Urville (2006) is a vast black and white photograph by the Wilsons. It shows a hulking Nazi bunker, seemingly toppled on its side. The bunker looks like a broken Transformer toy - cartoonishly brutalist. Surrounded by sand, there are footprints leading up to or away from the bunker. The sky overhead seems about to break into a storm. There is a sense of violence, held at a distance. It is a spectacular image, bold and tragic.
In one of the most radical elements of his thought and fiction, Ballard saw a link between Nazi brutalist design and the postwar city planning in Britain that contained and controlled the working classes. He wrote: "I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 50s sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them." Dillon pursues this Ballardian theme with subtlety. Several works explore the ghettoisation of the poorest in London, and the waste of uninhabited urban spaces.
Estate Map (1999) is a large work of acrylic paint and marker pen on an aluminium background by the artist collective Inventory. It shows a damaged and degraded map of the Marquess Rd housing estate in Islington; the letters are eroded and the yellow blocks that signify houses are partly erased. The image is like an abstract painting, and, indeed, this is a living space abstracted out of existence. Across the bottom of the image, the artists have written about the feeling of absence created by the fact that such estates are not included on city maps. They are blanks, their inhabitants both symbolically and actually excluded. This is part of the ideological stranglehold of space that organises any city, and though the ruin was aligned with the picturesque in the 18th century, the issue here is of urban deprivation.
I love Laura Oldfield Ford's large painting TQ3382: Tweed House, Teviot Street (2012). It is striking because it shows an interior, domestic space rather than the exterior of a building. The domestic is historically feminine, but this is more riot grrrl than girly. Two women sit on an unmade bed, writing. They are ambushed on all sides by florescent pink paint. Oldfield Ford is influenced by punk, squatting, and rave subcultures, and the painting looks as though it were made in the 80s. Always precarious, this is a scene of creative life under threat.
Joseph Michael Gandy's A Bird's-Eye View of the Bank of England (1830) appears all the more astonishing in light of the political anger of these works. It is a surreal and timely example of how the British establishment has evoked the idea of ruins in order to cement its own power. The large gold-framed watercolour was commissioned by the architect Sir John Soane, who designed the bank, to celebrate his own retirement in 1830. Rather than show the building in pristine condition, Soane asked Gandy to imagine it in a state of decay. The cutaway perspective allows you to see the interior of the building, evoking the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome.
The painting itself is whimsical, nostalgic, lightly Romantic. The pale sandy palette and shafts of blue light falling from the left are Turneresque. Far from the busyness of central London, the bank is surrounded by an exposed red cliff face and a fallen classical statue. The suggestion is that civilisation may fall, but the bank will remain. It belongs to the grace of things past, not present. It is an instance of how art has served the elites through the centuries.
Ruin Lust: Tate Britain, London, to May 18
- Independent
