Ruins in Reverse. An Exhibition at Tate Modern (March 1st - June 24th 2013)

Abstract

In the same week Ruins in Reverse opened at the Tate Modern gallery in London, Jonathan Jones asked on his Guardian Blog whether archaeology might be ‘the new art’ (2013). He posed this question as a result of two recent exhibitions at The British Museum, namely Ice Age Art and Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which sought to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of archaeological objects. As Jones argued, such exhibitions ‘popularise’ the discipline by drawing attention to the ‘stupendous beauty of things that survive from the past’. While visitor numbers go some way to demonstrating the veracity of this comment, it seems restrictive both to art and to archaeology to frame any relationship between the two in this way. The spectacular archaeological find is atypical and potentially deceptive. A more potent line of enquiry - one adopted by several of the artists featured in Ruins in Reverse - might be to consider the present itself through an archaeological lens, applying the language of ‘discovery’ and ‘excavation’ to artefacts and locations that few would call stupendous or beautiful.