Serpentine. A Touch of Heaven (and Hell)
The publication documents a public art project in the tourist area of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, one of the most important and best-visited tourist attractions in Austria. It presents its planning and construction history in the 1920s and 30s, when the road was propagated as a heroic masterpiece of engineering and key building of the Austrian national consciousness of the young First Republic and the corporative state, as well as the changing role of fine art from its complicity with the tourist production of longing to a sometimes hyper-critical attitude, which was recently exacerbated by climate change, which is paradigmatically represented here in the melting of the glacier.
The project interpreted the motorised tourist experience along this road as a theatrical co-production of mobilised actors in a stage set consisting of landscape, road and vehicles of all kinds: a multi-part and far-reaching course of artworks of various genres was successively constructed in several stages during the three summer seasons from 2020 to 2022: Paintings, sculptures and a container cinema, which comment poetically and critically on the high alpine driving and nature experience along this High Alpine Road and the history (histories) inscribed in it. Parallel to this, the Museum of Modern Art in Carinthia functioned as a base station for art-historical contextualisation and a ‘safe space’ in which more delicate paintings, sculptures and installations were presented that would not have withstood the extreme weather conditions on the mountain – or that were only created in parallel to the work on the mountain by those in the museum.
The special format of this publication is inspired by one of the first folders published to advertising the road in 1933: the fold-out cover opens to reveal a wide road map showing a historical photo collage by Robert Haas, which visualises attractions on both sides of the mountain passage that are far apart from each other in just one image. This collage formed the centrepiece of the Austrian pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris.
See more images on the website of designer Theresa Hattinger, or flip through the book on Issuu.
2024, the catalogue has been awarded a prize in the category “Art Books” by the Hauptverband des österreichischen Buchhandels and the BmKOES in the competition for “Die schönsten Bücher Österreichs 2023”.
