Great Fear on the Mountain

I still occasionally end up buying a book for its cover, or at least picking it out to look at on that basis. This one (published last year) got to me through that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting, Mountain Peak (1918). It is extremely well chosen as an illustration of the story, which concerns a high pasture with an evil reputation, avoided for twenty years until a new group of shepherds volunteer to spend a summer up there. It doesn't end well for them. There is an excellent, comprehensive article by Alice-Catherine Carls about Great Fear on the Mountain (1926) and its Swiss author Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. I'll quote here some of what she says about his landscape imagery: 

In Great Fear, the glacier tests the limits of human understanding and causes a loss of reality conducive to extracorporal and paranormal sensations, hallucinations, phantasms, and dreams. It becomes a purgatory to “vapors and legions of errant souls” experiencing a “hypnotic delirium, a kind of awake-dream.” 

Other settings that describe unfamiliar, disorienting light and sound effects include the mountain slopes’ dense forest, the absolute darkness of the night, the blinding light of the noon sun, and the silence of high altitudes’ “mineral world.” The magnificent sunrises on the jagged mountain summits are described in impressionistic, worshipping fervor, with dawn alighting on the landscape like a bird and the sky being so close that one could touch it.

The disturbed psychologies of the characters in Great Fear could be likened to the state Kirchner was in after being discharged from the army. As a recent article in the Art Newspaper explains, he 'was a physical and psychological wreck when he first arrived in Davos in 1917. Addicted to alcohol and morphine, he was suffering from blackouts and paralysis.' At first he stayed with a nurse on the Stafelalp, in a mountain hut  - “It’s very beautiful up here ... and I could paint so much, if I weren’t so weak.” A year later he was doing better and living in Davos where he remained until 1925, painting landscapes like the one Archipelago Books have used for Great Fear on the Mountain. 

Sahara Project

Tate Modern's Electric Dreams exhibition includes the film Tele-Mack, shot in 1968, featuring the work of West German artist Heinz Mack. It starts in black and white with him driving an E-type through a city, looking like David Hemmings in Blow-Up. Then it leaps into colour - Mack is now in a silver suit carrying an aluminium disc into a stretch of water (accompanied by 'tense music', as you can see from my photograph above). The voice on the soundtrack tells us this is a kind of artificial sun and is an experiment related to the artist's Sahara Project. Next we see him planting fragmented mirrors in a field (a kind of landscape art I've written about here before). Then we see an installation of kinetic sculptures made of aluminium foil and coloured Plexiglas - Mack is wearing a cool sixties suit while a groovy young woman in plastic orange raincoat and hat takes photographs of him. From this Warhol-like scene we are transported to the Tunisian desert, where the artist in his silver suit resembles an astronaut, setting up aluminium sculptures that face into the sun. Here we are witnessing the culmination of his long-planned Sahara Project. There are only two colours - the blue of the sky and the white-brown of the sand, until Mack places a pink translucent sheet in front of the camera. Finally he creates an artificial garden of metal-winged sculptures, the kind of thing you might see in J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971). 

You can watch a short video about the Sahara Project on the Guggenheim website. Mack conceived it in the early fifties when he and his wife drove their VW Beetle into the desert and first experienced its intense light. Curator Valerie Hillings says Mack told her a story about how he broke off the mirror in his hotel room and 'took it into the desert to see what happened.' Mack himself describes the attraction of a place with no distractions, the perfect setting for sculptures: a landscape unspoiled by the "fingerprints of civilisation." By 1959 he had worked out his thoughts on paper and exhibited them as a concept, years before the American land artists came up with similar ideas of using remote locations and mirrors. Although light and reflection were central to the work he was making in the sixties, it wasn't until the Tele-Mack filmmakers suggested going out to Tunisia that he got to take these sculptures and set them up in the desert. The key difference here between Mack and earth artists like Michael Heizer was that his work was temporary. He left no trace behind - Sahara Project was thus as ephemeral as a walk by Hamish Fulton (and can thus be viewed as relatively environmentally sensitive). It was also a one-off performance, only preserved on the medium of film. And what an excellent film Tele-Mack is -  I'm not at all surprised it got an honourable mention at the 1971 Venice Film festival.

Postscript 14/3/25

A week after writing this I have realised that Tate Etc. magazine carried an interview with Heinz Mack in which he discusses the film and Sahara Project. 

'The gravity of the desert, its absolute tranquillity, its endless dimensions – all this radiated mystery. In this landscape, infinitely vast and untouched, I now experimented with my comparatively small models and sculptures. This was inspired by the question of whether my art could stand up to this open landscape or would be lost in it. I discovered that, despite the contradictory proportions, something could be created there that had a poetic radiance.'