Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere - the paradigmatic city of ruins - and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films.
Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster - in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit's abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit's deterioration as either inevitable or the city's own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline - corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere - the paradigmatic city of ruins - and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films.
Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit's decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster - in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit's abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit's deterioration as either inevitable or the city's own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline - corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Modernity in Ruins1 Ruin Terrors and Pleasures2 Fear and Longing in Detroit3 Urban Exploration: Beauty in Decay4 Detroit Ruin Images: Where Are the People?5 Looking for Signs of Resurrection6 Surviving in the Post-Apocalyptic LandscapeConclusion: Your Town TomorrowNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
DORA APEL is a professor of art history and visual culture and W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of War Culture and the Contest of Images (Rutgers University Press).
"In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline,
Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and
delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs
the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the
Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations
and bureaucrats who have abandoned it. The result is a work that
seems to invigorate a depressed debate and ask timely questions
about social values in America and the world it influences."
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
"'The borders between art, media, advertising, and popular culture
have become increasingly permeable,' Apel writes, 'as visual
imagery easily ranges across these formats and as people produce
their own imagery on websites and social media.' And the
aestheticized ruination of Detroit feeds into a more
widespread (even global) 'anxiety of decline' expressed in
post-apocalyptic videogame scenarios, survivalist television
programs, zombie movies, and so on ... Much of the imagery
analyzed in Beautiful Terrible Ruins seems to play right along with
that social vision. The nicely composed photographs of
crumbling buildings are usually empty of any human presence, while
horror movies fill their urban landscapes with the hungry undead -
the shape of dreaded things to come."
*Inside Higher Ed*
"Wayne State prof looks behind the fascination of Detroit's ruins:
the new pornographers" by Lee DeVito
Read the full interview (http://bit.ly/1FNfkIi)
*Detroit Metro Times*
"Bringing her usual due diligence to bear, Apel digs deep, tracing
the roots historically, culturally, and politically of the West's
fascination with ruination and its import for today ... Essential
reading."
*Infinite Mile*
"What is refreshing about Apel's approach is that her analysis
reaches far beyond the spectacle of abandonment and decay to
address the forces behind urban decline. In the process, she
delivers a powerful critique of the role of corporate disinvestment
and neoliberal globalization in ruining cities."
*Journal of American Studies*
"Apel again captivates with her incisive reading of cultural
production."
*The Journal of American History*
"Dora Apel's multi-layered, thought-provoking account of the
decline of Detroit and our visual perception of that decline uses
Detroit as a case study to explore the anxiety brought by the
repeated and continual emphasis on ruin imagery. An eloquent
examination of the aesthetics of decay, the charismatic appeal of
both the beautiful and the repulsive, drives the book."
*ARLIS/NA Reviews*
"A provocative and challenging book … Recommended. General readers,
upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and
research faculty."
*CHOICE*
"Writing against the genre of ruin porn, Dora Apel's wonderful
Beautiful Terrible Ruins reveals the way decay is inbuilt into
capitalism at its creation. An excellent and penetrating
study."
*author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten
Jungle City*
"In her thoughtful and riveting take on the decline of Detroit,
Dora Apel makes the case that 'ruin porn' images of urban decay say
less about a specific city than about the grinding forces of
globalism and political abandonment."
*author of Detroit: A Biography*
"In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles
Sheeler's photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Rivera's murals
of work. Today, the hulking ruins of old industrial buildings and
empty skyscrapers symbolize the city. In this provocative analysis,
informed by urban geography, political economy, and art history,
Dora Apel reflects on what images of ruined Detroit teach us about
the city, popular culture, and American capitalism."
*The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar
Detroit*
"Apel mounts a scathing critique of the dominant narrative [of
Detroit in Beautiful Terrible Ruins]."
*International Sociology Reviews*
"Beautiful Terrible Ruins is a fascinating book. Apel makes a
powerful statement about how we need to look more closely at our
own ma- terial culture, especially as it is expressed in visual
imagery and in the built environment itself in order to better
interpret our history. As Apel aptly com- ments, 'to look at
Detroit’s beautiful terrible ruins and talk about its decline is
talk about everything that is wrong with global capitalism
today.'”
*Middle West Review*
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