➾ Link to the De Gruyter catalog
Chris Zintzen: Shifting perspectives: Alpine scenarios in the work complex Nach der Natur (Beyond Nature) by the Austrian architectural photographer Margherita Spiluttini.
In: The Draw of the Alps: Alpine Summits and Borderlands in Modern German-speaking Culture, edited by Richard McClelland. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2023, pp. 103–120 (=Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies 36). DOI: 10.1515/9783111150536-005; ISBN 978-3-11-114907-3; e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-115053-6; e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-115068-0.
Abstract
Update: With the alpine images of the photographic portfolio “Beyond Nature”, architectural photographer Margherita Spiluttini achieved her breakthrough in the art world. 20 years after the first presentation of these images, this article undertakes a renewed appreciation of the special photographic approach and recontextualizes the images within the Cultural Studies' discourse on the motif of the Alps of the years 1980 to 2000. — The topic receives a further, sad topicality through the passing of the artist (and friend) in March 2023.
The Alps as a theme and motif play a prominent role in European cultural, intellectual, literary and art history as signifiers of such diverse valences as: Ecology vs. civilization, primordiality vs. culture, geology vs. transcendence, security/homeland vs. danger/alterity. Using the photographic work of award-winning Austrian architectural photographer Margherita Spiluttini as an example, various phases of the reception of the Alps in Austrian ideology and intellectual history are reconstructed. The ratio is that the motif of the Alps, compromised as a symbol of “homeland” by Austrofascism and National Socialism, only returned to the reflective space of advanced art after the bitter ideological critique of the 1960s and 70s and, beyond that, after a broad revision of the history of ideology in the 1990s. Using the imaging strategies of architectural photography, Margherita Spiluttini's photographs of alpine scenarios show a viable method (Ernst von Glasersfeld) of dealing with the cultured landscape in post-postmodernism and in the Anthropocene.
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The Book
The Alps have exerted a hold over the German cultural imagination throughout the modern period, enthralling writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and tourists alike. The Draw of the Alps interrogates the dynamics of this fascination. Though philosophical and aesthetic responses to Alpine space have shifted over time, the Alps continue to captivate at an individual and collective level. This has resulted in myriad cultural engagements with Alpine space, as this interdisciplinary volume attests. Literature, photography, and philosophy continue to engage with the Alps as a place in which humans pursue their cognitive and aesthetic limits. At the same time, individuals engage physically with the alpine environment, whether as visitors through the well-established leisure industry, as enthusiasts of extreme sports, or as residents who feel the acute end of social and environmental change. Taking a transnational view of Alpine space, the volume demonstrates that the Alps are not geographically peripheral to the nation-state but are a vibrant locus of modern cultural production. As The Draw of the Alps attests, the Alps are nothing less than a crucible in which understandings of what it means to be human have been forged. (Richard McClelland)
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