Brian Dillon – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Chris Marker, 1921–2012

“A recurrent rumour says that Chris Marker and the cat Guillaume-en-Egypt sank with the Titanic.” Photo credited to Wim Wenders.

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends. That the subject of this memory should be a photographer and a filmmaker does not mean that his memory is essentially more interesting than that of the next man (or the next woman), but only that he has left traces with which one can work, contours to draw up his maps.

Chris Marker, introductory notes to Immemory (2002)

Memory is the key word: it’s at the heart of Chris Marker’s most well-known films, his science fiction short La Jetée (1962), and the feature-length film-essay Sans Soleil. Both those films reference Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film concerned with layered memories, both real and invented. Memory also comprises the subject of Marker’s most ambitious work from his later years, the CD-ROM Immemory, a unique creation which few will have experienced since it appeared after the great wave of ROM-mania in the 1990s, and was also Mac-only at a time (2002) when Macs were even more of a minority concern than they are today. My own copy is now unusable since it only runs on the outmoded OS 9 system (later copies were upgraded to OS X), leaving me with nothing but memories of Immemory and a box which sports a still from Vertigo among its cover images. The loss is regrettable but somehow fitting, and there’s a lesson here about impermanence for all you boys and girls planning bright new iPad apps. La Jetée is the film that receives the most attention, made on a budget that even when adjusted forward wouldn’t have covered the catering costs on Inception, it was one of JG Ballard’s favourites, and the source (of course) for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. But it’s to Sans Soleil that I always return, a place where the complex interleaving of documentary footage and fictional—or is it?—narration proves endlessly rewarding.

The Beckoning Cats from Sans Soleil (1983).

• Chrismarker.org: an essential resource
• Chris Marker’s YouTube channel
• Chris Marker interviewed by Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire in 2003
• The New Yorker: In Memoriam: Chris Marker by Richard Brody
• Guardian obituary by Ronald Bergan
• Telegraph obituary
• Things That Quicken The Heart: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil by David Moats
• The Humanists: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil by Colin Marshall
• Brian Dillon on La Jetée

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Junkopia
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Monsieur Chat
• Sans Soleil

Pleasure of Ruins

The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities.

Denis Diderot, 1767

Ruins, as Diderot observed, are the memento mori of civilisations, a reminder that the apparent permanence of architecture is illusory: this too shall pass. Rose Macaulay explored the melancholy pleasure inspired by this contemplation in Pleasure of Ruins (1953), a book I was reminded of on two separate occasions this weekend. Before I get to those I can’t resist showing something of my own copy of Macaulay’s study, a heavyweight volume (286 pp, 346mm x 260mm) published by Thames & Hudson in 1964. This was the third book by Canadian photographer Roloff Beny who made a habit of photographing ancient ruins. Here he visits Angkor, Tintern Abbey, Persepolis, Petra, Baalbek, Leptis Magna, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu and elsewhere to embellish Macaulay’s text with 160 photogravure pages, 12 tipped-in colour plates, and maps of the locations on fold-out spreads. Beny also designed the book which even in my rather scuffed and damp-afflicted copy is an impressive example of the mass-produced edition as work-of-art.

Metallic silver printing on the endpapers.

Rick Poynor provided the first mention of Macaulay’s book in a piece of polemic justifiably disputing the pejorative term “ruin porn”, an epithet that’s appeared recently among critics of those fascinated by photos of abandoned Detroit, or Battleship Island off the coast of Japan. If photos of ruins are “ruin porn” then Roloff Beny’s books must count as hardcore, while my National Trust Book of Ruins is evidently a government-sponsored sex manual. Poynor notes the criticism being a particularly American one, and wonders whether some Americans fail to appreciate the long cultural and political history of the ruin in Europe. Plenty of European cities have ruins in their midst, whether ancient ones like London Wall and the centre of Rome, or more recent ones like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin and Coventry Cathedral, both partially destroyed during the Second World War. An appreciation of ruins began in the 18th century and evolved in tandem with the emergence of antiquarianism. Prior to this, ancient ruins were either a nuisance or a resource to be plundered for their stones. (Or, as can be seen in some of Piranesi’s Views of Rome, a convenient support for shops and houses.)

From ruin porn to Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings, an essay by Brian Dillon which covers similar ground to Poynor’s piece, and discusses Rose Macaulay’s interest in ruins, an interest that survived being bombed out of her home during the war. This is a great run through the usual suspects, from the Romantics (with a nod to Fonthill Abbey) to JG Ballard’s obsession with the remnants of the Cold War and the Space Age. Dillon mentions the painting John Soane commissioned from Joseph Gandy showing his Bank of England building as a future ruin. And he also recounts the story (which I heard repeated recently in a Robert Hughes documentary) of Hitler’s demands to Albert Speer during their planning of the future capital of the Third Reich, Germania, that the buildings should make good ruins. It’s impossible to imagine anyone today planning a building as a future ruin even though many will end up that way, if they last at all.

If it wasn’t already apparent that ruins are the thing du jour, a current exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts is of photographic prints by Jane and Louise Wilson showing views of abandoned Pripyat, better known as the town at the heart of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Rick Poynor refers to Pripyat in his piece, and it’s also an inevitable subject of discussion in Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Zona, an exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker where a disused power station adds a more sinister quality to the pleasure of ruins.

More pages from Roloff Beny’s book follow.

Continue reading “Pleasure of Ruins”

The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art

Skull Vision by Michael Ayrton (1943).

The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art: great title for an exhibition, a shame that it’s all the way down in Cornwall at Tate St Ives.

This group exhibition takes its title from the infamous 1962 book by St Ives artist Sven Berlin. It will explore the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of art in Britain. Focusing on works from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day it will consider, in particular, the relationship they have to the landscape and legends of the British Isles. (More.)

Artists featured include Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Cecil Collins, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and John Craxton. Among the contemporary artists there are Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Titchner, Eva Rothschild, Simon Periton, Clare Woods, Steven Claydon, John Stezeker and Derek Jarman. Austin Osman Spare is notable by his absence but then that’s no surprise, the major occult artist of the 20th century never rates more that a passing mention from the art establishment. One nice surprise is seeing Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) featured in her second major British exhibition this year. (Her work is also present in the Angels of Anarchy exhibition running at the Manchester Art Gallery.) Colquhoun was a contemporary of Spare’s whose work turns up in occult encyclopaedias or overviews of the minor current of British Surrealism but she’s still largely unheard of outside those circles.

The Tate exhibition may be awkward to visit but there’s an illustrated catalogue available featuring contributions from quality writers including Brian Dillon, Philip Hoare, Jon Savage, Jennifer Higgie, Marina Warner, Michael Bracewell, Alun Rowlands and Martin Clark. Michael Bracewell has a piece about the exhibition at Tate Etc while Brian Dillon has an excellent essay in the Guardian connecting John Dee’s mysterious obsidian scrying mirror with some of the works on display.

Untitled by David Noonan (2009).

• Artist of the week: David Noonan
• Ithell Colquhoun at A Journey Round My Skull

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

The slow death of modernism

“Soon to be picturesque ruins” was a slogan the Situationists used to enjoy posting on Parisian buildings but their rebuke to architectural hubris can be applied anywhere. St Peter’s College seminary building at Cardross near Glasgow was an example of post-Le Corbusier concrete construction which drew praise for its clean modernity in the 1960s. Today it brings only photographers and graffiti kids to its dereliction. Brian Dillon notes that the seminary

resembles nothing so much as the desolate and sentient “zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker: a place where snow falls slowly upon vacant altars, where stagnant pools are so full of rot that they look horribly alive even at the edge of winter, where a startlingly tame robin will perch on your head as you step delicately over the rubble. (More.)

Yes indeed, and Flickr is full of striking examples like these. Someone ought to take advantage of what Dillon calls the seminary’s “futuristic rot” and use the place as a film set before the decay becomes too hazardous or the building is demolished altogether.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The ruins of Detroit
• Ephemeral architecture
• The temples of Angkor
• St Pancras in Spheroview
• The Stalker meme