The
Aesthetics of Ruins
by Robert Ginsberg.
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
2004
538 pp., illus. 100 b/w. Trade, $155
ISBN: 90-420-1672-8.
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington,
DC 20008, USA
a.graubard@starpower.net
An encounter with ruin, a ruin, can
be many things. Perhaps in order to constrain
the possible scope of what this encounter
means, Robert Ginsberg has written his
The Aesthetics of Ruins:
a discursive work in 15 chapters with
numerous photographs. Does the
discussion reveal the encounter that provokes
it? That is up to the reader to decide.
But considering ruin as matter, form,
function, incongruity, site, or symbol,
and ruins in aesthetic experience, architecture,
nature, sculpture (and other visual arts,
including cinema and TV), then literature,
philosophy, terminology, theory, and how
the eye (and other senses) bring to ruin
what was or was not ruined with a plethora
of appendices on how ruins play in art
history to war, and more, is not something
to read carelessly or even perhaps to
read consistently. At the same time, the
breadth of the work satisfies the title,
or tries to, and as it does so qualifies
ruin, our encounter with a ruin, in a
particular way.
Beyond this kind of particularity, the
search for a cultural value in ruin, is
something that the book seems to shape
perhaps too vivaciously: the fact of the
ruin as an instance of devastation, whether
wrought by intention or time, the natural
course of entropy, or some intermix of
the two. Masks of ruin, ruined masks,
however they have come to us, enthrall.
That much is clear. Museum curators and
travel agents know this thoroughly. Enduring
ruination is something else entirely,
replacing aesthetics with another need:
survival. And if there is anything I miss
here, it is this visceral sense and the
definitive risks endured in our understanding
of it.
The book is part of the "Value Inquiry
Book Series," founded by the author,
to promote such inquiry as a medium for
scholarly research worldwide.
