Frozen memory

Later, ruins attracted the attention of Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich in Germany and JMW Turner in England, as well as poets like Shelley, whose Ozymandias speaks of a ruined monument (“two vast and trunkless legs of stone … half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies”), symbolising the ephemeral nature of earthly power and of man in general.

Those aspects of the depiction of ruins are all represented in a new exhibition at Bozar in Brussels. In collaboration with Antwerp’s Photo Museum, Bozar has selected a small sample of photographs fitting under the title The Reality as a Ruin as the latest part of its ongoing Archives of the Imagination series. In fact, “exhibition” is putting it a bit above itself: the photos hang in the hallway outside the Henri Lebœuf concert hall and on the walls of the passage leading to the loges. This is not so much curatorship as décor.

It’s a pity the selection is so limited because the exhibit contains a couple of very interesting ideas. First, it stretches our conception of what a ruin might be. As well as standard views of the Acropolis (see photo), the Sun Temple of Baalbeek in Lebanon and the Temple of Neptune at Pesto in Italy (formerly known as Paestum – nothing to do with the sauce), there are also photos of the flooded foundations of an unbuilt house (by American photographer Richard Misrach) and a crumbling slum from an area of Brussels affected by the covering-over of the river Zenne in the 19th century (by Louis-Joseph Ghémar in 1867).

Also displayed are a variety of man-made ruins caused by war – the bombardment in Paris in the Franco-Prussian War (by Willy Ronis), the destruction of Stuttgart by the Royal Air Force in World War Two (by German photographer Willi Moegle), and the levelling of Sarajevo by Serbs in more recent times (by Flemish photographer Jan Kempenaars). There is also a triptych of photos by Flemish photographer Patrick Poels of concentration camp buildings at Majdanek, Birkenau and Auschwitz – modern-day equivalents (“wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”) of the ruins of the statue of Ozymandias.

Second, and somewhat related to that, the exhibition toys with the very idea of the ruin. The display has very little explanation or documentary material, but it does emphasise that a photograph is a frozen memory, so a photo of a ruin is a memory of a moment that no longer exists, of a building that no longer exists. That’s true of all photos, of course, and of all images of reality, not only ruins. A portrait is a snapshot of a person who no longer exists, whether it’s a Kodak moment or a painting by Gainsborough.
One thing which is particular to depictions of ruins, though, is that the ruin is frozen in the act of becoming. And that can work both ways, as shown by the playful inclusion of two photos of Brussels ruins. In one, taken by Joseph Mascré in 1867, we see the ground being prepared for the construction of the Justice Palace of Joseph Poelaert. That’s what the caption tells us, at least: to the naked eye, it could just as easily be the site of some long-lost antique temple or palace.

The other, taken by Gilbert Fastenaekens for his collection Site, created in 1990-97, shows a construction site in some densely built-up part of the city (no precise location is indicated) at a moment when the workers are absent. In the background, we see the shabby rears of the buildings in the same block. In the foreground, exposed concrete, scattered building elements, rubble everywhere.

Could you tell, just by looking, whether the building was going up or coming down? In essence, the picture seems to be saying, it doesn’t make much difference either way.

Until 8 March, Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels

online
www.bozar.be