TATE'S RUIN LUST EXHIBITION DID NOT SATISFY ME

... and I had been looking forward to it for weeks. 

Ruin Lust at Tate Britain is a huge disappointment for two reasons: it has failed to account for the present cultural fascination with ruination, and it demonstrates and excuses what are for me disappointing trends in curatorship.

Whether or not I am on some cultural pulse I don't know - but in 2007 I embarked on my doctorate at the Glasgow School of Art which quickly immersed me in Ruin Culture.  Christopher Woodward's In Ruins (2002) had already established a contemporary lineage from the picturesque and the sublime, through war artists like John Piper, and on to contemporary work including that of film makers, architects and sculptors. 

More recently, and around the time I was at Glasgow, this fascination was further demonstrated by the writings of geographers (Tim Edensor's Industrial Ruins, 2005) and philosophers (Dylan Trigg's Aesthetics of Decay, 2006), but also in the increasingly significant photographic art of Urban Exploration (Romany WG's Beauty in Decay, 2010). 

So this sort of thing has been with us for quite some time, and has been effectively documented over the last ten years.  What, then, could this exhibition offer that was new?

One good idea might have been to try to answer the question Why? - why are we currently so fascinated by ruination?  Is it something to do with the collapse of Modernity; or is it something to do with our collective need for mementi mori?  The answers to questions like these can of course be suggested by looking at the work of artists, and more thorough curation could have left us wiser about the world we currently occupy.

But the exhibition had no narrative whatsoever.  It called itself 'transhistorical' (ie it runs across histories), but in truth it was 'ahistorical': it offered no historical narrative at all.  Exhibits seem to have been chosen on account of their ease of access to the gallery - and thrown together artlessly, rather like a TV video editor might put together an early evening soap, jumping from scene to scene - the main task being to keep the audience awake enough to take in the adverts.

Once more I find myself agreeing with Brian Sewell: he has already complained bitterly about the trivialising of art history and anything intellectually challenging through television (the presenter and the production being elevated to a more important position than the material being presented).  And I found Sewell's review of this show in yesterday's Evening Standard equally sensible, at least on this count.  Ruin Lust is dumbed-down curatorship.  The show has been pulled together for people who haven't had the time to read the current literature.  It's a TV meal of a show.  It says nothing new.  A gallery of the Tate's status should be giving more quality to the fee-paying visitor.