Eye on Eternity
Massimo Passacaglia
In his book In Ruins, Christopher Woodward, Director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, explores our fascination with ruins and their history. He speaks of »the artist’s joy in ruins – found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth-century landscape gardens, the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay – seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination … the melancholy charm of eternal fragments. If such a colossus as Rome can crumble – its ruins ask – why not London or New York? When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future … ruins predict the fall of Empires«. Pictures of ruins are always topical, today as much as ever, for a new global war is beginning, which will create new ruins. And a new Piranesi will draw them.
The buildings of Rome: an unparalleled visual subject. An architectural jungle: the old nestling amongst the new, the new shooting out from the ruins like plants from decaying trees. Rome’s world of shapes is rich and unique. The unexpected juxtaposition of styles, the capriccio, so typical of Rome, is a sort of natural Surrealism – one might even say une peinture automatique; images which seem to arise from the unconscious.
Antiquity and the present cultivate a melancholy coexistence in Rome. The centuries can be seen, touched, tasted, as nowhere else. The remorseless passing of time has often brought the city close to destruction. Berlin is gone; its essence, its spirit, has disappeared. But in Rome the old gods are still alive. The visible reality of the city has infinite layers; it is a palimpsest, described by Quincey in his Confessions – full of shadows on shadows, new graves in old, churches built from the bones of ancient temples. Maybe Rome is nothing more than a cemetery surrounding the Vatican, which is itself merely a monument. »The papacy is not other / than the ghost of the deceased roman Empire / sitting crowned upon the grave thereof«, wrote Thomas Hobbes in 1651. Two hundred and fifty years later, nothing has changed: the Pope and the Vatican are still there, and so are all the old altars – if that is how one might describe what the rulers of Rome built.
Strange: large areas of ancient Rome, and certainly much of the ultra-modern city, remain almost invisible to the traveller. Tourist groups will not be shown them. To discover these areas, you have to look very carefully, you have t have a lot of time, be unobtrusive and behave like a Roman … »when in Rome, do as Romans do.« Only then will you discover that in Rome not even the new can really be new; that the present is forever haunted by the past.
Rome is a Jurassic Parc made of stone. Perhaps most impressive are the old aquaducts. They lumber through the city like dinosaurs, extending tens of miles into the surrounding countryside. Their ruins are found in modern residential urban areas and in remote fields in Campagna. They were the city’s arteries, the source of a successful livelihood. Clear spring water flowed from the Alban hills, through these arteries, and poured out, murky and clouded, into the Tiber and the sea.
It is as though the aquaducts are hiding – trying, perhaps, to avoid the final, massive destruction which is to come. For centuries they served as Rome’s quarries; the stone was once a precious material but now, in this 20th centrury, it is treated like rubble. The quarries are still there; whether they will still be there in a hundred years is anyone’s guess. Sometimes it seems as though they want to prevent Rome’s decline through their defiance; by their dogged persistence is to prove wrong once again what Byron wrote in 1818: »While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand / When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall / And when Rome falls – the World.«
These aquaducts and the ruins of Rome have hardly ever been photographed in a way that revealed their real character. Maybe this is because on the whole only the locals know where they are; travellers do not get to see them. Many of the ruins are in the suburb, the borgate, or in slum areas, or in delapidated or fenced off parts of the city, on private land, sports fields and rubbish dumps. Pasolini shows some of these petrified dinosaurs in his films Mamma Roma and La Ricotta. The actors blunder around them, following their – mostly terrible – destinies. The aquaducts’ arches, and the graves on the Appian Way, are often used by street prostitutes. People lived in them, had their workshops there and various types of stores, until Walter Veltroni declared that they were monuments which were worth protecting, and made the inhabitants leave. Many of the arches are still whitewashed in places; bits of wallpaper still stick to the walls. The inhabitants did move out – a few hundred metres away, into specially built housing estates.
Roman ruins do not suggest defeat; rather resistance and stubbornness, victory over time and death and destruction. When something has survived for so many years, has withstood the sack of Rome, vandals of all types, bombs – it can and must count as eternal. And the eternal reveals the emptiness of everything contemporary. Rome is the city of paradox and double-meaning. The bizarre disharmony of ruins nestling amongst the modern – in Rome this creates a harmony. Roman ruins are more contemporary than any twentieth-century building.
Michael Ruetz has spent many years in Rome and in Italy. Between 1976 and 1997, he stayed a few months every year in the German Academy of Rome, the Villa Massimo, where he lived like a Roman and experienced a total immersion in the city’s culture. His weakness for ruins cannot just be explained by his life story: it is a weakness famously shared by many other artists and writers. Rome is the ruin-pilgrim’s Paradise on Earth, his Mecca. In Rome, Ruetz has delighted in experiencing to the full what Christopher Woodward calls »the artist’s joy in ruins«; he has studied Rome like a laboratory preparation. His pictures reflect the gaze of the contemporary artist as he looks at old-fashioned, absurd Rome. A Rome which appears to be within reach and yet is infinitely far away – as if the distance in time has transformed into a physical distance. No one seems really to know Rome completely or to understand it; what remains is full of riddles, mysterious. Maybe there is a second Rome – as Dino Buzatti thinks of Venice – in which the observer can disappear without trace, a Rome which cannot be seen, only experienced. That is, one sees it without knowing one can see it.
The picture cycle Eye on Eternity, which reflects thirty years’ work, will be a book and an exhibition, and will include about 100 pictures, at most 120. Almost all negatives and transparencies are in large format (4"×5" or 6×17 cm), in black and white and in colour. Thirty pictures have been publicly exhibited for the first time by the Galerie Priska Pasquer at the Paris Photo fair from 13—18 November, 2002. Some of the pictures in the cycle have been included in Ruetz’s books Cosmos, A Library for the Eye and WindEye. About 120 colour and black and white prints in 50×60cm format can be offered as a visual supplement to this proposal.