Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: “I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.”

The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: “I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books.” But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.

The story that Macaulay tells in Pleasure of Ruins is essentially a modern one: it is still alive today in photographs of post-industrial Detroitand recent responses by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Laura Oldfield Ford to the demolitions wrought in the name of the London Olympics. The taste for heroic destruction or picturesque decay cannot thrive without a sense of progress for which it fulfils the role of brooding, sometimes gleeful, unconscious. There were few if any classical or medieval enthusiasts of ruination. Even in renaissance painting, which is littered with mouldered remnants of Greco-Roman statuary and architecture, ruins are ancillary to the main pictorial event, providing a fractured backdrop to a serene madonna, or a handy bit of broken column to support a wilting St Sebastian. But by the 16th and 17th centuries, Macaulay wrote, something like the later literary and artistic obsession with ruins is in the air: Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit “a ruined and ruinous world” of blasted heaths and crumbling castles, and there are resonant examples in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: “I do love these ancient ruins: / We never tread upon them but we set / Our foot upon some reverend history.”

It was in the 18th century, however, that the ruin arrived centre-stage in European art, poetry, fiction, garden design and architecture itself. A cult of melancholy collapse and picturesque rot took hold, especially of the English aristocracy, for whom no estate was complete without its mock-dilapidated classical temple, executed in stone, plastered brick or even (as the garden designer Batty Langley advised in 1728) cut-price painted canvas. The craze inspired some well-known architectural absurdities: in Westmeath in 1740 Lord Belvedere built a ruined abbey to block the view of a house where his ex-wife had taken up with his brother, and in 1796 William Beckford first contrived his fantastical Fonthill Abbey, “a sort of habitable ruin”, according to Macaulay – “sort of’” because the thing kept falling down.

Alongside such follies there flourished a literature of pleasing desuetude, encompassing aesthetic theory, romantic poetry’s rubble-strewn excursions and the dank precincts of the gothic novel. In his Elements of Criticism of 1762, Lord Kames had approved ruins, real or confected, for their embodying “the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought”. And the English romantics took to ruination with a paradoxical energy, Wordsworth uncovering his poetic self among the remnants of Tintern Abbey, Coleridge in the unfinished “Kubla Khan” deriving a whole aesthetic of the literary fragment out of his botched architectural fantasia.

If all of this seems like so much picturesque maundering, it was also evidence of a fretful modernity. It was in painting that the vexing timescale of the ruin was most accurately broached – ruins, it seemed, spoke as much of the future as of the classical or more recent past. For sure, romantic art is dominated by the sublime vistas of Caspar David Friedrich, whose lone figures look dolefully on the vacant arches of medieval abbeys. But the gaze might as easily be turned on catastrophes to come: in 1830 Sir John Soane commissioned the painter Joseph Gandy to depict his recently completed Bank of England in ruins. In France, Hubert Robert had already painted the Louvre in a state of collapse, prompting Diderot to write: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.”

This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it’s historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one’s own civilisation: nowhere more so than in the literary and artistic afterlife of a ruinous motif conjured by Rose Macaulay’s grand-uncle Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1840. Reviewing Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay speculates that in the distant future Catholicism “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s”. Macaulay’s New Zealander, gazing at the wreckage of the metropolis (and by extension on the fall of the British empire), was for decades a popular image of London’s future ruin – its most notable avatar is Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander.

Images of the modern city in ruins proliferated in the Victorian period –Richard Jefferies’s 1885 novel After London is the best-known example, with its vision of a city reverting to nature following some unnamed calamity – but the following century had another perspective on the now venerable and even hackneyed trope of ruin: for modernism the city, even (or especially) as it pretended to progress or novelty, was already in ruins. The Waste Land is an obvious instance, with its fragmentary vision of the unreal city. But consider too the photographs of Eugène Atget, which capture a Paris being demolished and rebuilt at the same time, or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: a critical-historical phantasmagoria conjured from the already decaying Parisian shopping arcades of just a few decades earlier. In architectural terms, the most thoroughgoing visions of the city of the future were haunted too by ruination: Le Corbusier’s projected Ville Radieuse depended on the wholesale ruin of the existing city, and the classical kitsch that Albert Speer planned for Hitler’s future Germania was designed with its potential “ruin value” in mind.

The second world war tested the taste for ruins to its limits – such wholesale destruction was surely unsuited to melancholy thoughts of an aesthetic cast. Rose Macaulay worries at the problem in the “Note on New Ruins” that she appended to Pleasure of Ruins: the bomb sites of London, she fears, are still too jagged and raw in the memory to qualify as ruins. And yet many of the most affecting images of the depredations of total war and, especially, of the bombing of cities are clearly indebted to romantic precursors. Macaulay herself was not immune to their pleasures: in 1949 her novel The World My Wilderness hymned the Eliotic wasteland that London had become, her feral teenage protagonists running wild among gaping cellars and ruderal meadows. One thinks, too, of Cecil Beaton’s blitz photographs, or Paul Nash’s 1941 painting Totes Meer and its rhyming of wrecked aircraft with Friedrich’sSea of Ice. In the immediate postwar period, it was cinema that frankly embraced the visual allure and import of the ruin. In Germany, an entire genre of “ruin films” arose out of the devastation caused by Allied carpet-bombing, though the signature film in terms of capturing the plight of Berlin’s orphaned Trümmerkinder, or children of the ruins, was by an Italian director: Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero of 1948.

Postwar culture is littered with images of ruins past and potentially to come, the levelled cities of Europe becoming mixed up with photographs and footage of real or anticipated nuclear destruction, the whole apocalyptic imaginary hardly alleviated by a sense that urban reconstruction was in itself a form of ruin lust: cities rising into wreckage and the earth poisoned by new industries. Chris Marker’s La Jetée(1962) begins with views of post-apocalyptic Paris that are clearly mocked-up from photographs of real cities in ruin in the 1940s; Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) shows the factory districts of Ravenna as a lurid, smoky hell that already looks post-industrial and decayed. And in the same decade JG Ballard began to formulate a view of ex-urban modernity — the concrete non-places of motorway flyovers and airport environs — as the landscape of a decidedly post-romantic sublime.

If Ballard is the English laureate of late-modern ruins, his influence still palpable in the writings of Iain Sinclair or the poetic dross-scape of Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s recent book Edgelands, the figure around whom the artistic fascination with ruins has crystallised in recent years is the artist Robert Smithson. In the years before his death in 1973 Smithson, who had certainly been reading Eliot and Ballard, combined ambitious land-art projects (his Spiral Jetty of 1970 is the best known) with a series of inventive and wry essays on the ruinous condition of the modern American landscape. Writing of his native New Jersey in 1967, in an essay titled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”, Smithson affected to have found, on the outskirts of a declining industrial town, the contemporary “eternal city”: an agglomeration of half-built highways and rusting factory relics to rival the architectural and artistic treasures of ancient Rome. New Jersey, writes Smithson memorably, is “a utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass”.

Smithson’s influence – and especially his notion of “ruins in reverse”, in which construction and dissolution cannot be told apart – is all over the ruinous turn that many artists and writers took in the last decade or so. Tacita Dean’s films are a case in point, with their frequent focus on defunct technology or architecture. Jane and Louise Wilson followed Ballard and the French urban theorist Paul Virilio in exploring the derelict remains of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall fortifications. Younger artists such as Cyprien Gaillard and collaborators Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry have continued to explore the idea of modern ruins, while Owen Hatherley’s 2011 book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britainessayed a critique of the ruinous effects of recent urban planning in the UK. (Later this year Hatherley’s sequel, A New Kind of Bleak will show that process nearing its endgame, from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Croydon to Belfast.)

An obsession with ruins can risk a fall into mere sentiment or nostalgia: ruin lust was already a cliché in the 18th century, and its periodic revivals may put one in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan: “There’s a fascination frantic / In a ruin that’s romantic.” The great interest in the remarkable images of decayed Detroit – in the photographs, for example, of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, on show at the Wilmotte Gallery in London from this week – is easily understandable but seems oddly detached from analyses of the political forces that brought the city to its present sorry pass. It may be that as a cultural touchstone the idea of ruin needs to slump into the undergrowth again. But the history of ruin aesthetics tells us that it would likely resurface in time, charged again with artistic and political energy, and we’d find ourselves looking once more at blasted or burned cities with a visionary or melancholy eye, just as Rose Macaulay did in 1941, ambiguously lamenting a bombed-out house where “the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky”.

‘What is the matter with you?’ Thus long-suffering Margaret Dumont in Animal Crackers (1930) when, not for the first time, she finds that Harpo’s thigh is in her left hand. The more pressing question, even after many viewings, is how the thing got there: one moment you’re a well apportioned dowager trying to rise above Groucho’s leery limbo-dancing wit, the next you’re being treated like the furniture by a curiously muscular child-loon in a ginger wig. The ‘leg trick’, as Wayne Koestenbaum calls it in his charming and rigorous study, is one of Harpo’s more speedy, surreptitious turns: it seems to come from nowhere, its comedic mechanics skilfully elided till audience and on-screen dupe realise he’s done it. Again.

On the face of it, speed was his thing: Harpo’s and his brothers’s theatrical roots may have been obvious in the films, but his dumb kinetics seem to spin off the centrifuge of silent comedy’s energy. As Koestenbaum puts it: ‘Who knows what Harpo wants? We only see evidence of his momentum.’ But just as the best of early cinematic slapstick is actually all about slowness, so Harpo’s velocity tends to a paradoxical stasis, whether it’s the blankness of repetition (all those circular chase scenes) or, more engagingly, oases of intense concentration in the midst of chaos. Time and again, says Koestenbaum, his face is ‘waxen with stopped thought.’ Never mind such privileged moments as the Harpo-Groucho mirror scene in Duck Soup (1933) – whether scissoring off every necktie in sight or fingering his weird arsenal of car horns and other improbable props (was a comic character ever so physically encumbered and transfixed by things?), the whole texture of Harpo’s performance has to do with intense absorption.

What better subject, then, for a critical study that is practically all concentration or interpretation, and almost nothing in terms of dutiful biography, film history or theoretical armature? Or so The Anatomy of Harpo Marx presents itself, at least. Koestenbaum is in truth too smart a critic – author of books on humiliation, opera, Warhol and Jackie Kennedy; also an acclaimed poet – not to be aware of the scholarship he apparently brackets in favour of a rapt, ecstatic and frequently hilarious adherence to Harpo’s on-screen presence itself. His Anatomy treats of all Harpo’s appearances, one film at a time but with no respect to the chronology of their production. Here, then, are actor and character reduced (or expanded) to a frieze of gestures, tricks and contemplative interludes: Harpo proffers a punning succession of objects in answer to Chico’s request for a flashlight, Harpo shoots the hats off young ladies’ heads, Harpo leaps into the arms of various women, Harpo leaps into the arms of various men.

‘Harpo loses himself in the practice of being Harpo, and I lose myself in contemplating Harpo.’ As a critical method, Koestenbaum acknowledges, this ‘might be madness’. At one level, it allows him to engage some staples of comic theory: repetition, duration, literalism, a laconic refusal of all types of authority. But the essence of Harpo is a mode of acceleration or escalation (even if it’s in the direction of entropy or emptiness), and Koestenbaum is unafraid of seeming to have too much invested in Harpo’s cute, saintly, buffed and often bare body. It’s no shock to be told that a lot of comic stage or screen business seems to be about castration, but it is a surprise to read that the critic ‘think[s] of Harpo’s harp solos while watching a solo porn video of a guy named Dave’, or that Harpo’s blank stare reminds him of those who had lost all hope in the Nazi death camps. But the point, or one point, of Koestenbaum’s experiment is to test the limits of what we find critically embarrassing: ‘We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death.’

ANDREI TARKOVSKY’S Stalker (1979) is a film that’s easy to precis and hard to describe. In this wittily personal and digressive account of it, Geoff Dyer declares himself allergic to having a film (or more predictably its narrative arc) sketched out before he has seen it; of all movies, Stalker is among the least amenable to breathless recommendation via plot summary.

What actually happens? In a dismal land that might be the director’s native Russia, the mysterious Stalker of the title leads two other men – known only as Writer and Professor – into a heavily guarded, ruinous territory, the Zone, where it is said their deepest desires will be made real. They wander about, by turns bickering and melancholic, until they enter a room where it seems the fabled wish-fulfilment might occur. Apparently it doesn’t. They leave the Zone again – though we’re not sure how, given the perils faced getting in there.

All of which is quite inadequate, because the proper question to ask someone who has seen Stalker – who has been, as it were, inside the Zone and lived for two and three-quarter hours on what Dyer calls Tarkovsky-time – is not what happened but how it has marked them. So seductive are the rhythms (and, yes, longueurs) of the film, so arresting but ambiguous its imagery, so vast its metaphysical purview but precise its attention to matter, that it can seem in retrospect more an atmosphere than an artefact. It’s as if viewers emerge with Zone goggles on: I know of only a handful of films of which I can truly assert the cliche that they changed the way I saw the world. Hardly a day goes by without my being reminded of this film. Whether it’s a gust of wind among branches, a luxurious clump of weeds, desolate railway sidings or the back of a stranger’s head, the universe offers up frequent small Tarkovsky moments.

How does an artist insinuate himself into our everyday like that? According to Dyer, whose book begins as a shot-by-shot analysis of Stalker and soon drifts into something more ambitious and vagrant, it is partly a matter of sheer concentration. The Zone is on one level a hokey sci-fi conceit. (The film was shot at two abandoned power stations in Estonia, but they were benign hydroelectric installations, and Tarkovsky blurs the postnuclear resonance of the Zone by suggesting its weird properties are the result of a meteor strike.) But the place is also a topographic excuse for simply looking very closely at things. As Dyer has it, “We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness.” What is true for the questing trio is also true for the viewer: Stalker demands an intensity and duration of looking that is properly entranced.

Or not. Perhaps we’re simply bored. By Stalker and his associates’ philosophical maundering, by their protracted slumping into stagnant pools and undergrowth, by the camera’s hypnotic attention to rusted bits of infrastructure and enigmatic junk: decayed tanks and machine guns, sluices and drains full of old syringes, unlikely waterlogged reproductions of panels from the Ghent Altarpiece. As Dyer notes, the world of Stalker is sopping wet; after a while it seems the whole film is taking place under water, and in slow motion. Close-ups and tableaux that look at first like still images are, as Dyer also spots, always minutely in motion, “as if the film were breathing”. The slowness is paradoxically one of the reasons the Zone seems so alive, as though the doleful and patient landscape is possessed of a “slumbering sentience”.

If that makes Tarkovsky’s film sound like a fairy tale, well, yes, there is an elemental animism at work – at times almost comically so, as in the case of a vacant building that seems to speak to Writer. Dyer, quite correctly I think, is not so keen on the overt archetypes that Stalker deploys, nor very taken with the film’s more obvious religiosity. Certain keepers of the Tarkovsky flame (he died in 1986) will insist that this film is thoroughly theological in import, but while the director himself could be sincere about the sacred in his work, his belief was touched with irony: Writer mocks Stalker’s messianic ambitions by fashioning a crown of thorns. For Dyer the film is much more about earthly (if complex, over-reaching) desires, including the desire for art – the Zone, he writes, is nothing other than cinema itself.

As a reader (too dry a word) of Stalker , Dyer rarely, if ever, puts a foot wrong; he has loved the film since its release, in his 20s, and now he is right to suggest that it is in part about middle age and the fading of dreams as much as their urgency or persistence. Zona is also very funny, treating as it does of the author’s own deepest desires – tales of missed threesomes and failing to jump on the property ladder – and even those of his parents (more meat, apparently). One can forgive his assertion that cinema no longer means for him what it did when he first saw Stalker, because the corollary is that some images are so intense that they continue to shape us throughout our lives and can never be bettered.

What’s less endearing in this volume is Dyer’s recourse at times to a merely facetious, blokeish register that he has played with in previous essays and fiction but that here starts to strain somewhat. So Jean-Luc Godard (admittedly, the opinion is also that of Mick Jagger, who had to work with him) is bluntly “a twat”, and Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia is adjudged “so far up itself”. At such moments you wonder if Dyer is afraid of his own seriousness, maybe even afraid of his profoundest ambitions as a writer and critic, in a way the twentysomething Tarkovsky fan would never have dreamed. But at its frequent best, Zona doesn’t baulk at the difficulty, even pretension, of its miraculous subject.

In 2005, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk contrived a timely and satiric installation for Making Things Public: a vast exhibition on objects and present-day politics held at ZKM, a cutting-edge centre for media art in Karlsruhe, Germany. Faced with fragile western triumphalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sloterdijk proposed that a “pneumatic parliament” be parachuted into post-conflict zones, its sleek transparent dome inflated in an hour and a half, and seats for 160 representatives installed within 24 hours. In a laconic essay to accompany CGI renderings of his Swiftian bubble in situ, the philosopher noted that some “failed states” among the customer target group might not be ready for the full parliamentary “experience”. A lucrative secondary market would arise in educational theme parks dedicated to potential state systems: democracy, monarchy, aristocracy and outright tyranny.

As a political-philosophical joke, the pneumatic parliament is a slightly clunky conceit. But it has its origin in Sloterdijk’s hugely ambitious and suggestive trilogy Spheres, published between 1998 and 2004. (Bubbles is the first volume to appear in English.) Here he attempts nothing less than a metaphysical history of enclosed spaces, utopian or practical pods and domes, real and fantastical atmospheres or ecosystems. Spheres is a wildly eclectic work; the third part, on foam (Schäume), is full of reflections on such topics as the vitreous dreamland of the Great Exhibition, the Victorian invention of the concept of environment, the deployment of poison gas during the first world war and the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller. Modernity, Sloterdijk contends, has long been a matter of control and liberation through a sort of air conditioning. And we live now, of course, with the constant knowledge that we have turned the system up too far.

Bubbles is every bit as vagrant and curious in its range of reference as the volumes still to be translated. Early on, Sloterdijk signals his mixing of art, science and metaphysics with a lovely invocation of Sir John Everett Millais’s 1887 painting Bubbles: a little boy sending some core aspect of his being aloft in a magical soap bubble. But it’s worth pausing to sound not exactly a warning but a modest caveat. This is fundamentally a work of philosophy, and its author is in more or less avowed dialogue throughout with the thought of Martin Heidegger, whose disquisitions on time and space describe a rooted, authentic sense of being in the world that Sloterdijk wants in part to counter with his vision of mobile spheres.

Here he is on what he calls the “egg principle”, as broached by William Harvey in his animal encyclopaedia De generatione animalium in 1651: “The ovum of the biologists is no longer the egg of the mythologists of origin; nonetheless, the incipient modern life sciences also fall back on the old cosmogonic motif of the genesis of all life, indeed the world as a whole, from an original egg.” The scientific insight that all living beings (even those previously thought to generate spontaneously) emerge from egg cells – a conjecture later confirmed under the microscope – becomes a guiding principle for thinking about all manner of origins and adventures. Sloterdijk conjures the image of life bursting forth from a discrete bubble, or communing with the outside through a porous membrane: these are the metaphors that animate artists from Hieronymus Bosch to Kazimir Malevich, scientists from the 17th century to the era of space travel, the designers of renaissance garden grottoes and 18th-century French four-poster beds.

At times, Bubbles reads distinctly like one of those poetic, rigorous and slightly mad essays that posits a single form as pseudo-scientific key to all mythologies and mores: Emerson’s essay on “Circles” (“the highest emblem in the cipher of the world”) or Sir Thomas Browne’s “The Garden of Cyrus”, in which the 17th-century physician spies a five-pointed “quincunx” everywhere in nature. At worst, Sloterdijk could be accused of merely spotting metaphoric slippages between the womb-encircled human foetus, saintly faces surrounded by haloes and the static-charged spheres employed by mesmerists or enthusiasts of animal magnetism. But his book is more fundamentally a study of the ways that life, soul, being and being-together have been conceived in terms of inside, outside and the traffic between.

If Sloterdijk’s reflections sound obvious or fanciful, consider again the long and vexed history of enclosed but transparent volumes as images alike of freedom and security, futurism and consolation. From the paradise of commodities corralled at the Crystal Palace – the only building, so the catalogue had it in 1851, in which the very atmosphere was visible – through the Millennium Dome and Eden Project to metaphors attached today to national security or cloud computing, we seem addicted to spaces that promise immunity and drift at the same time. Bubbles might best be compared to The Arcades Project, the massive fragmentary book in which Walter Benjamin tried to crystallise the history of capitalism in the image of Parisian glass arcades. (Or, in a British context, to Humphrey Jennings’s phantasmagoria of industrial modernity, Pandaemonium.) Though his eccentric methods are similar, Sloterdijk’s historical purview is a lot wider, and Bubbles is as much an essential guide to modern space as it is a philosophical epic about dwelling and thinking.

‘I cannot abide fuzzy plants, or plants of a certain texture … Just looking at them sets me off,’ an off-screen male synaesthete complains in Daria Martin’s Sensorium Tests, the central work among the US-born and UK-based artist’s 16-mm films at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes (until 8 April). I suppose many or most of us nurse comparable sensitivities to those of the young man whose words Martin took from an internet discussion of synaesthesia. (Mine are vegetal too: I have a thing about rhubarb leaves, not to speak of certain stalky umbellifers – cow parsley and the like. I blame the memory of frilled and succulent Triffids in a television adaptation of John Wyndham in the early 1980s.) But what if these aversions turned more physically insistent and unsettling? Imagine a world in which the mere sight of a pen or pencil triggered a pricking of your thumbs, in which you felt fork tines rip your flesh from across the room and the corners of hardback books poke you dully in the ribs.

These last sensations, also reported online, were noted by Martin in the course of her research. Not for the first time in her work – having trained as a painter, Martin has been making film installations since 2000 – she was taken by the threatening or tender encounter between body and thing. More precisely, she became interested in the curious phenomenon of mirror-touch synaesthesia: a condition in which the patient, faced with another human body (or even an inanimate object) that is being touched, feels this touch in the same spot on his or her body. This opens up, as they say, a world of hurt. In the presence of real violence mirror-touch synaesthetes may feel themselves slapped, punched or stabbed, and experience similar shocks when watching television or a film. Strangely, they will only feel, or fully feel, such sensations as they have already experienced: if they’ve never been passionately kissed, or kicked in the groin, the synaesthetic response recalls instead the closest analogue.

Whatever complex of psychology, neurological oddity and old-fashioned squeamishness is at work here, it seems of a piece with synaesthesia as we ordinarily understand it. That is, the kind of confusion between sense perceptions which Nabokov wrote about in Speak, Memory: ‘I present a fine case of coloured hearing.’ Nabokov claimed it gave him no advantage as a writer, but as Martin points out in the exhibition catalogue (where she quotes from, among others, Proust, Eisenstein, Benjamin and Merleau-Ponty), synaesthesia has long been thought at least an adjunct to the work of literature, painting and latterly cinema. Sensorium Tests, however, is no swooning meditation on artistic susceptibilities. Martin has in part reconstructed a clinical scene: a self-declared mirror-touch synaesthete (here played by the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca) is asked to watch objects and bodies gently slapped or palpated, and is quizzed on whether or where she feels anything in response. The result is a work that doesn’t exactly resolve the artist’s stated equivocation: ‘I don’t know whether to envy or to pity synaesthetes’ experiences of dissolving borders between what the rest of us assume to be discrete.’

The ten-minute film opens in a blue room where the subject of the experiment is being schooled in preparation for her task. An audio speaker, an electric fan, a lampshade and a young man’s face will be touched in turn in front of her while her instructor stands behind her and touches her (the subject’s) face at the same time – she is simply to say whether she feels the other woman’s hand on her right or left cheek, or both at once. Another young man hovers: his job is to introduce the objects and smack them very lightly with flat open hands. Meanwhile, in an adjacent darkened room, a third woman watches the proceedings through a one-way mirror. It seems she is a scientist, and colleague to a bald, spectacled, tense-looking man who stands in the shadows and listens on headphones to recordings of synaesthetes outlining their symptoms. He is gradually drawn to the clinical drama unfolding in the next room.

This set-up may make the film sound merely academic – the laconic presentation of a medical or pseudo-medical mise-en-scène, theoretically enlivened with reference to once modish ideas about institutional voyeurism – but Sensorium Tests is a more devious and alluring work than that. (The male scientist looks remarkably like – or remarkably like my memory of – one of the malevolent scientists in Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It’s just one of many cinematic references in Martin’s work, in this case lendingSensorium Tests an air of metaphysical SF.) As the tests succeed each other, and Marinca softly calls out ‘right’ or ‘left’, one starts to notice slippages and ambiguities: a shot in which the female scientist appears to be in the blue room and not behind the mirror; a close-up of a cheek that seems to be Marinca’s but turns out to be that of the young man who’s also being touched; sudden glances between the principals that maybe suggest the subject has just given the ‘wrong’ answer, though as a viewer you can’t be sure. And what to make of the almost abstract images that punctuate the whole: a mysterious lattice or fabric that looms out of nowhere, an inexplicable and heart-stopping close-up of a sharp object piercing the meniscus of a liquid? At such moments it seems we’re glimpsing the synaesthete’s intense and bristling inner world.

Martin has put lab research to enigmatic use before, and Sensorium Tests is just the latest of her works to explore extremities of sensation. Her film Soft Materials (2004), also showing at Milton Keynes, depicts a naked man and woman (both professional dancers) frolicking with a series of more or less clunky robots devised at the University of Zurich to explore the possibility of ‘embodied artificial intelligence’. The woman allows a compact, whirring contraption to brush its nest of almost infinitely fine filaments over her face, then bustles about tenderly with a miniature airship that seems to know where it is going. The man’s face, more alarmingly, is caressed by a realistically articulated metal hand, while the cables that control it – or rather, it seems, allow it to orient itself – tense and slacken creepily on the floor. Gradually it becomes clear that this is not just a collaboration or performance between human and machine: they appear instead to be teaching each other something about movement and balance – and sensitivity.

This review of Will Wiles’s Care of Wooden Floors appeared in the Telegraph.

‘It was a scratch and a minor stain. It was not a matter of life and death.” Thus the unnamed narrator of Will Wiles’s ingenious first novel, holed up in an anonymous Eastern-European city and four days into a week of entropically bad luck. Much worse is to come. Tasked with looking after the apartment of Oskar, an old university friend, the hapless English protagonist arrives among canals that seem filled with tar and buildings that resemble damp grey sugar cubes. Oskar’s flat is a pristine refuge, sparsely appointed with impeccable furniture, steel kitchen surfaces, intimidating art books and its owner’s gleaming (and fateful) grand piano. Oskar – musician, émigré, minimalist aesthete, composer of Variations on Tram Timetables – is in LA, getting divorced. The narrator has merely to obey the many notes his fastidious pal has left behind and all will be well.

MARINA WARNER’S wondrous and lucid study of Arabian Nights has been two decades and more in the making. She began her research during the first Gulf War and completed the book in the midst of the Arab Spring: a story still unfinished, but one Warner hopes in the end might “give the princes and sultans of this world pause”. Stranger Magic is not exactly an argument for the present “relevance” of these venerable tales – Warner is far too subtle, curious and vagrant a reader for that – but it is an extraordinarily rich and elegant lesson in cultural involution. Edward Said, a childhood friend of Warner’s in Cairo, famously accused certain stories of frankly racist attitudes, but Warner is at pains to show how complex the traffic was between orientalist fantasies and the cultures that produced the original (and they are not all original) stories.

The tales that comprise Thousand and One Nights (as the 12th-century Arabic title has it) have no named authors and arose from no discrete milieu; the collection includes narratives from India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt. There are echoes of the Bible and Koran, as well as numerous rhymes with western folk tales. We owe the modern Nights to one Antoine Gallard, who produced a French translation in the early 18th century and most likely contrived several stories himself, including the most celebrated: the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba. English translations came later: Edward Lane’s rather chaste edition in 1841 – in a luminous essay on the Nights, Borges calls it an “encyclopedia of evasion” – and John Payne’s in 1882. Sir Richard Burton’s, three years later, was largely based on Payne’s but lacquered the tales with fin-de-siecle exoticism: Warner calls his translation “prolix and rococo”.

What all of these versions have in common, of course, is the framing story of Shahrazad – Warner adopts the modern transliteration, formerly Scheherazade – whose nightly tale-spinning (like “an Arabian Penelope”) staves off her slaughter at the hands of the sultan Shahriyar, her husband. This is just the first such frame around a work that sometimes appears entirely composed of prologues and digressions, tales within tales. Among other tricks and treasures, the Nights bequeaths us one of the basic narrative styles of world literature: the nesting of one story inside another in a manner that André Gide (borrowing a heraldic term) called mise en abyme . It’s one of the great pleasures and longueurs of the work, this elaborate process of deferral: a convoluted narrative line that is very precisely “arabesque”.

When it comes to the tales themselves and their fantastical content, Warner is an excellent guide and a stylish storyteller in her own right: her renderings of 15 of the stories punctuate the book. The world she describes in the intervening chapters is in some ways familiar: a magical universe of princes, viziers, witches, virgins, bottled genies, flying carpets, mechanical horses and lethal automata. Among reflections on the themes of envy, lust and betrayal that animate the stories, she points out too the uncanny, inhuman nature of much of this fictional realm.Arabian Nights is a book replete with oddly animate objects, not least in the chilling The City of Brass : travellers in the Sahara discover a town arrested in time, where robots stand guard over a queen lying in state, jewelled and mummified, her eyes filled with quicksilver.

There are many later fictional counterparts to such visions – the doll Olympia, for example, in ETA Hoffmann’sThe Sandman – but perhaps the tales’ strange fixation with marionettes and machinery is also one reason they have flourished on stage and in the cinema. The story of Aladdin and the magical lamp was dramatised by the Irish actor and playwright John O’Keeffe and performed at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden in 1788; it was a popular subject, too, for children’s toy theatres a few decades later. The Disney version of Aladdin is well known, Lotte Reiniger’s delightful animated silhouettes in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) less so. But very early film-makers seem already to have divined a magical link between the technologies they invented and the contraptions that appear in the Nights – William Dickson, an assistant to Thomas Edison, described the latter’s revolving black studio in Brooklyn as “the air-ship of some swart Afrite”, mimicking the “fancy, straining archaisms” of Burton’s Arabian Nights .

Warner’s chapters on the filmic afterlife of the Nights remind us that her last book was Phantasmagoria , a study of ghostly and occult technologies from the magic lantern to virtual reality. In fact, even that hugely ambitious and fascinating volume now looks like a sort of footnote to the remarkable feat she has pulled off in Stranger Magic : nothing less than a history of magic, storytelling and centuries of cultural exchange between east and west. All in the guise of a book about one book, albeit an inexhaustible one. There are more dutiful histories of those subjects, just as there are scholarly studies of Arabian Nights that adequately describe its form, politics or translations but never truly fly. The product of Warner’s meticulous research is a weighty volume that feels airborne on every page.

On 30 October 1985, Andy Warhol was signing books at a New York bookshop when a young woman approached and tore off his silver wig. Andy simply pulled up his jacket’s hood and went on signing. Or so the story goes. In fact, as the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes in his svelte 2001 biography, Warhol was mortified. However calculatedly he’d parlayed his bodily strangeness into artistic and commercial success, in middle age he still feared the “wounds, holes, distentions; stretch-marks of his pre-fame, cramped embodiment”. Warhol lived, and made his work, in constant expectation that he was about to be humiliated.

Koestenbaum has fretted stylishly elsewhere about celebrity, performance and physical betrayal; his books include The Queen’s Throat, on opera and sexuality, and Jackie Under My Skin, a study of a woman whose kempt, sleek image is indelibly marked in the public mind with the blood of her slain husband. In his new book Koestenbaum reflects explicitly on the scenography of bodies laid bare, mocked, lusted after, pitied and despised. Humiliation (Notting Hill Editions, £12) is an eloquent, fearless and frequently hilarious essay on the “whimpering beast inside each of us”, and on the urge to exploit its vulnerability.

Humiliation is always a reminder of our embodied being – it involves flesh and fluids and unwanted (or shamefully desired) intrusions. Koestenbaum recalls many instances of his own body’s abject eruption, from childhood accidents such as sneezing on his hand at school to deadpan anecdotes from his erotic life: “Sitting beside a playwright, I began ejaculating, and at just that instant an urban planner walked into the room.” This last (delightfully context-free) anecdote points to the book’s first key insight: humiliation requires, or at least imagines, a trio. While one may burn with shame alone, or suffer embarrassment in the presence of one other, humiliation’s “infernal waltz” is danced by victim, protagonist and witness: “The scene’s horror – its energy, its electricity – invokes the presence of three.”

With fame, of course, the triad structure remains but the witnesses multiply, and some of Humiliation is devoted to persons whose celebrity is or was largely a matter of having their bodies exposed, or speculated on in more than one sense.

There is Michael Jackson, beaten and mocked by his father, and later reduced to recounting on TV how police photographers had inspected his penis, buttocks and thighs. There is Liza Minnelli, slurring and loud in interviews, seeming to reincarnate the humiliations endured by her mother, Judy Garland. (Koestenbaum is unashamed of his Judy and Liza fixations, though he knows they’re a little embarrassing at this stage.) And most bizarrely: the queasy mea culpa performed by the sexually compromised and “self-trashing, media-trashed” male politician, hoping to explain away furtive grapples in public toilets, while his wife stands beside him, pristine and humiliated. Koestenbaum acknowledges some pleasure at this grim Passion, but cannot help identifying with the accused, even with a self-declared homophobe such as US senator Larry Craig, arraigned for soliciting sex from an undercover cop at Minneapolis airport.

In its briskly essayistic way, Humiliation moves unapologetically from such trivial cases to the most profound and awful acts of humiliation. Here Koestenbaum draws on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the Nazi death camps. At Auschwitz, Agamben argues, an ancient juridical-political category was tested to the limit: the Roman concept of homo sacer, the sacrificial body that, having been excluded from the category of the human, could be killed with impunity. It is common enough to talk of “dehumanisation” in such contexts. But Agamben’s point about the Holocaust (and Koestenbaum’s about lynching photographs or the grotesqueries at Abu Ghraib) has to do with the codification of that process, its more or less elaborate ritual or performance, and the precise, apparently small, acts of mockery or exposure that link reality TV and surveillance culture to the worst forms of humiliation.

Koestenbaum is an avowedly excitable guide to the subject and sometimes strains historical affinities between his own minor embarrassments – a bad review, a rejected essay – and the plight, for example, of African women who have suffered obstetric fistulas. But painful humiliation can be a matter of accumulated small slights and slippages as much as dramatic exclusion from the social body. And while his is certainly a witty account of the varieties of mortification (“In a sonnet, the ratio of humiliation to uplift is 8:6″), Koestenbaum’s point is ultimately an ethical one: “We have an obligation to keep asking questions about experiences that are not our own, experiences that are worse than our own ever will be.”

What mode or degree of attention does photography demand, or deserve, today? It sometimes seems  the photograph as such is no longer really with us: suborned to contemporary art practices for which mediumistic integrity is beside the point, dispersed in myriad online quotidia that flummox efforts at a cult-studs overview, the medium meanwhile a decade and more past its heyday as gallery-bound pretender to painting’s spectacle and presence. And yet criticism carries on much as if photography were still parsable in terms of the old problems. Traditional photographic publishing does its sedulous, Aperture-approved thing; academic treatments abound of this or that (dread word ahead) ‘issue’ as pertains to photographic history; and a certain three-decades-old ‘theoretical’ text (no prizes) simply will not go away. Surveying recent photographic publications is an oddly familiar exercise – mostly one just longs for evidence of real looking.

Consider some points on the continuum sketched above. Justin Carville’s Photography and Ireland (Reaktion, 2011) is the latest in its publisher’s admirable series on photography’s traffic with broad-brush topics – death, literature, archaeology, flight, cinema – and exhibits all the merits and failings of such a thematic exercise. Carville is a dutiful guide to the vexed cultural landscape of Irish photography. The country’s proximity to artistic and imperial capitals meant there was little time lag in terms of early adoption: there were wealthy amateurs and numerous commercial operations at work by the middle of the nineteenth century. Ireland was in no sense photographically backward but it was – and here is Carville’s whole thesis – subject to an aesthetic primitivism that later photographers, whether of realist or postmodern bent, have worked hard to undo. So far, perhaps, so predictably post-colonial; but there’s a scholarly job to be done here and Carville has tackled it well.

What grates about Photography and Ireland, and renders it symptomatic, is the paucity of analysis or even straightforward description of the many fascinating images therein. Most photographs are accused (how else to describe such a crabbed critical modus?) of invoking the usual genera – poverty, politics, gender, urbanization, modernity – in such a way that the image itself may as well not be there. Faced with instances of the Victorian picturesque, such as Lady Hawarden’s treescapes, Carville opines that they seem to have been ‘deliberately’ composed to avoid picturing the Famine. Among jejune overstatements of this sort, he rarely pauses to consider an image for more than a sentence or two before adjudging its status as ideological prop or provocation. That’s not to say he’s on the wrong track with, say, the occlusion of politics by the picturesque, or the extent to which photographers such as Trish Morrissey or Hanna Starkey ‘explore issues of gender, memory and social space’. Rather, he scorns pictorial evidence for the complexity of relations between art and politics, telling us early on that aesthetics will play no part in his history.

It’s not just possible to get away with such tactics in a para-academic text; it pretty much defines the genre. But what is the alternative now to the swift dissolving of any given image into its cultural ground? One answer might be found in a book like Tod Papageorge’s Core Curriculum (Aperture, 2011): a collection of the veteran photographer’s occasional writings on his own and others’ work. Papageorge’s photographs – the book reproduces several, from the 1960s to the present day – are wide-angle adjuncts to the work of his associates Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. His Central Park series of the 1970s discovers curious scenes and gestures at the centre of expansive compositions: a man stooping awkwardly to comb his son’s hair, another stretched on the grass and peering at an optician’s chart. As a critic and teacher – much of Core Curriculum originated as lectures at Yale – Papageorge can sound of his era, hymning Atget, Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, baulking at contemporary photography’s privileging of concept above a phenomenal world at the artist’s vigilant beck. But there are less responsible essays here too, odd rhetorical swerves by which Papageorge captures the core of his own practice: an effort to achieve in the image what he’d hoped, as a young man, to crystallise in the poetic syllable.

Core Curriculum is an example of ‘photography from the photographer’s point of view’: one of the tropes that so bored Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980). Thirty years later, Barthes’s essay has itself attained the force of doxa: the photograph’s mournful, deathly aspect is a given of much contemporary theory and practice. Which convention leaves out a deal of what’s valuable in that book; I’d love to read a scholar who was willing to shunt the dead mother aside and think hard about Barthes’s verbs: all that ‘pricking’ and ‘lacerating’. But it is nonetheless bracing to learn that James Elkins’s What Photography Is (Routledge, 2011) was written in exasperated homage to Barthes’s book, Elkins determined to dispel the mildly haunted sentiment that surrounds Camera Lucida. Barthes notoriously misreads key details in the photographs he loves: a ‘gold chain’ is in fact a string of pearls, the ‘cell’ wall behind the condemned Lewis Payne is obviously the riveted hull of a ship. But Elkins’s charge against Barthes is more fundamental: that he looks past the photograph and scants its status as unmeaning surface. Elkins, by contrast, wants to look so hard at surfaces and details that the personal and cultural (also aesthetic) baggage falls away and we’re left with something intractable and strange: photography’s capacity for attention to the lumpish muteness of appearances.

It’s initially a compelling turn in the face of Barthes’s essentially dramatic or narrative approach to photographs, and involves Elkins in a series of bravura reflections on some intriguing images – a selenite window in Mexico, a patch of black ice, Harold Edgerton’s hideously globular atomic explosions – and scarcely definable details: a tiny rock in a Timothy O’Sullivan landscape, some unexplained indentations in the corner of a Kertész. Such things tell us more, Elkins claims, about the nature of photography than any number of maunderings about memory and loss. Well, maybe. There’s a curiously gee-whizz tone to his reading of Camera Lucida: as if he’s the first to notice that Barthes’s limitations. (Isn’t that the point? He’s not so much limited as truly crippled. Elkins’s insistence that melancholy is not a good model for criticism seems arbitrary and obtuse.) And there’s a lot of vaguely scientistic disdain for the history of art photography, the subtext of which seems to be, again, that Elkins is the first to aver that photography makes us look at things we would not dream of looking at. Both tendencies are dispiriting in a book that promises, and in places delivers, a way of seeing to rival culturalist or art-historical attitudes to photography.

But the proper counter to Elkins’s flip dismissals of contemporary work, his awkward effort to ape Barthes’s boredom with photographic doxa, would be to turn to something like Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance (Aperture, 2011) with its spider patterns of fractured glass, roadkill bloodstains, unnameable clusters of light, the red-green iridescence on a pigeon’s neck. Kawauchi’s book is the season’s loveliest example of sustained looking at just the sort of resistant particulars that Elkins admires, and which have been there all along.

Connemara: a Little Gaelic Kingdom
Tim Robinson
Penguin Ireland, 432pp, £20

Tim Robinson is the Proust of the western seaboard, a Ruskin of the isles. Since the 1980s, this Yorkshire-born polymath has essayed an extraordinarily ambitious and eloquent description of the portions of the west of Ireland where he has lived. Robinson had been a mathematician, teacher and artist when, in 1972, he fled London for the Aran Islands. Eking a living as a cartographer, he began work on Stones of Aran, a two-volume treatment of his new home that is both exact and lyrical, modestly indebted to local guides and often testy in the face of sentimental tourists and unthinking efforts to modernise which ruin the location. By the time the first volume appeared in 1986, Robinson had relocated to mainland Connemara, now the subject of a monumental trilogy, of which A Little Gaelic Kingdom is the final part.

The region of Robinson’s title stretches 40 miles or so to the north-west of the city of Galway: a variegated territory of rock, bog, farmland (frequently composed of rock and bog), precipitous and raw glacial remnants and ill-advised plantings of conifers from the pre-boom decades, the whole bounded by a coastline of such complexity that Robinson invokes Benoît Mandelbrot in an effort to make it make sense. As he notes in the second volume of the trilogy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (who took up resi­dence at Rosroe in 1948) considered Conne­mara “the last pool of darkness” in Europe. In Robinson’s books it is perhaps not so obscure, but certainly no less depthless, a place of “random beguilements and sidesteps”.

The immediate subject of this third volume is the Irish-speaking districts of Connemara. As a non-native, Robinson seems to have got as close to the long-dying language as one can, recounting stories told him only in Irish and tracing the residues of the language in contemporary place names. But in approaching Connemara’s Gaeltachts (Irish-speaking areas), he enters territory even more vexed, culturally and politically, than he did in Stones of Aran, where the work of his precursor J M Synge was a constant presence.

Here, the eager historical guide is Patrick Pearse, doomed leader of the 1916 Easter Rising and lover of both the language and land of Connemara. Robinson is generous about Pearse’s life and his writing, preferring to mine his short stories for their intimacy with the landscape than to linger over his prim but messianic character. Still, the politics of the Irish language are never far away: later, Robinson recounts efforts to have the Gaeltachts protected in a country that was officially obsessed by its vanishing tongue but in practice oddly oblivious to its speakers.

None of this should suggest that Robinson has written anything so conventional as a history of the Irish language in Connemara; his is too roving a mind for that – it is the topography and its narrative store that dominate. Robinson moves easily from considerations of the fractal geology of the coastline, through tales of tyrannical landlords done to death in the land wars, to austerely hymning thesean-nós (old-style) singing of such notables as Joe Heaney, once an unlikely collaborator with John Cage. Another story lurks unfinished here: Connemara is now pocked with the ruins of boom-time hubris, a landscape of unwanted housing developments and abandoned factories.

As ever with Robinson, the pleasures of his vagrant, exacting style are many. The seductive accumulation of stories or topographical details frequently culminates in reflections at once abstract and lovely, as in his concluding remarks about the intricacy of the coast: “The natural world is largely composed of such recalcitrant entities, over which the geometry of Euclid, the fairy tale of lines, circles, areas and volumes we are told at school, has no authority.” Long, digressive tramps through natural or cultural history terminate in aphoristic clarity: “There are places where place proliferates . . . There is no overarching story other than the dominance of story itself.” Except that, for Robinson, such sudden vistas and insights are preludes to the renewed work of immersion in place. As he wrote in his diary 30 years ago: “I could wander onwards up here for ever.”