Utopia Lost: Reframing Dereliction in Art Photography

02 January 2007 @ 10:05 am

The city has been deemed, by practice and perhaps by assumption, no fit subject for sentimental art. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan romance, perhaps, the sort of Moulin Rouge we find associated with Paris. But the city in its more realistic aspect for us tends to lack beauty and grace; it is too close to us to clearly mean anything other than commerce, or blight.

smallpox hospital (Motts)

industrial stacks (Motts)

Verden Psychiatric Hospital (Motts)

A few modern artists and adventurers see the urbanscape differently, and their alternative uses and visions give us that delicious jolt of awareness art can that there may be other ways of taking in the city, not as if it grew out of dragon's teeth, but out of our own dreams and desires just the same. Some who find wonder and beauty amidst the ruins refer to this as "the derelict sensation." Here, I am thinking of urban explorers and chroniclers, whose speleological numbers include the extraorindarly gifted photographer of Opacity: Urban Ruins (source of above image), who goes on the web only by his nickname, Motts. Motts has this to say about the motivation for his work:

"Once a building no longer serves its purpose, and all of its functionality ceases to exist, it becomes truly fascinating. Each room is transforming into something new at its own rate, yielding to the forces of nature as it reclaims man's creation. The corrosion and decay paint vibrant colors across otherwise dull surfaces, lit only by natural sunlight spilling into the spaces at unaccustomed angles. Each object left behind becomes more significant than it has ever been, hinting at the life prior to its disuse. Floors collapse and walls cave in without care; if you get hurt, no one is here to help you. This is a lonesome alien world whose dark corners and peeling walls have gotten a hold of me and many others; this affinity for derelict structures and often dangerous excitement is the core essence of urban exploring, in my opinion."

I posit that these artists do not choose to make the city beautiful despite its ugliness, but because of it. The aesthetic seems rooted in a Gothic sensibility, one that takes aesthetic pleasure in iconographic ironies that are at once earnestly haunting or tragic and a product of the impersonal modern institution. The artists humanize that which is inhuman, in a post-Romantic mood, just as Mary Shelley once made of a monster something we could mourn, even as we recognized its incompatability with a life we desire to live and share. In some of Motts' work, the vertical perspective and the somber colors, the archetypal shapes, lend a cathedral or sacramental quality to the unlikely objects of his vision. Interior views are often quite different: with an intimacy as hushed as a dessicated tongue, velveted with dust, yet remarkable for what might have been said in those rooms, those spaces (not above them, or about them, but in them).

Click here for another remarkable series of photo essays on Modern Ruins by Shaun O'Boyle in quite a different style, sienna scrapbook, a washed-out world, yet appreciated for the beauty of its forms and stains, the reclamation of use by disuse, and so membership into the uselessness of art's suspended unreality.