by Jon Lackman | 24 January 2011 | Awards, Books, Modern
In an age of immersive video games, 3-D television, and “reality adventures,” a re-evaulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk seems apt. Nominated for The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, Modernism after Wagner by Juliet Koss is a “critical history of Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art,” from the mid-nineteenth-century to the 1930s. It “investigates particular moments in the history of the interrelation of the arts against the background of shifting models of modern spectatorship.” The book naturally ranges across all the arts, but lingers longest on the visual arts, particularly the history of theater architecture.
In her introduction, Koss professes a desire to rescue the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk from the ill repute it has acquired among art historians:
The term is used with regard to such disparate environments as the cinema palaces of Berlin in the 1920s and Andy Warhol’s Factory scene in New York in the 1960s, operating as shorthand to describe a seamless melding of a variety of art forms that overwhelms spectators’ emotions, impedes the possibility of critical thought, and molds a group of individuals into a powerless mass … [S]cholars regularly invoke the Gesamtkunstwerk as a countermodel for the “advanced art” of European modernism … [opposing it] to such basic modernist principles as artistic purity, autonomy, and medium specificity … “Gesamtkunstwerk” often stands for an artistic environment or performance in which spectators are expertly maneuvered into dumbfounded passivity by a sinister and powerful creative force [that is considered] implicitly or explicitly, as fascist, protofascist, or neo-fascist.
To demonstrate the unfairness of this characterization, Koss notes that “notions of artistic purity, autonomy and medium specificity were central to Wagner’s initial formulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in 1849. In uniting the arts, Wagner argued, the Gesamtkunstwerk would allow each to achieve its full potential, to grow stronger in the struggle to define itself against the others.”
I most enjoyed chapter 7, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” which includes a striking observation by Rilke about dolls and childhood:
At a time when everyone still tried hard to answer us quickly and soothingly, it, the dool, was the first to inflict on us that larger-than-life silence that later wafted over us again and again from space when somewhere we approached the frontiers of our existence. Across from it, while it stared at us, we first experienced (or am I mistaken?) that hollowness of feeling, that heart pause, in which one would perish if the whole of gently persistent nature did not lift one, like a lifeless thing, over abysses.
Koss paraphrases and extends Rilke’s observation:
Owing to its extraordinary capacity to absorb empathy … the doll is the first figure to impose on a child the experience of estrangement. Staring blankly, it offers a comforting presence while cruelly inflicting a silence both uncomprehending and incomprehensible. A pivotal figure in human development, the doll prefigures relationship with others, and subsequently and metaphorically, with the spaces of architecture and the world. Its Bauhaus incarnation were similarly passive but capable of provoking intense emotional responses.
This seems like a particularly fascinating and relevant topic today. Over the weekend, I happened to read Jeffrey R. Young’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Programmed for Love: In a skeptical turn, the MIT ethnographer Sherry Turkle warns of the dangers of social technology.” As Young writes, “She’s concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.” Who better than artists to help mediate our upcoming, sure-to-be-uncanny relationships with our new robot overlords?
