Title:
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Caspar David Friedrich and the Catachthonic Cultures of Romantic Science and Technology
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My thesis, `Caspar David Friedrich and the Catachthonic Cultures of Romantic
Science and Technology, ' investigates the work of the German Romantic painter
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in relation to subterranean worlds, the
vernacular of the mining profession, and certain text-based representations found
in scientific, technological, and popular culture publications concerned with
speleological explorations and the mining industry. The purpose of this thesis is
to re-describe key works within the oeuvre of Caspar David Friedrich as
belonging to the culture of Bergwesen, and in so doing, provide evidence to
support the claim that these works contribute to the symbolic, allegorical and
technological cultures of the subterranean world in Germany.
Arguing that before we know what something in a painting means, we first have
to know what it is, I recover the original identity of particular features within
individual paintings by Friedrich. I situate this work in a cultural context that has
yet to be explored in the scholarship. The images within the rarely studied
technological volumes which I examine were `practically embedded artworks'
that served as important role in the visual culture of the Romantic Age although
they might not have qualified as meaningful art in Hegelian terms. Further to
this, relevant artefacts to the enquiry may be found in an archaeology of human
intervention in the domain of the mountain -a location usually reserved in
scholarship for theoretical enquiries into notions of spectatorship, human and
nature interface, and interpretative subjectivities; not as a site for the excavation
of legible matter of a technological nature.
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