Author Description

Cabinet No. 20 focuses on decay and desuetude; the history, aesthetics, and politics of the fragment, the remnant, and the rubble of once-proud edifices. At what historical remove from its prime does a ruin come to seem respectably picturesque? Are there ruins that are unrecoupable to an aesthetics of attractive decay or sublime rot? Cabinet No. 20 treats the "ruin" as an unruly rubric--not just pertaining to the ruins of buildings, fortifications, industrial plants, monuments, and engineering works, but also to the ruins of substances, landscapes, ideas, images, media, institutions. A framing essay by the magazine's UK editor Brian Dillon introduces a range of texts and projects exploring these themes, including Nina Dubin on the eighteenth-century French painter Hubert Robert, known as "Robert des Ruines"; Svetlana Boym on the ruined gaze and the panorama; Joseph Masco on atomic wreckage; George Pendle on William Beckford, master of the classic Gothic pile, Fonthill Abbey; and artist projects by Ester Partegas, Martin Herbert & Darren Almond, Eric Schwab & Walead Beshty, and Jeremy Millar. The issue also includes poet Lyn Hejinian on the color cyan, Paul Laity on the history of the sandal, Steven Featherstone on the.50 rifle and Josh Foer on the world's foremost "arborsculptor."