The Total Work of Art

The Total Work of Art
Author: David Imhoof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 178533185X

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture

The Gesamtkunstwerk in Design and Architecture
Author: Anders V. Munch
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 8772194650

The history of modern design and architecture has seen many attempts to embrace and merge different art forms, and to bring art into the framing of everyday life and the organisation of modern society, in a process understood as total design or total architecture. These attempts were historically based on the romanticist idea of merging all art forms into a uniting and transgressing work of art, mostly associated with – but certainly not limited to – Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and musical dramas. This utopian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art, was intended both to bring unity to the people and to bring art into the everyday life of their homes, as well as into factories, cities and even modern media. As a result, the experiments ranged from music, poetry and drama to architecture, design, visual communication and city-planning. These ideas of merging art forms into more immersive and transgressive installations or design interventions to change everyday life are widespread today, but their complex and often problematic roots are mostly ignored. Design and architecture have delivered some of the broadest and most influential experiments with the Gesamtkunstwerk, from garden cities for workers and corporate identity design to the German AEG corporation.

The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner

The Quest for the Gesamtkunstwerk and Richard Wagner
Author: Hilda Meldrum Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2016
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019932543X

The Gesamtkunstwerk ('total work of art'), once a key concept in Wagner studies, has become problematic. This book sheds light on this conundrum by first tracing the development of the concept in the 19th century through selected examples, some of which include combinations of different art forms. It then focuses on the culmination of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Wagner's theories and in the practice of his late music dramas, of which Der Ring des Nibelungen is the most complete representation. Finally, the book contrasts the view of the Ring as a fusion of dramatic text and music with the 20th century trend towards Deconstruction in Wagnerian productions and the importance of R gie. Against this trend a case is made here for a fresh critical approach and a reconsideration of the nature and basis for the fundamental unity which has hitherto been widely perceived in Wagner's Ring. Approaches through Leitmotiv alone are no longer acceptable. However, in conjunction with another principle, Moment, which Wagner insisted on combining with Motive, these can be ingeniously 'staged' and steered to dramatic ends by means of musical dynamics and expressive devices such as accumulation. Analysis of the two Erda scenes demonstrates how this complex combination of resources acts as a powerful means of fusion of the musical and dramatic elements in the Ring and confirms its status as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism

The Total Work of Art in European Modernism
Author: David Roberts
Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0801460972

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.

The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork

The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork
Author: Anke K. Finger
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780801895821

In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term “total artwork.” The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.

The Total Art of Stalinism

The Total Art of Stalinism
Author: Boris Groys
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1844678091

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Tristan's Shadow

Tristan's Shadow
Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2013-11-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022608227X

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk

Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk
Author: Harald Krejci
Publisher: Walther Konig Verlag
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783863351403

Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk attempts to analyse a phenomenon, which has been hotly debated for more than 100 years. Avant-garde art, in which the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total/universal art-form) came into bloom, has installed a first shift in meaning of the term as a unit of art and life.The desire to make society more worth living in and the question, which life concepts are still or again valid, always have been at the centre of attention of modernist artistic work. With all due scepticism, contemporary art as well as its theory have increasingly undertaken a re-reading of modernism, seizing the figure of thought of the Gesamtkunstwerk and redefining the project.Especially the younger generation of artists scrutinises its own artistic existence from an ethical viewpoint and discusses a new sense of responsibility in art. The question of the Gesamtkunstwerk, its new or re-interpretation, is both an art historical as well as a social concern, which can give new impetus.This publication on the exhibition Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk begins where Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk ended (Harald Szeemann's landmark show he curated in 1983), and based on more than 50 artists from the 1950s until today presents a new view on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk gained from contemporary positions was well as their formation over the last sixty years.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk at 21er Haus, Vienna, 20 January - 20 May 2012.

The Cambridge History of Modernism

The Cambridge History of Modernism
Author: Vincent Sherry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1579
Release: 2017-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316720535

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.

Modernism After Wagner

Modernism After Wagner
Author: Juliet Koss
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Arts, Modern
ISBN: 9780816651597

This is a critical history of Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its impact on European modernism. Koss explores the legacy of Wagner's concept, laying out its genealogy and the political, aesthetic, and cultural context from which it emerged.