➾ 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.
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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.
Excerpt
[...] In my approach to Margherita Spiluttini's photographic work, I consider various contexts. These
contexts include, first: the photographic-historical background of landscape and Alpine photography of
the 19th
and 20th centuries, from which Spiluttini's photography differs – as Dietmar Steiner has emphasized – through her inclusion of industrial-technical motifs in the sense of the ‘New Topographers’. At the same time, the media-specific implications of photography will be taken into account, which distinguish the photographed mountain from the real and from the painted, drawn, filmed and narrated Alps.
A second framework for analysis concerns the complex and overdetermined motivic inventory of the Alps in visual art and literature that must be kept present,
and whose
paradigms (the threatening vs. the sublime, power vs. helplessness, nature vs. culture) are shifted by
Spiluttini's photography in the direction of the proposition of a hybrid of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and
projected into the spatial composition of cubatures.
Yet a third context is the specifically Austrian national, patriotic or ‘Heimat’ (‘homeland’)
appropriation/fiction of the Alps, as it was portrayed in the mass media since the era of the Ständestaat
(Federal State of Austria, 1934–1938), under National Socialism (1938–1945) and into the Second
Republic (from 1955) – a fiction that was systematically deconstructed only during the 1990s.
Finally,
I refer implicitly to the context of ‘Anti-Heimat’ literature and art which preceded scientific
deconstruction and which (as with Schönherr, Turrini, Mitterer, Jelinek in literature and Hermann
Painitz in art, respectively) worked to debunk the popular, tourist and political fictions of the ‘beautiful
Alpine country’: in doing so, as is often noted, the ‘Anti-Heimat’ reflex remains dialectically trapped
in the clichés of the ‘Heimat’. This essay cannot refer to all these valences exhaustively, but their
validity is hereby implicitly claimed.
I would like to present the Alpine oeuvre of the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini
under the assumption – fed by many perceptions – that, after the deconstructive turn in Cultural Studies,
art and discourse (at the latest since the 1990s), the motif of the Alps has moved as newly accessible
into the space of advanced and reflected art. This can be seen, for example, in the issue Alpine
Avantgarden und urbane Alpen of the cultural studies journal sinnhaft, which insinuated a diagnosis of
a “vague Alpine” in 2008.
The conceptual literary texts of the writer Bodo Hell, the adaptation of folk
music motifs in the “Neue Volxmusik” (bands such as Attwenger, Broadlahn, Franui) and the new
approaches to Alpine architecture, which I will report on in the context of Spiluttini's photography,
could serve as indicators of a revision and redevelopment of the Alpine motif. [...]
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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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