Pleasure of Pleasures Ruin of Ruins

Lately I have gotten embroiled in some very big projects, ones that involve a lot of time (three months for this one) and a lot of material (I cut up about thirty books to get what I needed) and a lot of thought (but I really mean intuition or instinct or even groping in the dark). I will eventually make a little movie tour of this project, and maybe by then I will have found a narrative to account for it. What were the debits and credits of this work?

Rose Macaulay, who wrote the book, was a formidable English lady who had seen the ancient world revealed by 20th century archaeology, and Roloff Beny, who took the pictures, captured a sense of how grainy the past can seem. His photographs are generally devoid of living humans, and her text is generally devoid of humor. I took those forms of emptiness as an invitation. The world should be populous, and the world should seem hilarious, and the result of my good-natured interventions should seem ruinous. My effort to please myself among these artifacts should appall. And appeal.

I'm afraid my graphic effects are not well captured by the image systems of social media--wrong aspect ratio for Beny's double page spreads--but you can get a better sense from the selection of images I put on my website:  Pleasure of Pleasure Ruin of Ruins.