Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of DeclineOnce 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. |
Contents
List of Illustrations | |
Ruin Terrors and Pleasures | |
Fear and Longing in Detroit | |
Beauty in Decay | |
Where Are the People? | |
Looking for Signs of Resurrection | |
Surviving in the Postapocalyptic Landscape | |
Your Town Tomorrow | |
Selected Bibliography | |
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abandoned American Andreas Schönle Andrew Moore anxiety of decline apocalyptic architecture artists auto bankruptcy Beauty in Decay Brian Dillon buildings capitalism capitalist Center Chrysler city’s Coleman Young Contemporary Art corporate crisis critique cultural cultural pessimism Dead deindustrial sublime deindustrialization destruction Detroit Disassembled Detroit Free Press disaster Duke University Duke University Press economic Edensor effects evokes film Ford Ford’s global Heidelberg Project Hell and Andreas homeless housing Ibid imagined Industrial Ruins Julia Hell landscape living Marchand and Meffre Michigan Michigan Central Station million Museum narratives nation nature neighborhood neoliberal Ninjalicious nuclear Packard Plant pension percent photographs political population postapocalyptic produced Romain Meffre ruin gazer ruin imagery ruin images ruin porn ruination Ruins of Detroit Ruins of Modernity social space suburbs suggests Taubman thousand Trigg Urban Decay urban explorers urbex Whitechapel Gallery workers York Yves Marchand zombies