Cabinet 27: Mountains

Looming large in both geological fact and sociocultural significance, mountains promise grandeur, picturesque natural beauty, good health and the chance to literally rise above the everyday--yet they also menace our imaginations with their harsh conditions, dangerous terrain and deep sense of isolation. These multivalent moods have proved an enticement to sportsmen, scientists, poets and philosophers. Indeed, our modern notion of the "sublime" was born in the Alps--where, as the English critic John Dennis wrote in 1693, nature was revealed as not solely a "delight that is consistent with reason," but also an experience "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." Cabinet 27 features Brian Dillon on the Cold War fact and Faustian fiction of Germany's Brocken; Allen S. Weiss on Petrarch and the winds of Mount Ventoux; and Jeffrey Kastner on the eighteenth-century Alpine panoramas of Hans Conrad Escher von der Linth. It also features Christopher Turner on the "lunar photographs" of James Nasmyth; Viktoria Tkaczyk on scientist Robert Hooke; biologist J.S.B. Haldane on being the right size; artist projects by Casey Logan and Walead Beshty; and Peter Lamborn Wilson's examination of the alchemical properties of building materials.