Film showing as part of Ruin Lust exhibition at Tate Britain reveals novelists' predictions were sometimes way off the mark
They correctly talk about "television phones" and electric toothbrushes, but mostly the 12 writers who gathered in 1963 to predict and debate the future were way off target. We're not yet immortal, the routine nature of space travel is yet to come, and the coffee we drink is not generally laced with amphetamine to improve our mood.
The dozen science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, were part of a Playboy magazine panel predicting what life would be like after 1984. At Tate Britain, visitors will be able to watch a filmed reconstruction of the predictions using actors.
Gerard Byrne's work, 1984 and Beyond, is part of an exhibition opening to the public on Tuesday called Ruin Lust, which explores artists' and society's fascination with ruins from the 17th century to the present day.
The presence of Byrne's work reflects the wide scope of the show. "It is not very obviously ruinous," said the show's co-curator, Brian Dillon. "But the thing that it captures is that sense of a future that might have been and I think ruins are partly about that – they point to a future that is unfinished."
Byrne's work is one of more than 100 on show for what is the widest-ranging art exhibition to explore the subject of ruins. Most of the works on show are from the Tate's own collections, and follows previous thematic shows that have included ones called "Migrations" and "Looking at the View". The exhibition includes works from particular periods when there was heightened interest in ruins, not least the 18th century, when there was something of a ruin craze.
There are works by John Martin, John Constable and JMW Turner, as well as contemporary artists fascinated by ruins such as Tacita Dean, Jane and Louise Wilson (seen left is Azeville 2006, part of a series of photographs of Nazi defences in northern France) and Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by photographs of Hackney tower blocks being demolished in 1996.
Dillon has long been fascinated by ruins, admitting that a fun day out for him was "to wander about the Isle of Grain looking at lumps of old concrete from second world war airfields".
The title of the show is taken from a 1953 study written by the novelist and scholar Rose Macauley called Pleasure of Ruins. Dillon said there had been debate about what to call the exhibition.
"People have started to use the phrase ruin porn a lot and that seems to me very limiting – lust seems more capacious, it takes in desire for the past and future, nostalgia, regret, excitement, a kind of sublime."
There are lots of old ruins to look at – from ruins that may prompt a sentimental nostalgia, such as Turner's Tintern Abbey, to more horrifying ones, such as scenes of second world war devastation in works by artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.
The show very much has a message that "ruins are also about the future", said Dillon. One of the most recent works is a bright pink post-riots painting by Laura Oldfield Ford called TQ3382: Tweed House, Teviot Street, which has two women in a dilapidated, brutalist flat who may be on the verge of discovering that something is about to happen.
Similarly, Byrne's work is very obviously looking forward. He filmed Dutch actors to take the roles of the sci-fi writers and they cheerfully predict away, but badly. There will be no boring jobs, they say, we'll get to Hawaii in an hour, and some of our children will live for 200 years, our grandchildren for 1,000 years and our great-grandchildren for ever.
Ruin Lust is at Tate Britain from 4 March until 18 May.
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