Ruins Recast

Abstract

This paper discusses recent projects by Glasgow-based artist Scott Myles, and in particular a number of works which have deployed effects of ruin and ruination. Key among these is Potlatch, a 2014 piece that invoked the work of Guy Debord within the unlikely setting of Galeries Lafayette Maison. Placing Potlatch in the context of Myles's wider practice, and in particular his uses of appropriation and fabrication in relation to ruins, the paper also seeks to situate Myles's practice theoretically in relation to the writing of Agamben, Benjamin, Debord and others.

Notes

1 Crimp (1997) emphasizes the extent to which Schinkel's museum embodied an idealist, and avowedly Hegelian, conception of art. Built in the 1820s to house the Prussian royal collection, the Altes Museum used a neoclassical architectural style featuring frequent allusions to Greek and Roman precedents (most notably in the rotunda's echoes of the Pantheon) to display works determined as outstanding instances of art qua art, as well as those of historical import. Schinkel's museum is, therefore, not only of architectural significance, but is emblematic of the nineteenth-century museum's epistemological and aesthetic programme.

2 It is worth noting that this specific proposal is attributed to Michèle Bernstein and was made during a meeting on urban planning in September 1955. In the same meeting Debord argued ‘for the complete demolition of religious buildings of all denominations. (No trace should remain of them and their sites should be used for other purposes)’ (1996 [1955] 56). Debord, it seems, understood ruins as retaining the power to figure forth their histories and former uses, whether those be revolutionary or conservative.