SARAH WALKER

ON RUINS

For Untitled, a limited edition artist book/object on the work of Dr. Fiona Lee. With contributions by artists Sarah Walker, Luke Adams, architect Jose Rodriguez, and editor Sarah Jones, published by Ranch Pressing.

Let me tell you what I am thinking about.

I’m thinking about ruins and how we adore them.

A lot of my work deals with disasters, catastrophe, apocalypse. The electric tension between terror and longing that comes with imagining these things. End-of-world narratives are more popular than ever right now, with us still shell-shocked from the pandemic and horrified by global violence and reading our grocery receipts with shaking heads. If the world ends, we won’t have to go to work, you know? Might even be able to sleep in a little. Give voice to the rage and shock and hunger we feel. We’ll traipse through the rubble and eventually crest a hill, and gaze down on the ruins of the world we knew: the Flinders Street dome collapsing, a tree pushing through its apex. Federation Square overrun with kangaroos. Our voices echoing in the nothing, producing no reaction. Quiet.

Mark Fisher talks about the uncanny in terms of what he calls the weird (a presence which does not belong: think aliens) and the eerie (an unsettling absence, of materiality or agency). Disembodied cries are eerie. Ruins are eerie. Places where people should be but are not.

There’s a project currently underway to restore the granite shell on the smallest of the pyramids at Giza. The Pyramid of Menkaure lost its cladding in an earthquake some time in the past thousand years, but now there are cranes and workers in hard hats, lifting granite blocks and stacking them like Jenga pieces over its limestone frame. People are pissed. The point of the pyramids is that they are ruined. We don’t want these things to be nice. We want them to be both impressive (man’s achievement!) and threatening (quoting Ozymandias, imagining a world without us). Above all, they should be eerie: haunted, ghostly, drenched in absent humanity. A ruin is a portal: a place where time breaks down. The glorious past, the wreck of the future, and the aching present, collapsing time together like a closed book. We can feel the pages rustling on either side.

There has been a theory since the mid 2000s that the pyramids were not built of blocks at all, but rather of a limestone composite, wet-poured. Concrete. This will be the material we leave behind us. It is the second most-used substance on earth, after water. This is humanity at its most basic: we live and we build.

When he’s particularly overwhelmed and depressive, my partner jokes that he’s going to quit his job and become a folly hermit. The folly: a decorative ruin, built already in a state of collapse. In the 18th century, wealthy landowners would pay people to reside in them as a kind of live garden gnome. Sometimes the hermits would speak to visitors, dispense counsel. I’ve been reading recently about how we live in a disenchanted age; that the rise of conspiracy theories indicates a desperate void in our culture: a need for magic, for ritual, for a world brimming with the unknown. We speak of it as a modern phenomenon. But is there anything that better expresses this longing— for a world that retains an aura — than building a crumbling temple and populating it with a salaried wise man? We’re all children, wanting to find the wizard in the woods. Always have been.

I’m thinking about posthumanism, about the attempt to step outside our own anthropocentrism, and whether that’s possible.

In ‘The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror’, Dylan Trigg discusses these complexities:

‘Today, this promise of a philosophy that replaces subjects with objects has long since folded back upon itself, becoming a distinctly human—alas, all too human—vision fixed at all times on the perennial question: How will the Earth remember us? A strange impasse intervenes. Despite its attempt to transcend a philosophy that binds the subject with the world, the new philosophy remains linked to a glorification of the world that persists long after humans have left the scene, both conceptually and empirically.’

We can’t escape our own sense of legacy. Perhaps this is what it means to be human, to be conscious: the gravity, the weight of what we leave behind. Our sense of trace, of detritus, of waste. To build is to create a folly—it is falling apart from the moment it is created. To build is to give the middle finger to time, to speak of a belief in ourselves, our power, even as the earth shimmies below us, even as the winds plucks grains of dust from the walls, even as water chuckles far beneath. We know who’s going to win this. Playing the long game.

I’m thinking about community, about how Fiona is inexorably drawn toward it. Another form of building. Drawing people together, setting them like marbles on a collision course, saying: what might happen when these forces meet?

When we gathered to play with the concrete forms she’d cast, we started off tentative. Overthinking. Making known forms: a pyramid atop a cube — a child’s drawing of a home. Slowly, we loosened. Stacking shapes in unwieldy towers, colonising the studio, rolling circles of concrete with our fingers like the door to Lazarus’ tomb. We built, and then we stepped back, squinted. Imagined the view from the crest of the hill. The eerie quiet of it. The world made by human hands, devoid of human presence. The arc of creation and destruction compressed. A folly.

I’m thinking about art, its temporality, its flimsiness. About the Donald Judd sculpture at the Art Gallery of South Australia, a concrete triangle, a pyramid’s lines laid flat on the lawn behind the cafe. The trace of the wooden casting mould still visible, the loops and swirls of the tree’s bark marking the surface. The work is discolouring from sun and rain and wind. It has ceased to be minimal. Life is growing on it, time is working at it. Slowly, it is becoming a ruin of itself. A work that says: I was grand and tidy, and soon I will be a wreck. A work that says: and so will you. A work that says: And so will this building, and these cafe umbrellas, and so will art itself. A work that says: But we’re here now, together. A work that says: and that’s something, surely. That’s gotta be something.

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Untitled is available from Ranch Pressing.