urbex/rurex and the picturesque: chasing what cannot be there

by Michael Templeton

Several years ago, my wife and I visited the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia, while on our honeymoon, because we are odd people, and this is the typa thing we do. It is quite an experience visiting an old prison since prison is pretty much by definition one of the main places we all want to avoid. If you have read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Eastern State is the primary site Foucault describes in the book, and you can actually buy copies of it in the gift shop. Eastern State Penitentiary is in many ways a typical touristy site in historic Philadelphia, and it contains all the ordinary touristy things. It is, in fact, a historic site, being the first modern penitentiary in the world. You can get a good look at what it must have been like to spend time there. Al Capone’s cell is preserved and furnished in the way he demanded when he did a short spell in the prison. It is clearly different than every other cell with nice rugs, bookcases, a beautiful wooden desk, and subdued lamp lighting. Tour guides will walk you around various parts of the prison and explain how things worked. It is pretty amazing, I confess. What stands out about Eastern State (to me anyway) is the fact that the conservation organization behind the site has deliberately refused to renovate, or even carefully preserve, the natural decay of the structure. It is, what they call, a “controlled ruin.” This is to say that Eastern State Penitentiary is crumbling around you as you tour the site, and it will one day be gone altogether. The ruin is what fascinated me. I spent the bulk of my time carefully taking in as much of the half-decayed, structural features as I could, and I took plenty of pictures.

My photos show old prison cells; tiny rooms that contain an iron bed, a sink and toilet, a small wooden table, and nothing else. One small window overlooks each cell from high above, and the inner parts of the window sill are falling into the cells. It was cold when I was there, and snow blew into some of the cells. I found, and photographed, an old barber chair in one cell. The red leather still attached and gleaming against the metal of the chair, even as the room itself filled up with plaster and stone from the walls that were falling in around it. I documented as much of the site as I could. What I accomplished at Eastern State was, in essence, an “urbex” expedition, albeit one that was very safe and completely legal. The urbex, or urban exploration phenomena is nothing new, that and its rural cousin, “rurex.” Search Instagram and you will find thousands of hits under these hashtags. I admit I love many of them. I am aware that much of the activity that comes along with urbex and rurex is illegal and dangerous. I know people have gotten hurt and even killed taking extremely dangerous chances in old buildings and industrial sites, and I am not trying to encourage anyone to do things that are illegal or dangerous or both. That said, people still do these things. I have done these things. I have cut my head open climbing into an old hospital—an injury that could have landed me in a working hospital. This same little caper could have gotten me a trespassing charge, as well. Someone close to me, who I will not name, is fearless with the rurex runs. She will sneak into anything no matter the rural land owners armed with AR-15s who really do know how to shoot, no matter the Wrong Turn lookin’ dudes, no matter the ghosts and haunts. I and millions of others persist in these activities, and we do it for the simple reward of cool photos of old, beaten down, decaying structures. For many years now, I have wondered, what is the appeal? What fuels these activities that so many of us will risk life and criminal records to obtain photos of things that no one was meant to see? From the lost cells of an old prison to abandoned farmhouses on lonely stretches of rural state routes, what pulls us into these forbidden places?

Most of us are aware of the great Romantic tradition of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. This is the time of the almost stereotypical poets of nature who wrote of “sublime nature” and the beautiful sentiments of the pure heart. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and all those dudes. The whole thing stretched all over Europe and into America. Along with this poetic and artistic movement, a great many philosophers thought to codify some of these poetic and artistic ideas into systems of aesthetics. Edmund Burke in England and Immanuel Kant in Germany wrote long, complex treatises on the sublime and the beautiful. So as not to bore you with a long digression on this, the sublime is basically what goes beyond our ability to describe it. The sublime is that which inspires terror, that which defies the faculties of the mind to provide a satisfactory understanding of what it is contemplating. The endless stars in the night sky can provide a sublime image. The beautiful is that which conforms perfectly to our imagination. It consists of things like gradual variation so that the infinite twists and turns that have no beginning or end of the petals of a complex flower can provide an image of the beautiful. (Edmund Burke chose to exemplify the beautiful with the image of a woman’s neck and shoulders, but he left out the head. For Burke, the ideal beautiful image is a decapitated woman. This Romantic era aesthetics thing got real weird almost immediately). But there was a third, less famous category of aesthetic experience that partakes of both the sublime and the beautiful. The picturesque runs between the sublime and the beautiful and it is best exemplified by ruins. Broken down buildings, ideally very ancient buildings like castles, but architectural sites that have been abandoned and fallen into decay form the basis of the picturesque. Perhaps this old idea of a very strange form of artistic ideal is what lies at the heart of the urbex/rurex phenomena.

There were not a lot of people who wrote about the picturesque. Mainly a few, almost dilettante-ish, men in England took on this aesthetic ideal, but they took it very seriously. William Gilpin’s Essays on Picturesque Beauty from 1772 is a lengthy exploration of the picturesque in landscape sketching and painting. He focused on landscape, but landscape—for Gilpin—included the incidental features of ruined structures. These things became so important to landscape artists of the picturesque that that many of them brought hammers with them on excursions to break up the sites they wanted to paint and draw. It is Gilpin who explains that to attain the picturesque we “must use the mallet instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it [the picturesque object]” (Three Essays). Indeed, Gilpin explains that while the painter must seek the picturesque landscape and the forms given by nature, his inclusion of ruins among the landscape is offered as a rhetorical question as if there is no real question: “Is there a greater ornament of landscape than a ruined castle? What painter rejects it?” he asks. Another great thinker and writer of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, wrote in 1794: “A temple or palace of Grecian architecture in its perfect entire state, and its surface and colour smooth and even, either in painting or reality, is beautiful; in ruin is picturesque...” (An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful.) The picturesque, it seems, necessarily derives its aesthetic power from ruin, from decay, and from abandonment. None of this is incidental to art in the loftiest sense of the term. Great art, if it is to include the picturesque, which it most certainly does, demands the ideal exploration of abandoned places in varying states of wreck and ruin.

It is not as if I imagine any of the urbex/rurex people posting cool pics online have even the slightest awareness of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. What I am suggesting is that whatever sparked the imagination of writers of art and aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century is precisely the same thing that is lighting all of us up as we sneak into old hospitals, factories, and farm buildings. We are looking for something, and we are finding something, although what the thing is I do not know. If you think about what aesthetics means, it clearly points toward a psychology, and, in fact, it was at this same point in history that Foucault describes in one of his other great works, Madness and Civilization, that we see the emergence of the science of psychology as opposed to the old ship of fools. As the smarties of eighteenth/nineteenth century Europe were working out how we experience the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque, other smarties were coming up with theories of the human mind, a logic of the psyche, or a psychology. As you might imagine, the Freudians have had loads of fun with this shit. The idea that we somehow revere ideas that inspire terror in things that are vastly larger than our minds can grasp worked well with men who wanted to equate everything with a master term denoted by something called “the phallus,” and the notion that the picturesque is dependent on smashing up the structural integrity of ideal architectural forms fits in well with a theory of the mind that includes psychosis as a loss of the integrity of the mind. In any case, the psychology of the image and the psychology of the inspiration for the image are obviously part of the same mechanism (whether we include the Freudians or not). I suppose the questions should be: Why are we still fascinated by these things? Why are we so fascinated that we would risk life, limb, and pre-employment criminal background check?

The fact is, aesthetics is filled with terms like “power,” “submission,” “terror,” and the focus of aesthetic experience is on the body. Edmund Burke’s aesthetic theories, for example, are centered on ideas of physical pleasure and pain, and Burke’s ideas of the sublime and beautiful are central to all western aesthetic theory. Terry Eagleton wrote that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body,” and the ways we idealize the world around us are tied to the ways we understand our bodies, not just as isolated physiological facts, but as bodies in the world, situated in the world, acting in, and acting on the world. The process of chasing after “bandos” and taking photographs as a kind of thrill includes the chase and the photograph. We are after the adventure of seeking the object and the finished product that documents the adventure. Whether we accept the Freudians or not, there is something to the urbex/rurex and the picturesque that is extremely loaded with psychology and physicality. Still, what remains of the picturesque landscape and the experience of it are always remnants, dead forms of what once was. The aesthetic bodily experience is inextricably linked to features of what has past and the remnants of past things.

The somber image of ruin is at the center of the picturesque. It think this remains virtually unchanged in our present day as so many of us seek the bando in search of an elusive remnant of something... something what? I once roamed around an abandoned old-folks home in rural Ohio, and while I was immediately motivated by just idle, and even morbid, curiosity, other feelings began to emerge as I made way around the old building. This was one of those places most of us fear; a space for the old and forgotten, the abandoned human who is left to just molder away alone in some care home that maybe feeds them and keeps them more or less sanitary, but which largely just holds onto them until they die. Now the building itself was moldering away just waiting for nature and gravity to pull it down into the earth. It was all deeply unsettling. Beyond my own limited experiences, any quick look around turns up image after image of urbex and rurex sites that, upon reflection, will stir similar unsettling thoughts. The site of an abandoned school in a part of a city that appears to be abandoned itself. An old barn in some out of the way part of West Virginia that is now surrounded by convenience stores, McDonald’s, and subdivisions—on an on. All of these things show us spaces and places where life once happened and is no more, and what remains are the discarded remnants of life. When we look at images of these places, we are looking at the broken, decayed, and cast-off features of life that are now gone. Often, the life that is now gone was part of a way of living that has long since ceased to be. Even things like abandoned factories reveal windows into an industrialized past of American life. What drew Gilpin and Price to the ruined castle in the desolate landscape, and what draws people to abandoned houses, is the search for just the right aestheticized rendering of artifacts of loss, and there is nothing in the Eighteenth Century thinkers nor in our contemporary explorers that reveals just exactly what is lost. The reason we are not concerned with the specific site, building, geographic location is because we are not drawn to the thing but what the thing designates. This is to say that the object of aesthetic experience in the picturesque is not the lost object but loss itself.

The natural world, a landscape, or cultural formations like a city can take on aesthetic qualities when we begin to articulate the ways these things impact our physical and imaginative experiences in and of them. Thus, a landscape that is enormous, that stretches out or up beyond   our limits can become sublime. A local urban garden that presents us with the continuous and subtle change of foliage and color can be beautiful. In both cases, we are taken up with ideas of either the object of experience or our estimation of the object of experience. In the case of the picturesque, which seems to carry features of both the sublime and the beautiful, we are no longer interested in our ideas of the object of experience. No matter how busy or historically important or personally significant, the object of the picturesque image is that which is no longer present in the image. The missing thing is the important thing. What happens in the picturesque is what philosophers (and Freudians) once called “melancholia,” a feeling of loss wherein what is lost was never actually present in the first place. The often cluttered images of the urbexers and rurexers, images of abandoned spaces covered over with illegible graffiti and littered around with junk and garbage, all denote the space as it may have been even though what we are looking at demands an imaginative leap to see what may have been. The abandoned shopping mall is clearly what it is, but its significance as a shopping mall is not at all contained in the image in its abandoned and crumbling state. To reach that, we need to either remember or imagine what it was like to go to a shopping mall when it was a center of economic and social life. The garbage, decay, and general crap in a photo all point to the loss of that economic and social life, although none of this detritus specifically denotes that life. It is loss itself that this junk denotes because “in melancholia the object is neither appropriated nor lost, but both possessed and lost at the same time” (Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 21). In the picturesque urbex/rurex image, we grasp what remains in the form of the clutter and litter in the image, while we simultaneously experience loss in the form of the former living world that is tangentially attached to all that junk. Since we, who look upon the image, never had access to what is lost, it cannot be said that we ever had access to the lost object. Nevertheless, we are able to experience loss in the form of pure loss by the picturesque destruction and decay that the urbex/rurex image offers. Everything in the image makes known all that is not present in the image. And all that is present in the image takes on meaning from what is not present in the image. Consequently, the exploration of urban and rural abandonment can never achieve its object. We can never find what we are after because it is not to be found. I told you aesthetics gets real weird real fast. The thrill of the picturesque is the physical pursuit of the image, the exploration, and the fact that we are often trespassing makes it all that much more thrilling. However, we never obtain what we are after because what we are after is not there. It is long gone and irretrievable.

It may help to point out that when the philosophers of aesthetics of the Eighteenth Century began codifying all these things, they were working in, and looking at, a world that was rapidly changing in ways that were not necessarily good. Think about what was happening right around 1780- 1820. Democracy exploded into the world with the American War of Independence, something the Brits did not worry much about because (let’s face it) the colonials were all nuts anyway. But also, there was the French Revolution, which the Brits cared deeply about because of the whole cutting the heads off of kings thing. At the same time, the industrial factory had begun to take over the formerly idyllic rural landscape, and with it came filthy air filled with coal smoke, overcrowded cities rife with poverty and disease. Land clearances were forcing people out of ways of living that had been in existence for centuries to make way for modern forms of land ownership. In short, the world was changing, and it was becoming ugly. It is no wonder the smarties were trying to find ways to nail down how we understand beauty since beauty itself was disappearing everywhere. In our own time, our world is fracturing on every level of life. The idea of a stable job that makes it possible to own a home, pay our bills, and provide for a family is as distant and mythical as any ancient castle. Something as hard and fast as “knowledge” is no longer hard and fast at all, as the criteria for what defines it is being eroded as fast as it emerges. None of us know what is real anymore since AI can offer us any goddamn real we want. Life is completely schizophrenic in our time. It would make sense then, that many of us are running around risking our lives, bones, and good names on trespassing into old buildings to get photos of things that document loss itself because most of us cannot even identify what it is, exactly, that has been lost. We just know that the melancholia of loss is pervasive, and so we keep chasing the missing thing, whatever the thing might be.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giogio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L.

Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1991.

Gilpin, William. Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty.

https://viscomi.sites.oasis.unc.edu/viscomi/coursepack/gilpin/Gilpin-Three.pdf.

Price, Uvedale. On the Picturesque. Selections from Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla. The

Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. London: Cambridge University

Press, 1996.

https://viscomi.sites.oasis.unc.edu/viscomi/coursepack/criticism_etc/HippleonPicturesque.pdf

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