Ruin Time

Ed Keller, December 2010

"…essentially a 'functional ruin'…"

Let’s begin with a question: what attributes might be common to crumbling empires; or points of
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contact and conflict between empires?

Ruin. Ruin, decay, noise. The places where topological invariance begins to collapse across all
scales. And ruin, arguably, has an inexorable relationship to horror. One track that stitches them
together is the sublime, and a subjective set of criteria: anthropocentric reactions to ruin. Ruin as
mise-en-scene.

But another approach would assess the value and function of bodies in time in both ruins and
horror. Ruins are more or less freed from the burden of use value. In parallel, horror tests the
limits of a recognizable body, experimenting with the places and operations where that body’s
inviolability fails, getting close to the limits of ‘life’. There is something paradoxical in the idea of a
‘functional ruin’. A zombie: both living and dead. Or: a thing that mistakenly thinks it is alive…

In both cases, ‘temporal value’ has something to do with describing the range of possible futures
and pasts that any given body has access to. So an empire in decline would not only trigger a
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complex kind of Garcia Marquez-ian infinite nostalgia for its population; it would also exist as a
vast, non human system that, as a slow moving, tectonic and aeon spanning computation,
functions to process all the input output cycles [humans] that pass across its circuits, and through
ruin, add more errors into that computation.

Some of the humans might become dimly conscious of that operation. How? Perhaps something
to do with ‘representation’.

But, what is this eponymous Ruin Time, anyway?

One could enthusiastically announce: 'It's ruin time!', as in a beer commercial. Thus marketing a
global anti-soporific: the corrosive brew that ends all parties. Or more portentously, we might
simply meditate on the quality of a time that would only be found in ruins, noble, eternal, mostly
non-human. The skeletal armatures of an entire empire, rendered in architectural forms and
sequences that retain only the larger scale gestures of a global moment of denial. Frozen, being
blown backwards into the future.

Or, finally, we could understand it as a command: 'Ruin time.' Delivered in a voice unmodulated,
sub-bass, in a register far beyond human hearing, as from a roiling, black cloud: the relentless
command for us to go forth and ruin time. Dust motes, the cumulative energy of billions of
particles aggregating into a dead-substance-voice: legion, brief, eternal, pervasive: "Ruin TIME!"

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Bold italic paragraph headings were extracted from the Simon Preston Gallery notes for the J. Gerrard exhibit, winter
2010
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez has developed a geopolitically resonant idea of ‘nostalgia’ in his novel Cien Anos de
Soledad, both within the diegetic envelope and in the positioning of the novel itself against the real world.
"Constructed in the 1960's to a modular Eastern Bloc design…"

Empire, post-empire, Cuba. They go together, these things. Sparks fly.

What is the substance of time, as the reliquaries of one fragment of a revolutionary movement
slowly crumble? Was it not Proust who observed that
"It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained
to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by
whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body."

In thinking of something like a ‘cuban school’, what then is that illness? With whom, or what, do
we live if we live not alone? What recourse has that school, chained to a creature of a different
kingdom? [O, Miami, so close…] And which then is that body?

These are all questions Cuban School begins to ask. And it has something to do with
‘representation’.

"With insomnia, nothing is real.

Everything is far away.
Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."3

What does the eye see as we hear this voiceover in Fight Club? A truly banal, fluorescent-lit
office interior, a copy room with cubicle drones all performing the same repetitive tasks. Identical
Starbucks coffees. And a barely perceptible flash frame of Tyler Durden [revolutionary
th
extraordinaire] only 1/24 of a second long.

So: would these lines not work also as a voiceover for John Gerrard’s Cuban School ? Insomnia,
the status of reality, vast distances… and simulacra. Let’s insert a flashframe image of Che as a
stand-in for Tyler Durden… Or is the ‘caretaker’ more appropriate? A copy of a copy…

More questions: who or what cannot sleep? Cuba? Or the outside world? Compare the
geopolitical resonances of the real school [by which, I mean the real building, nearing utter ruin]
and its position in Cuba, with the implied critique of capitalism we find in Fight Club, which ends
by destroying a part of global credit history. Would it be that Cuban resistance to a global dream
continues via a restless insomnia? Who else of the global constituency is pacing their chambers
late at night, eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, contemplating how ‘deep the rabbit hole goes?’ And:
what is far away? Is it the success of liberatory communism [far away in time as well as space]?
And what exactly is being copied here? An architecture and infrastructure lifts its typological
principles from other places in the world [Eastern Bloc design] similarly engaged in a renunciation
of certain economic and political systems. But what essential characteristics can be transferred
by copying a copy, the implied catalytic social functions in that eastern bloc model simply lifted,
themselves, from a kind of distillation of modernism?

"…an unflinching camera orbit…"

[combined with a reconstructive methodology]

We are told that Gerrard works "...from extensive photographs and topographical satellite data
[…] the artist and studio have hand-built a meticulous virtual world..."

So, a quasi-cinematic methodology is at the heart of Gerrard’s work: in camera movement, in an

‘unflinching…orbit’. References swarm around this trope: the delirious orbit, the endless shot,

3
Fight Club [Fincher 1999], script by Jim Uhls, based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk
and all the supporting evidence which that gesture accumulates. Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Noe’s
Enter the Void. Reggio’s Koyaanisquatsi. Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And the above mentioned Fight
Club. Each one with unique, distinct kino-time thinking. But before them, another reference
emerges: J. G. Ballard.

Apropos of Gerrard, Bryan Appleyard observes:

'He studied sculpture at Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford. In 1997, he came across a
3D scan there. “It was a sculptural photograph, untethered from the 2D surface. It was a
sea change in the way you could think about photography." Gerrard blagged his way into
the company that did it, which, curiously, was scanning 2,500 women a year so that
Marks & Spencer could get their bra sizes right. They let him have a go, and he became
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convinced this was the sculpture of the future." The Sunday Times, March 2010

One is reminded by this slightly salacious anecdote [seemingly completely unhinged from
Gerrard’s output] of characters in various Ballard tales. Recall the meticulous reconstruction of
events that Vaughn pursues in Crash: the original event of an historical car crash, copied
faithfully, and propagated forward into the future to enable any and all ‘survivors’ to participate not
only in the ‘fertilizing’ energy of the crash, but all the ancillary relationships that the event would
then afford them. There’s a blurring of simulation and simulacrum in Vaughn’s project, and
ultimately his demise is linked to his keen awareness that one has to mix those kinds of
representation with reality itself.

A perhaps less known but similar project is carried out by the character Sheppard, in 'Myths of
the Near Future', a story in Ballard’s haunting compilation Memories of the Space Age:

'During that week, Anne Godwin did her best to help Sheppard construct his
"machine."...Sheppard gazed for hours through his stop-frame focus, as if he would find
among these images an anatomical door, one of the keys in a combination whose other
tumblers were the Marey chronograms, the surrealist paintings, and the drained
swimming-pool in the even-brighter sunlight outside.'

Sheppard’s machine, in this case, is a pornographic protocol. Which will, if it works, allow him to
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navigate time freely. Or to perceive what he suspects is the already present, natural
superimposition of all times. A very clear set of protocols for gathering evidence, combined with
drawing techniques, re-photographing, re-drawing, mapping; and real world events [in both
Vaughn’s and Sheppard’s cases copulation] all conjoin to constitute the ‘machine’.

Brian DePalma’s film Blow Out orthogonally permutes this form of time control by insisting on a
coupled relationship between a political time-plane and all ‘media’; and is itself a masterful hybrid
reconstruction of Antonioni’s Blow Up and Coppola’s Conversation. In Blow Out, the
methodology of filmic re-construction that Travolta’s character employs is explicitly tied to a
political assassination and the criminal investigation of the event post-facto through sound and
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image re-composition. And, yes: Antonioni’s Blow Up also deals with a ‘murder’ and the
‘evidence’ that can function to ‘prove’ that an event has transpired; but the larger scale
consciousness of the event that is invoked by Blow Out is closer in spirit to the subtle, subliminal
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kino-mind that Gerrard invokes in Cuban School.

4
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article7056972.ece
5
Was that not also, in a way, the Cuban project: A geopolitical time machine?
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In fact, the viewer of the film basically learns how to make a film during the in-diegetic investigation.
DePalma does Vertov.
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There’s another spool to be unwound here, that time and space do not permit me, which would contrast the model of
‘late modernist’ time and the political agency that can emerge from Blow Up, as fundamentally different than the
temporal model we have in Blow Out.
This son-image recreation of the event as political representation has a nearly eschatological
force, not so distant from Gerrard's own prior work, Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas), 2007. Dust
Storm takes on weird aspects when one superimposes it over the various Iraqi dust/sand storms
that have been videoed and posted to YouTube by occupying forces- and if one considers the
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general stupefaction with which they seem to be viewed. Somehow, intuitively, this recreated
‘sublime everyday’ touches a nerve that is interior to a broader tele/empathic distance viewing of
the hidden, latent components of our world- the sunset of support for the Cuban project; the
embargoes; the earlier US dust bowl; media as a cryptogenic system which can somehow
engineer a place of overlap for all this: all parts of the cartographies that Ballard’s & DePalma’s
characters take on as urgent [and doomed] projects.

"…disinheriting its formal integrity through entropy and decay… questioning their
resilience and capacity to exist as potent entities once complicit resources are depleted or
removed."

We began by asking what attributes would be common to failing empires [ruin?], and we end by
asking: what constitutes a landscape of decay? And what would it matter if ‘formal integrity’ was
lost? By classifying entropy, we might distinguish between the varying faces of ruin, the different
species of decay. Into the context of an entropic system, producing raw noise at some scales,
and the unpredictable anabasis of upstream life-noise at others, ruin time returns again. But now
understood as constituting the nature of a global time-form that might uncouple itself from the
monotonic cycles of capital.

The horror of failed historical projects of resource allocation can be rubbed crosswise against the
time control we find in Gerrard’s work: and the cinematic trope of the endless shot returns, but
deployed across thousands of miles and centuries. One thinks of Koyaanisquatsi, where Reggio
uses long, soaring takes to compress landscapes revealing billions of years of geo-cosmological
time into close proximity with the fragility of human, organismic time. And the image of technology
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catastrophe in the endlessly falling, flaming, exploded rocket engine, at the end. Horror is a
body radically temporalized and has little to do with space but everything to do with time.

"…the melancholic demise of a political vision…"

What other vestigial rearguard organs exist, appendages slouching toward the global operating
theater to challenge their own amputation? Gerrard’s work seems to be trying to compass this
territory. Animals, unseen, being readied for slaughter; students, unseen, learning in the
crumbling infrastructure of a twilight global experiment. Dark comparisons.

Or perhaps these vestigial organs revolt from the host, come unstuck and enter the flows of a
vaster general economy, and swarm upstream to the source, releasing seeds of some kind of
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radical aphasia that breeds novelty in the ‘yet to come’. The clamour of being would then be an
infinite assembly of trumpet brass, blown with an embrasure akin to Chet Baker's beautifully
mangled tone, in unison yet varied. Baker scores the soundtrack that I imagine behind all of the
‘films’ that chronicle this ongoing project: a Chet Baker on the shores of eternity, improvising a
funny valentine for the noisy time-flow-system of failed revolution. But melancholia is never quite
final.

8
One thinks here immediately of Reza Negarestani’s investigation of dust and the ‘desert storm’, in all its scales and
implications, in his Cyclonopedia [2008]; cf. pp 87-97
9
Russian Ark’s single take through the Hermitage hopscotches us across multiple temporal substrates, spanning
centuries. Enter the Void manages something similar within the scope of a single lifetime, possibly at its end. The orbit
of the kiss, in Vertigo, when Scotty and Judy repeat what Scotty and Madeline have before- is a wormhole in both the
plot structure of the film and in the very fabric of time itself.
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…to steal a phrase from Badiou and repurpose it against his grain.