Ruin Porn

In the mid-1990's I had a job delivering meals and groceries to people living with AIDS in San Francisco.  Much of my job was spent filling in the gaps that volunteers could not cover.  In our office, we had a map of the city, with pushpins marking all our clients.  Far and away, the highest concentrations were clustered in areas of high poverty, especially the Tenderloin district, where single-occupancy-residencies (SRO's) were common.

These were tall buildings, often eight or nine stories, usually managed by an immigrant family on the first floor, protected by a cage and responsible for regulating entry into and out of the building.  The buildings were old, likely nearly a century, but they had fallen into deep disrepair.  The clunky elevators with manual gates would often break down; paint was peeling; carpets were torn and stained; trash piled up at smelly chutes that dripped with grime.  There was air of dingy lawlessness and danger, occupants ranged from the old and infirm to young and drug-addicted, deeply psychotic to suspiciously sociopathic.  Many of my clients had a triple-diagnosis: drug abusing, mentally ill, and HIV positive.  Many of them came from poverty, and AIDS was merely a bi-product of their lifestyle.  But many had lost it all, and gone there to die.

A girlfriend at the time had an artist friend in LA whose work was appearing in a local gallery.  I was taken back a bit when I saw where the gallery was located - Fifth street, two blocks south of Market, the heart of the Tenderloin, where I worked on a daily basis.  I had gotten used to many of the locals, and as we walked towards the gallery, I began to recognize some of their faces.  Off the clock, on a Sunday afternoon, their lives were no longer my work, they were now my fellow citizens.  I had punched out a long time ago, yet they were still here, wandering the same stretch of sidewalk, muttering the same laments, hiding from the same predatory gangsters and back-alley villains, clutching the same dirty cigarettes.  

It made sense when we entered the gallery.  It was a minimal space, essentially a bare storefront stripped of any refurbishment.  Concrete and cracked tile floors, stained walls and rusty, leaking plumbing jutting from the ceiling.  I don't recall what the art was, but it was bleak - photographs I think.  The desperation and sadness of the gallery environment reinforced the intended sentiment.

Yet for me, it reinforced something else.  It pained me to be existing in a state of mind, a state of conscious experience that not only was in close proximity to such tragic suffering, but that was being asked to actively benefit from it.  Like blood money is the profit from violence, one might call this blood art, as it was profiting from a kind of violence done to a community.

A term for this phenomenon has been coined: ruin porn.  I'm not sure where it first came from, but it seems closely tied to the popularity of art created around the decrepitude of Detroit.  French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre published a photo essay in Time entitled Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline.

"St. Margaret Mary School" - Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

It isn't an inaccurate title.  The photographs are beautiful.  The subject is terribly sad.  An obvious commentary is central to the work: a fall from grace.  Just what has fallen, and maybe more importantly, why it has fallen, is left to the viewer to ponder.  On the blog Hyperallergic, Kyle Chayka reminds us that ruin porn is nothing new.  Art has long been concerned with death and decay.  As long as architecture has been made, its inevitable slow collapse has been documented.

"Architectural momento mori exist as well in ruin porn from centuries ago. Think we came up with anything new, shooting cavernous disused spaces? These photographers would do well to catch up on their Piranesi, an 18th century architect and printmaker whose etchings of the ruins of Rome are staggeringly epic, baroquely detailed and tragically decayed, a clear forerunner to the visual language of the Detroit photographers." 

Yet the ruins of Rome evidence a tragedy that occurred centuries ago, to people many generations past.  What happens when the tragedy is taking place all around us?  Granted, most of the viewers of ruin porn will not have lived in these neighborhoods.  It isn't as if they are being entertained by the suffering of their neighbors.

But that's part of the problem.  A class distinction runs right through this work.  When I visited the Tenderloin art gallery, I did not have to live there.  I was attending college part time;  I went home to a clean, safe neighborhood; I had the luxury of taking the 10,000ft. view.  With the coolness of a mortician, my palate for art appreciation was cleansed and prepped by an invisible, yet indispensable privilege.

Marie Antoinette, in the final days before her execution, was living behind walls of sublime ignorance, inhabiting a decadence in sharp contrast to the common citizenry.  Many false rumors were spread of her, promoting an inflated sense of her greed and debauchery.  Yet even these rumors never suggested that she might be taking pleasure in the "beautiful" demise of her country.

We, elite as we may be in our appreciation of high art and cultural criticism, are neither kings nor queens.  Most of us would surely like to help those who must live with the consequences of ruin and decay.  Part of the beauty we see in this art surely comes from its satiation of a deep anxiety that all members of the modern world feel.  There is a sense of alienation, loneliness in modern civilization, in which one must at all times grapple with two distinct realities of our consciousness: that of our family, friends and relations, and that of the anonymous, unknown public with whom we share so much, yet of whom we know so little.

In this art we see an expression of the promise we all feel in our daily lives as we make our way through work, traffic, public engagement, digestion of current events and our identity as reflected in endlessly changing times; the ruin has come to what had once possessed so much promise: the carefully laid brick, measured and tailored edges, artfully designed color pallets and purposeful textures.

But then we see the promise destroyed.  Just as our hopes and dreams seem so often seem precariously balanced on the edge not only of disaster in the form of horrible accidents, lost jobs or political defenestration, but more reliably, the simple, gradual lowering of expectations as hopes and dreams gradually slip away, steadily crushed by the weight of time and responsibility, dying the death of a thousand cuts.  There is a truth here that we are proud to see exposed.  Life's edges, perfect as we can ever plan them to be, will inevitably have a roughness that we cannot deny.  Death is a part of living.

All of this is good.  It is what art is for.  But as we gaze at our respective navels, there is a world of hurt more tragic happening to people just outside this frame.  We cannot allow ourselves to indulge our own private narratives on the backs of such suffering, exploiting its demonry for our own private exorcisms.  We must be reminded that art can be a useful and profound representation, but that for so many, it is not a representation, but a reality.