Culture and Decay: Darien Jane Rozentals on the Blacksmiths’ Shop, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery

Industrial ruins are archives, archaeological sites within the post-industrial contemporary city where a multiplicity of histories, pasts and memories are literally revealed. With every brick that disintegrates, with every layer of plaster that deteriorates, and for each sheet of concrete that decomposes, industrial ruins physically present the passing of time and visually expose the past as their architectures decay.

It is because industrial ruins are not rendered or repaired that the ghosts of the past are able to haunt these sites, and within the dark spaces of ruins a myriad of memories reside and a collection of residual narratives and experiences lurk. The spectres to the recent past see that forgotten histories and memories can be resurrected at the industrial ruin in a way that they are unable in the traditional monumental space of the city. As ‘living maps’ industrial ruins can be figuratively mined to investigate alternative interpretations of the past as they provide windows onto forgotten pasts (Neville & Villeneuve 2002).

The Blacksmiths's Shop, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by Darien Jane Rozentals.

The ability of industrial ruins to bring memories to the surface is reinforced through their similarity to the processes of memory: buildings are constructed and then crumble in the same way that events transpire, are forgotten, and later retrieved through acts of remembrance. Both the decaying ruin and the recalled event are impartial, fragmentary and incomplete, reminiscent of a past that has been lost, that can be recalled, but can never be fully restored. In the post-industrial city industrial ruins are being gentrified or exorcised from the urban landscape. Tim Edensor observes in Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005) that ruins are removed from contemporary cities because they can be used from a collection of activities beyond the scripted event space of the city. Ruins are embroiled in practices that range from the “carnivalesque to the mundane”; and where these activities are artistic (graffiti, stenciling, or past-ups), illicit, or secretive, they complicate the projected ideas of social order and control within cities.

Joe Moran argues that industrial ruins are problematic because they constitute moments in the city where ideologies of modernity are contradicted. They are “modernity’s embarrassing underside, that which it attempts to conceal through compensatory narratives of innovation and abundance” (Moran 2004). The decaying architecture of the industrial ruin counters the idea that the modern city is ceaselessly and seamlessly improving; ruins frustrate and thwart the notion that this progression was ever even possible by ridiculing the ideals that advocate the advantages and the existence of a seamless modernity.

Ruined factories and warehouses are increasingly transformed into loft-living apartments, bars, cafes, as well as cultural and artistic centres. Once sites of production, these sites are converted into sites of consumption such as museums and cultural sites. I suggest this ultimately forces memories and histories, the ghosts of the past, to be exorcised from these urban spaces. As a consequence, the ability industrial ruins have to resurrect the past is suffocated.

Fetish for the industrial aesthetic, in conjunction with available space within industrial ruins, has led to the recomposition of these sites into galleries and museums. Tate Modern and its Liverpool branch, iconic of the gentrification of the disused factories and warehouses across Britain, as well as the domestic Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart, are examples of factories turned cultural centres. While these centres have restored the scaffolding of the ruin – the facades, staircases, iron and brickwork are retained – these sites have essentially gutted the contents, history and memories tied to the original building and replaced them with cultural icons, temporary and permanent artworks, cafes and shops.

There has been a development in Tasmania, however, of a space that does not obscure the recent past and industrial memories through architectural transformations. The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery at Inveresk, Launceston, was originally the Launceston Railway Workshop. Although the site includes a new art gallery and an academy for the arts, the industrial past has not been entirely concealed or mystified through sleek conversions and the smoothing over of surfaces. The Launceston Railway Workshop’s original Blacksmiths’ Shop has been preserved – or to be precise, left exactly as it was when the Tasmanian Government Railways ceased production at the site. The factory does not display exhibits, there was no curator, and no artist designed the installation. Instead the retired factory is the exhibit.

Blacksmiths' Store (detail). Photograph by Darien Jane Rozentals.

Entering the Blacksmiths’ Shop is a haunting experience. The vast dark space is slowly rusting. The burnt red and brown machinery, equipment, metal ropes, nuts, bolts, buckets, nails, rods, and sheets of iron lay dormant. The windows are covered in dense grime. On workbenches are browning newspapers and tattered phone books. Wooden safety signs are splintered and cracked. Disintegrating gloves, protective clothing and helmets are littered through the room. Although the hall of the shop and its accompanying industrial rubble are in stasis, the sounds of the industrial past are literally present.

Rather than a silent decaying factory space, a sound scape has been installed within the Blacksmith’s Shop that is motion-triggered. As one walks along the path through the factory the noises, resonances, thuds, whirs and echoes of metal, machinery, and work accompany the visitor. The sound installation allows involuntary memories to be brought to the surface – the visitor has access to flickers of the past, glimpses onto the factory workers, and allows the industrial era to be remembered in the present. Victorian artist Michael Hues, a lecturer in sound engineering at RMIT created the sound-scape for the retired production hall, and it has since been modified by Evan Starky from the University of Tasmania who also works as a volunteer at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

The decision to leave the Blacksmiths’ Shop exactly as it was on the day it closed down and allow it to decay over time, as well as the accompanying sound scape, allows the factory hall to write back to the recent past. In turn, I would argue that the Blacksmiths’ Shop is characteristic of a memory installation. Memory installation is an emerging field within contemporary artistic practices and includes the work of artists that are geared towards actively engaging with residual urban memories and alternative interpretations of the past and present that are concealed across the urban landscape.

The room becomes a site-specific artwork that resists gentrification and as such prevents the site of failed production from becoming simply a site of artistic and cultural consumption – although these processes are also transpiring at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. It is unusual for an industrial ruin, converted into a cultural centre, to work as a memory installation since gentrified sites of production so often tend to obscure the memories and histories tied to place.

Darien Jane Rozentals was recently awarded her doctorate from the University of New South Wales. Researching the relationship between monuments and contemporary memory installations, Darien has guest lectured at Manchester Metropolitan University and Tate Liverpool.

Works Cited:

Edensor, Tim. (2005). Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford, Berg.

Moran, Joe. (2004). "History, Memory and the Everyday." Rethinking History 8(1): 51-68.

Neville, Brian. and Johanne Villeneuve, Eds. (2002). Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. Albany, State U of New York P.