Total work of art
A total work of art is a work that combines various arts such as music , poetry , dance / pantomime , architecture and painting . The compilation is not arbitrary and illustrative: the components must complement each other. The total work of art has a “tendency to erase the boundary between aesthetic structure and reality” ( Odo Marquard ). It is not a reference to divine creation, as was customary in art between Gothic and Baroque , but rather claims to be valid.
history
The idea of the total work of art originated in the Romantic era . The philosopher Friedrich Schelling emphasized, for example, the "necessary becoming God of man" ( Bruno or on the divine and natural principle of things , 1802). This increased self-confidence made it possible to equate the artist's work with the work of nature. The expression itself was first used by the writer and philosopher Eusebius Trahndorff in his book Aesthetics or Doctrine of World View and Art (1827). In 1849 it reappeared in Richard Wagner's book The Art and the Revolution . Whether Wagner knew Trahndorff's work is an open question.
Wagner described the Attic tragedy as the “great total work of art”. In the work he wrote shortly afterwards, The Work of Art of the Future , Wagner expanded the meaning of the term. In his conception of an integral work of art encompassing various arts, which he described in detail in his extensive book Opera and Drama and which was only later referred to as musical drama by others , Wagner assigned the individual “sister arts ” to a common purpose, drama. In his view, the increasing division of labor (such as the separation of sections in the theater) and the selfish isolation in society should be abolished. As a role model and enemy at the same time, he had the French Grand Opéra in mind, in which all stage arts were already combined at their latest technical level. Wagner started from the conviction that opera would be on the wrong track if it posited music as absolute and subordinated all other elements, above all the drama itself, to it.
Wagner's siblings were still actors, singers and dancers at the same time, which was no longer possible after 1850 due to the specialization of the theater professions. This universality was to be regained in a different way: through equal work of those performing the work of art in the service of its author. Wagner spoke of a " cooperative of all artists". He proceeded from the aesthetic ideas of the German Romantics as well as from the political and aesthetic discourses that were virulent in Paris around 1840 in the wake of the various revolutions and hoped to realize a social utopia through the means of aesthetics:
“The great total work of art, which has to encompass all genres of art, in order to use up every single one of these genres as a means to a certain extent, to destroy in favor of the achievement of the general purpose of all, namely the unconditional, direct representation of perfect human nature - this great total work of art he does not recognize as the arbitrarily possible act of the individual, but as the necessarily conceivable common work of people of the future. "
The stage designer Adolphe Appia later criticized Wagner's implementation of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk as part of the Bayreuth Festival (from 1876) . He saw a contradiction between the linguistic and musical structure of Wagner's musical dramas and Wagner's realistic stage directions, which he regarded as conventional. Appia's designs for the equipment and staging style contributed significantly to the theater reform around 1900.
Edward Gordon Craig, on the other hand, made the success of the synthesis dependent on the director's genius. Wassily Kandinsky introduced space as an overarching principle in his 1923 manifesto On Abstract Stage Synthesis .
Current meanings
In the exhibition “Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk” by Harald Szeemann , which was shown in 1983 in the Kunsthaus Zurich , in the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna and at the beginning of 1984 in Berlin's Charlottenburg Palace , various total works of art were presented to the public, including the Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters , the Goetheanum in Dornach , the cathedrals (such as the Sagrada Família ) by Antonio Gaudi , the Monte Verità near Ascona , the Vittoriale degli italiani on Lake Garda . The exhibition brings together European utopias since 1800 that do not want to be limited to a purely aesthetic meaning, but rather aim to transform social reality into a renewed society.
Last but not least, the projects by Karl Ernst Osthaus described with Hagener Impuls , one of whose founding was the Folkwang Museum, which opened in Hagen, Westphalia, in 1902 , must be seen against this background. The Hohenhof, built by Henry van de Velde in 1906-08, is one of the few examples of a total work of art from the early 20th century that has survived and is publicly accessible today.
More recently, the term Gesamtkunstwerk has overlapped with that of (synthetic) intermediality . Whether works of art that address different senses at the same time , are free compositions in the sense of multimedia or mixed media , or whether they meet the requirements of a union to form a total work of art, is a matter of interpretation. Also Happening , Fluxus , Performance , Experimental Theater and other phenomena are interpreted as variations of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
literature
- Anke Finger: The total work of art of modernism. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006. ISBN 3-525-208421
- Udo Bermbach : The madness of the total work of art. Richard Wagner's political-aesthetic utopia. 2nd edition, Stuttgart: Metzler 2004. ISBN 3-476-01868-7
- Roger Fornoff: The longing for the total work of art. Studies on an aesthetic conception of modernity. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms 2004. ISBN 3-487-12767-9
- Till R. Kuhnle: "Comments on the term 'Gesamtkunstwerk' - the politicization of an aesthetic category?", In: Germanica X , Lille 1992, 35–50.
- Daniel Schneller: Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" and the renewal of the mystery drama in Bayreuth. The vision of the total work of art as a universal culture of the future , Bern: Lang 1997. ISBN 3-906757-26-9
- Harald Szeemann (Ed.): The tendency to the total work of art. European utopias since 1800 , exhibition catalog, Kunsthaus Zürich 1983
- Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff : Aesthetics or doctrine of worldview and art. Berlin: Mason 1827
- Peter Simhandl: Gesamtkunstwerk , in: Manfred Brauneck , Gérard Schneilin (Hrsg.): Theater Lexikon 1. Terms and epochs, stages and ensembles . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag Reinbek near Hamburg, 5th completely revised new edition August 2007, ISBN 978-3-499-55673-9
Web links
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard Wagner, The Work of Art of the Future , 1849, chap. 5
- ↑ see data from DNB on the exhibition booklet for Berlin