Margherita Spiluttini – Photographic Traces
( Christiane Zintzen, translated by Steve Gander )
Camera Austria 103 – 104 | 2008
( → German version )
Augen, meine lieben Fensterlein,
Gebt mir schon so lange holden Schein,
Lasset freundlich Bild um Bild herein:
Einmal werdet ihr verdunkelt sein !
I.
“Lasset Bild um Bild herein” ( “Let in picture after picture” ): what – some may ask – is this quaint and naive verse with its limping prosody doing of all places in a text about Margherita Spiluttini, who is justifiably among the leading ( archtitectural ) photographers in Europe ? This quotation, which sets the artistic sense of vision in analogy to the photographic aperture, may principally signal that our associative, chronological path through Margherita Spiluttini’s oeuvre will be more similar to a cautiously friendly walk around an extensive field of proficiency than a toe-dance of superlatives. Problems and connections to photographic discourse and specific methods have been dealt with many times in other places.¹
“Lasset freundlich Bild um Bild herein” ( “Kindly let in picture after picture” ): the person as viewer. The artist as camera. Gottfried Keller wrote this verse of a ‘visual poetry’ avant la lettre. The same Gottfried Keller who with the novel “Der Grüne Heinrich” submitted eloquent proof for the crisis of realistic representation. This curiously modern and disorderly Bildungsroman is woven through and through with motifs of appearance: seeing as recognition, concentrated focussing as a gradual process of understanding and finally the transformation of impressions from many perspectives in the dark room of the mind’s eye ( “mind’s I” – Vladimir Nabokov ) into tangible aesthetic manifestation.
Ultimately: looking as happiness. Not ‘taking a look‘ but that ‘looking‘ which abandons itself to the object of observation which the ontological-existential art discourse of the 1950s ( escaped into the ahistorical after two world wars ) seized and ruined in such a way for decades.
Looking as happiness. This does not only apply to the confrontation with the ‘natural beauties‘ of idealism but also to the kairos of the encounter with an aesthetic artefact. Illumination and “choc” ( Walter Benjamin ), sudden recognition, sensuousness and certitude.
Photography is the classical metaphor for this kairos. Captured with the hand on the shutter release. Made still and transferred onto light-sensitive material. A materialisation which for its part immediately becomes an object and thereby history. As the maximum selective impression of a scene and as a still snatched from the unrelenting continuum of time, photography leaves what it captures on picture in the second of its creation. Now the instant of what is impressed ( empreinte ) on the matrix of the film draws its own track ( trace ).
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II.
Since the early 1980s Margherita Spiluttini has been laying such photographic tracks: urban situations, architectural characters, the composition and configuration of landscape. Implicitly visual as well as decidedly pronounced, the indication always remains of her own sense of her view of things, the productive potential of subjectivity. And this – nota bene – in manoeuvring with a medium which still is perceived as evidence, icon and fetish of the ‘objective‘. Between the reality of architectural artefacts and the photographic “reality-effect” ( Roland Barthes ), “the woman with the camera ” ( freely adapted from Dziga Vertov ) eminently expands the scope of architectural photography beyond the borders of the genre.
Margherita Spiluttini’s work makes an illuminating vision possible for us as viewers. In it we find our apparently so self-evident reality in versions and formulations that we never knew how to look for. Images iluminés, whose decisiveness instantaneously makes sense and illuminates us enduringly: we cannot return behind the second of her having seen. Spiluttini’s images have opened our eyes. Just as the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach opened our ears. Or Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew “.
Three work groups may bring to mind that and how Margherita Spiluttini’s photographic work has taught us to see. There would be 1.) the photographic survey for and with Dietmar Steiner’s guide “Architektur in Wien” ( 1984 ). There are 2.) the landscape photographs brought together in the exhibition “Nach der Natur” 2002 at the Technical Museum Vienna. There is 3. ) the catalogue-artwork “räumlich | spacious” composed by Margherita Spiluttini according to multiple criteria.² The Book appeared accompanying the exhibition “Atlas Austria“, which for its part assembled an extensive, sensuous aggregate as a temporary installation of photography at Architekturzentrum Wien:³ the view-points for various work groups – in an inventive and intricate arrangement by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch – shown exclusively as slide projections – made a relaxed situation possible, a mise en abyme. The medium of photography usually experienced as a paper print was taken back to its essence as a picture made up of immaterial light (“Licht- Bild“) and the museum space transformed into a dark-room . We can thank this temporary installation ( set up in dialogue with the artist ) for substantial insights into the space-time vector of Margherita Spiluttini’s photographic disposition.
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III.
“300 sehenswerte Bauten” ( “300 Buildings Worth Seeing” ): the subtitle of the guide “Architektur in Wien“, published by the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur ( Austrian Architectural Society ), plays cunningly with the conservative-affirmative idea of the remarkable sight.⁴ Pursed into 14 topographical nodes and each in chronological order Vienna’s buildings appear on the plan in text and image. With their strictly serial arrangement the en face portraits of buildings create a typology of proportions, idioms and forms.
From Dietmar Steiner: a short paragraph on each building. Text, information, commentary. From Margherita Spiluttini: one picture of each. Correctly stated: a selection of 300 from a total of 2,500 photographs of 500 buildings, all taken in the years 1982 to 1984. However, this impressive quantitative aspect should not here conceal the qualitative undertaking of a systematic survey of an architectonic city-body. Per page: five buildings, five captions, five prints. Kept in black and white, paratactically arranged in the same size, such an arrangement may bring to mind the physiognomy of the late 19th century. As if it was a question of documenting a kind of ‘architectonic mimic‘ of Vienna – similarly to Galton’s “average images “.⁵
Familiar with Vienna’s real and symbolic dimensions, traditional perception gives way to irritation: not a jot more space is devoted to the outstretching and respect-craving cubature of power than to the supposedly modest functional building and its functional forms. In such a way Architektur in Wien makes the democratic – if not even anti-authoritarian – spirit of the 60s and 70s fruitful for a catalogue of what is at hand. At the same time this guide lays out an inventory for the emerging postmodernism: a catalogue of existing forms, figures and fantasies as a basis for forward-looking building in the context of an historically over-determined urban space.
Like Bodo Hell’s “Stadtschrift “⁶, which appeared in 1983, some want to see the book Architektur in Wien as a hallmark of a new awareness of urbanity: an urbanity which in the early 1980s could be excitingly raw and crude. An urbanity which saw the cityscape as a space for excursions into the not yet completely formed macro and micro structure. The smoothing and colouring of surfaces – they were to take place later. Just like the new narcissism, city-competition and the architecture of the spectacle.
With unrelenting curiosity Margherita Spiluttini’s camera subsequently also accompanied the newer forms of building and the latest interior designs: no famous Austrian – if not even European – architect whose work she did not render. Spiluttini’s decidedly active and often subjectively articulated examination of form, forming and formulation of space via architecture is not solely to be valued in the sense of a visual note or a downright documentary but as part of a process upon which she exerted considerable influence: namely that of building bridges over the trenches between applied ( “commissioned” ) and artistic ( “free” ) photography.
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IV.
Change of scene: exhibition and complex of work “Nach der Natur” ( “Beyond Nature” ): To be seen in 2002 at the Technical Museum Vienna. Plus catalogue. Subtitle: “Konstruktionen der Landschaft” ( Constructions of Landscape ).⁷
In contrast to “Architektur in Wien“, in which the city building portraits focus their objects in strict central perspective, we now find ourselves in the vastness of an archaic, pre- and inhuman mountain landscape. Dwelling, functional and representational architecture oriented towards human scale and its conveniences yields to a ‘wild’ sequence of unaquiescing forms, at best tamed through basal interventions for the transport-technical conquest of the remains of nature that cannot be cleared out of the way as well as their pre-emptive taming.
At times of revolutionary Romanticism, fatigue of civilisation and rising nationalism glorified as a natural form of the ‘sublime ‘, in the case of natural disasters abominated as disobedient and undomesticated, it is not least the tourism industry that has installed alpine abstractions in the cadre of clichés.
On the other hand an alpine cultural landscape, which crudely put, “simply lies around” – all around – presents itself to the eye unprejudiced by the ideology of ‘nature‘. Nevertheless, made accessible through and through. This world made up of stone and time with its geological rubble, its one-another of folds and piles, truncations and superstructures must firstly appear chaotic. If photography wants to go further than defined by the picturesque perspectives of so-called scenic routes or view points, it must take on the role of participative observation .
In patient examination of the idioms of pathos | idyll, decor | authenticity presenting themselves ( which takes place anew each time in situ ), the complex of work “Nach der Natur” becomes a sceptical replica on reproduction realism which photography understands as a merely mechanically reproduced analogy to ‘reality‘. It is no coincidence that the photographer – highly talented in language and adhering to the literal – subsumes the polymorphous bundle of pertinent reflections in an ambiguous term. On the one hand the technical term for the old teaching discipline of drawing after nature is evoked. On the other hand “after nature” is to be understood as a post naturam . Nature is – since that is what it has been called – not to be had without thorough cultural shaping.
In the knowledge of the aporia of any approach to ‘nature‘ Margherita Spiluttini’s framing view captures scenes and situations according to the classical rules of composition. Dramatic diagonals. Suggestive symmetry. Warmth of surface-mighty concrete walls and mellow meadows. In contrast to the cold folds, edges and ridges of rockwork and quarry.
Alpine construction : railway lines, terraces, tunnels, pipes, canals. Here is the workshop of the often anonymous engineer and builder. Hardly ever does the “author-architect” enter the terrain. At this easily visible point we touch the leitmotif of constructive genius in contrast to the expressive artistic. An eminent theme when speaking of Margherita Spiluttini, the daughter of a montane construction engineer, and herself, trained in medical imaging techniques.
Some impression of these highly physical landscapes involuntarily catapults us into associative proximity to pathology. The mountains as intensive care unit. Tunnel pipes, drainage systems like catheters. Gaping quarries. Cables, courses and tubes like veins. Hairpin bends, avalanche control structures like bandages. Bridges as crutches and supports.
However, this paradigm does not necessarily impose itself. Whoever sees it does not do so on account of a demonstrative agenda. Rather in a discreet setting and quiet play of lines and forms, structures and textures.
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V.
Again we come across the word and value of ‘play‘ and ‘room for play‘. Room for play between the artistic resources of rationality and intuition. Room for play between the subject behind the camera and the object in front. The artist remains concealed under the black cloth covering the view-finder during her visual dialogue with the ojbect on the focussing screen of the large-format Linhof . – Black box ? Confessional ? Interpretation of dreams ? – However the hidden scope for play may be constituted: here in any case the image inflects into an emblematical icon.
Something infantile is suited to the ideas of ‘play’ and ‘room for play’ in the culture of Modernism: suspicion of disorder, disrespect, disgrace. Scandal of economic abundance. In the process it is mostly misunderstood that each game implies a highly complex sequence of individual decisions. In this regard Margherita Spiluttini is an avowed agent of the language game concept of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose house she has photographed in detail. The work catalogue edited by Dietmar Steiner and Architekturzentrum Wien, “räumlich | spacious“, devotes a separate chapter to “Palais Stonborough” ( aka “Haus Wittgenstein “⁸ ).
In this book-artwork through-composed by the author | photographer from text and picture is manifested the delight in playful combination, surrender to the enticements of the visual and perhaps even also one or other subliminal parody of the established genre of coffee-table book aesthetics. Lines and surfaces. Structures, figures and patterns. Correspondence, dissonance. The serial. The singular. The make of a colour. The find of a form. Mirrorings, transparencies.
“räumlich | spacious” restructures the palimpsest of a quarter of a century of photographic notes with just as much relish as unconventionality. In what this catalogue shows but also in how it shows it, this book-artwork is simultaneously a discours de la methode. Headed with structural, motif-like and at the same time rhetorically exciting over-determined titles ( “Form der Zeit” | “Shape of Time“, “Infiltration Reflexion” | “Infiltration | Reflection“, “Bau Körper” | “Building Body“, “Innensicht Einsicht” | “Inside Insight“, “Anspielung Täuschung” | “Alluding Deluding “) the chapters of this catalogue demonstrate various processes of how individual compositions are to be realised from the infinite number of possible images. To take a picture. To select. To glean.
Incidentally, the latter applies literally to the book edition: Margherita Spiluttini also added a selection of essayistic and literary texts to the selection of pictures: as a complement and supplement to older and current writings on Spiluttini’s genuine work ( e.g. by Friedrich Achleitner, Monika Faber, Otto Kapfinger and Dietmar Steiner ) there are international reference texts which kaleidoscopically unfold certain views of the photographer ( John Berger, Thomas Bernhard, Rainer Fuchs, Rudolf von Laban, Cathrin Pichler, Julian Schutting, Allison und Peter Smithson, etc. ).
And look here: in picture, in word, in the selection and composition of both components Margherita Spiluttini sufficiently enables our eyes, our brain and our imagination to decipher the coded language of these images and their mutual relationships. She does this – her artistic, personal, cultural – form(ative) work in her specific way: undogmatic and very discreet. Dignity of discipline, precision of thought, technical transparency – and this always in the plumage of irony.
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VI.
Margherita Spiluttini has worked in and with the edificial material of Vienna, she has participated in making the history of views of and insights into European architecture. If one were to be dramatic, one would say: with her persistent and precise work the photographer has considerably influenced our intellectual, visual and form-sensitive culture of knowledge, thought and discourse for more than thirty years.
But we are not dramatic and therefore we do not say it. Margherita would in fact not approve. Therefore, the concluding words are once again delegated to Gottfried Keller and the last verse of his “Evening Song “.
Doch noch wandl’ ich auf dem Abendfeld,
Nur dem sinkenden Gestirn gesellt;
Trinkt, O Augen, was die Wimper hält,
Von dem goldnen Überfluss der Welt !But I am still walking in the fields at evening,
With only the setting sun for company;
Drink, O eyes, as much as your lashes hold,
Of the golden abundance of the world !
( Translated by Stanley Appelbaum )
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End notes:
¹ – Christiane Zintzen: Werkstatt. Nach der Natur. Die österreichische Architekturfotografin Margherita Spiluttini – In: NZZ, 15. 5. 2002; Dies.: Margherita Spiluttini. Beyond Nature, translated by Steve Gander – In: METAMORPH. Catalogue 9th International Exhibition of Architecture | Biennale di Venezia, September – November 2004. Venezia: Marsilio Editore 2004, S. 215; Dies.: In der Falle: Leib und Bau | The Trap: Body and Building, translated by Steve Gander – In: Margherita Spiluttini. räumlich | spacious – Salzburg: Fotohof edition Band 85, 2007
² – Margherita Spiluttini: räumlich | spacious , ed. Architekturzentrum Wien, Dietmar Steiner – Salzburg: Fotohof edition 2007
³ – Margherita Spiluttini: Atlas Austria , Exhibition Architekturzentrum Wien, Alte Halle, 21. 6. to 24. 9. 2007 – Design: Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch
⁴ – Dietmar Steiner ( Texte und Daten ), Margherita Spiluttini ( Fotografie ): Architektur in Wien, 300 sehenswerte Bauten – Wien: Magistrat 1984
⁵ – For the Exhibition “Facies ” ( Österreichisches Fotoarchiv im Museum moderner Kunst, 1985 ) a selection of these photographs was assembled into a series of panels, each of eight photographs.
⁶ – Bodo Hell ( Text und Fotografie ): Stadtschrift – Linz: Edition Neue Texte 1983
⁷ – Margherita Spiluttini: Nach der Natur. Konstruktionen der Landschaft . Exhibition, Technisches Museum Wien, 22.3. to 22. 9. 2002; catalogue ed. Technisches Museum Wien, Elisabeth Limbeck-Lilienau – Salzburg: Fotohof edition 2002
⁸ – See Note 2
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