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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20140214T124201Z
DTSTART:20140218T170000Z
DTEND:20140218T190000Z
SUMMARY:CIDRAL Open Event: Professor Brian Dillon (Royal College of Arts)
  "Ruin Lust"
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DESCRIPTION:Ruins are paradoxical things. Fragments of classical architec
 ture predict the end of our own civilization as clearly as they speak of
  past glories. Modern urban or industrial decay comforts us that there a
 re still wild places among our sanitized cities and suburbs. Buildings d
 estroyed by conflict may be preserved as monuments and warnings\, but we
  fantasize about coming disaster\, or about the lost futures that modern
  ruins seem to conjure. For centuries\, artists have been periodically s
 eized by an attraction to ruin. I will explore some of the varied and co
 nflicting impulses behind this attraction in the work of JMW Turner\, Jo
 hn Constable\, John Martin\, Paul Nash\, Graham Sutherland\, Eduardo Pao
 lozzi\, Rachel Whiteread\, Tacita Dean and Laura Oldfield Ford. Above al
 l\, ruins embody certain confusions regarding regret\, nostalgia and fut
 ure potential.\n\nIn recent years\, and especially since the financial c
 risis\, the motif of the modern ruin\, formerly the preserve of relative
 ly arcane art and literature\, has returned to the aesthetic centrality 
 it enjoyed in the eighteenth century. In the mainstream media’s frank ob
 session with images of decayed cityscapes (Detroit\, failed architecture
  in China and North Korea\, the very recent reports on London’s “Billion
 aire’s Row”)\, the ruin returns in all its capacity for sublimity and ki
 tsch. Writing on ruination has ghosted the ‘new nature writing’ and the 
 proliferation of books on Britain’s decaying modernity. In this talk I w
 ill ask whether any aesthetic or political potential remains in a catego
 ry that has become so ubiquitous.\n\nBrian Dillon is reader in critical 
 writing at the Royal College of Art\, and UK editor of <i>Cabinet</i> ma
 gazine. His books include <i>Objects in This Mirror: Essays</i> (Sternbe
 rg Press\, 2014)\, <i>I Am Sitting in a Room</i> (Cabinet\, 2012)\, <i>R
 uins</i> (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery\, 2011) and <i>Tormented Hope</i
 > (Penguin\, 2009). His writing appears regularly in the <i>Guardian</i>
 \, the <i>London Review of Books</i>\, <i>frieze</i> and <i>Artforum</i>
 . He is curator of <i>Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing</i> — 
 which opened at Turner Contemporary\, Margate\, in May 2013 and is curre
 ntly touring — and <i>Ruin Lust</i>\, opening at Tate Britain on 4 March
  2014.
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:John Casken Lecture Theatre\, Martin Harris Centre for Music and
  Drama\, Manchester
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