Interpreting the ruin image outside of a Neo-romantic framework

"The contemporary obsession with ruins is neither a Baroque meditation on worldly vanitas, nor a romantic mourning for the lost wholeness of the past.3 Rather than recycling romantic notions of the picturesque framed in glass and concrete, the ruins of modernity question the making of such a “world picture,” offering us a new kind of radical perspectivism. The ruins of modernity as viewed from a 21st‑century perspective point at possible futures that never came to be. But those futures do not necessarily inspire restorative nostalgia. Instead, they make us aware of the vagaries of progressive vision as such.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Georg Simmel formulated a theory of ruins that resonates with contemporary preoccupations. According to Simmel, ruins are the opposite of the perfect moment pregnant with potentialities; they reveal in “retrospect” what this epiphanic moment had in “prospect.”4 Yet they do not merely signal decay but also a certain imaginative perspectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension. Simmel saw in the fascination with ruins a peculiar form of “collaboration” between human and natural creation: “Nature has transformed the work of art into material for her own expression as she had previously served as material for art.”5 Such framing of ruins reveals a multidirectional mimesis: men imitate nature’s creativity, but a natural setting endows human creations with a patina of age. The contemporary ruin-gaze is the gaze reconciled to perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial discontinuity. The contemporary ruin-gaze requires an acceptance of disharmony and of the contrapuntal relationship of human, historical, and natural temporality. Most importantly, present-day ruinophilia is not merely a neoromantic malaise and a reflection of our inner landscapes. Rediscovered, off-modern ruins are not only symptoms but also sites for a new exploration and production of meanings."

From Svetlana Boym's "Ruinophelia", full text here