Alpine rite aesthetics
Jul. 26th, 2007 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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koalas_in_love has a nice image-curation post today called FORENSETHSE CRYASTILLIUMTH in which he collects and exhibits images in a lexical set we could call "hunting gothic" or "mountain shaman" or "pine cabin grotesque". Perhaps the overall, catchall term is "alpine rite aesthetics". This stuff is to do with people who live in the mountains, their relationship with the animals which live in the mountains too (goats, bears, creatures with horns and fur, things you trap in the snow), and ancient and sinister rituals based on these relationships.
A collection of images like this can be a great starting point for a piece of creative work (once I have a title and a lexical set I pretty much have my song or story or whatever), or it can be a piece of work on its own, a collection you present to the public as a kind of folk archivist in the manner of an Alan Lomax or a Jeremy Deller. Looking at these images, I thought immediately of the work of a younger artist-collector: Paris-based, LA-born artist Cameron Jamie, whose Kranky Klaus, a 20-minute film of the pagan Krampus festival in Austria's Bad Gastein Valley, was one of the highlights of last year's Whitney Biennial. It depicts the ribald and riotous scenes which unfold in the village every December 6th, when residents await the visit of "a cortege of mythical elves and men dressed as horned, hairy beasts led by an elder bishop".
Jamie (you can see a video interview with him here) has always been fascinated by the primitive rituals you can see in supposedly advanced nations; his work started with collections of Halloween rituals and masked teen backyard wrestling tournaments in LA. Something sinister pervades these rituals, where facial concealment allows individuals to blend into groups and revert to primitive ancestral behaviours.
That kind of interest would lead us off into the work of artists like Hermann Nitsch and his "orgiastic mystery theatre" (animals, blood and mountains galore in that stuff). But there's a more kitsch, funny, second degree school of alpine aesthetics. I think of Guy Maddin's film Careful, which recycles Alpine melodrama as seen by 1930s Hollywood.
Cinema journal Images describes Careful thus: "The film is set in the sleepy "Canadian Alpine" village of Tolzbad, where its citizens live in constant fear of setting off an avalanche if they talk too loudly or behave in a reckless fashion. The opening montage narrated by the grim though wise Herr Trota (played by Victor Cowie), perfectly sets up the film’s precariously balanced narrative dominoes. As we watch characters performing everyday acts such as removing a teapot from the stove, chopping down a tree, sneezing, falling off a cliff, Herr Trota intones a litany of warnings:
"Don’t spill it."
"Children, heed the warnings of your parents."
"Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer."
"Think twice."
The eruption of an unruly cortege of mythical elves and beasts into that world would be disastrous, it seems. But perhaps alpine conservatism and riotous atavistic ritual aren't at odds at all; perhaps they hold each other in place. The goatmen, after all, only appear once a year.
koalas_in_love has a nice image-curation post today called FORENSETHSE CRYASTILLIUMTH in which he collects and exhibits images in a lexical set we could call "hunting gothic" or "mountain shaman" or "pine cabin grotesque". Perhaps the overall, catchall term is "alpine rite aesthetics". This stuff is to do with people who live in the mountains, their relationship with the animals which live in the mountains too (goats, bears, creatures with horns and fur, things you trap in the snow), and ancient and sinister rituals based on these relationships.A collection of images like this can be a great starting point for a piece of creative work (once I have a title and a lexical set I pretty much have my song or story or whatever), or it can be a piece of work on its own, a collection you present to the public as a kind of folk archivist in the manner of an Alan Lomax or a Jeremy Deller. Looking at these images, I thought immediately of the work of a younger artist-collector: Paris-based, LA-born artist Cameron Jamie, whose Kranky Klaus, a 20-minute film of the pagan Krampus festival in Austria's Bad Gastein Valley, was one of the highlights of last year's Whitney Biennial. It depicts the ribald and riotous scenes which unfold in the village every December 6th, when residents await the visit of "a cortege of mythical elves and men dressed as horned, hairy beasts led by an elder bishop".
Jamie (you can see a video interview with him here) has always been fascinated by the primitive rituals you can see in supposedly advanced nations; his work started with collections of Halloween rituals and masked teen backyard wrestling tournaments in LA. Something sinister pervades these rituals, where facial concealment allows individuals to blend into groups and revert to primitive ancestral behaviours. That kind of interest would lead us off into the work of artists like Hermann Nitsch and his "orgiastic mystery theatre" (animals, blood and mountains galore in that stuff). But there's a more kitsch, funny, second degree school of alpine aesthetics. I think of Guy Maddin's film Careful, which recycles Alpine melodrama as seen by 1930s Hollywood.
Cinema journal Images describes Careful thus: "The film is set in the sleepy "Canadian Alpine" village of Tolzbad, where its citizens live in constant fear of setting off an avalanche if they talk too loudly or behave in a reckless fashion. The opening montage narrated by the grim though wise Herr Trota (played by Victor Cowie), perfectly sets up the film’s precariously balanced narrative dominoes. As we watch characters performing everyday acts such as removing a teapot from the stove, chopping down a tree, sneezing, falling off a cliff, Herr Trota intones a litany of warnings:
"Don’t spill it."
"Children, heed the warnings of your parents."
"Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer."
"Think twice."
The eruption of an unruly cortege of mythical elves and beasts into that world would be disastrous, it seems. But perhaps alpine conservatism and riotous atavistic ritual aren't at odds at all; perhaps they hold each other in place. The goatmen, after all, only appear once a year.