Synopses & Reviews
Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhereandmdash;the paradigmatic city of ruinsandmdash;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. and#160;and#160;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 Detroitandrsquo;s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disasterandmdash;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 Detroitandrsquo;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 Detroitandrsquo;s deterioration as either inevitable or the cityandrsquo;s own fault, and absolving the real agents of declineandmdash;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.and#160;and#160;and#160;
Review
andquot;Writing against the genre of ruin porn, Dora Apeland#39;s wonderful Beautiful Terrible Ruins reveals the way decay is inbuilt into capitalism at its creation. An excellent and penetrating study.andquot;
Review
andquot;In her thoughtful and riveting take on the decline of Detroit, Dora Apel makes the case that and#39;ruin pornand#39; images of urban decay say less about a specific city than about the grinding forces of globalism and political abandonment.andquot;
Review
andquot;In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles Sheelerand#39;s photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Riveraand#39;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, and#160;popular culture, and American capitalism.andquot;
Review
andquot;and#39;The borders between art, media, advertising, and popular culture have become increasingly permeable,and#39;and#160;Apel writes, and#39;as visual imagery easily ranges across these formats and as people produce their own imagery on websites and social media.and#39; And the aestheticized ruination of Detroit and#160;feeds into a more widespread (even global) and#39;anxiety of declineand#39; expressed in post-apocalyptic videogame scenarios, survivalist television programs, zombie movies, and so on ...and#160;Much of the imagery analyzed in Beautiful Terrible Ruins seems to play right along with that social vision.and#160;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.andquot;
Synopsis
Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future.
Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.
Synopsis
Detroit is 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 of ruin, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. The author shows how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the beauty and fascination of these images helps us to cope with the overarching anxieties of our time. and#160;and#160;
Synopsis
Decades of economic prosperity in the United States have redefined the American dream. Paul Knox explores how extreme versions of this dream have changed the American landscape. Increased wealth has led America's metropolitan areas to develop into vast sprawling regions of andquot;metroburbiaandquot;andugrave;fragmented mixtures of employment and residential settings, combining urban and suburban characteristics.
Upper-middle-class Americans are moving into larger homes in greater numbers, which leads Knox to explore the relationship between built form and material culture in contemporary society. He covers changes in home design, real estate, the work of developers, and the changing wishes of consumers. Knox shows that contemporary suburban landscapes are a product of consumer demand, combined with the logic of real estate development, mediated by design and policy professionals and institutions of governance. Suburban landscapes not only echo the fortunes of successive generations of inhabitants, Knox argues, they also reflect the country's changing core values.
Knox addresses key areas of concern and importance to today's urban planners and suburban residents including McMansions, traffic disasters, house design, homeowner's associations, exclusionary politics, and big box stores. Through the inclusion of examples and photos, Metroburbia, USA creates an accessible portrait of today's suburbs supported by data, anecdotes, and social theory. It is a broad interpretation of the American metropolitan form that looks carefully at the different influences that contribute to where and how we live today.
About the Author
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).and#160;and#160;