The Total Work of Art

From Bayreuth to Cyberspace

Matthew Wilson Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135867317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The Total Work of Art provides a broad survey that incorporates many canonical artists into a single narrative. With particular attention to the influence of the Total Work of Art on modern theatre and performance, this brief introduction will also be of interest to students in such fields as film studies, music history, history of art, cultural studies, and modern European literatures.

Chapter 1
The total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction

Well, I may not have any money, but I do have a tremendous desire to practice a little artistic terrorism.

Wagner to Liszt, 5 June 1849 (Briefwechsel 17)

Defining the Gesamtkunstwerk

On one hand: the Gesamtkunstwerk is impossible. It is a lantern image, a ghost in glass. Utopia, thus nowhere.

On the other: the Gesamtkunstwerk is sensuous and concrete. It takes form in literature, in music, in opera, in painting, in dance, in theatre, in drama, in film, in politics. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Marinetti, Mann; Wagner, Strauss, Schönberg; Böcklin, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy; Diaghilev, Schlemmer, Duncan; Maeterlinck, Meyerhold, Appia, Craig; Gropius, Corbusier, van der Rohe; Eisenstein, Riefenstahl, Disney. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin.

On one hand: the Gesamtkunstwerk is modernity’s leviathan. Its worst moments are its moments of entry into the world. Its moments of fullest realization are also the moments of history’s greatest horror.

On the other: the Gesamtkunstwerk is modernity’s polestar. It is an uncompromising wish for a joyful community to be realized in this life, in this world. It is a longing for unity amidst fragmentation, for collectivity amidst alienation. It is inherently restless and potentially revolutionary, and while it is inescapably ideological its longings can never be entirely contained within the bounds of ideology. It is the shape of radical hope.

On one hand and on the other – can both hands be right?

To begin with, how shall we define this term?

The place to start, of course, is with Richard Wagner. Wagner coined and popularized the term in his Zurich writings of 1849–57, principally in his booklength essays The Artwork of the Future (1849) and Opera and Drama (1851), works written in the shadow of the Dresden uprising of 1849 and imbued with its revolutionary spirit. The most frequent translation of the word is “total work of art,” but even this is by no means straightforward: other possibilities include “communal work of art,” “collective work of art,” “combined work of art,” and “unified work of art.” Indeed, the concept includes all of these ideas, for it is an artform as much about collectivity as about unity, about community as about totality.

The aspect of the Gesamtkunstwerk most widely understood by scholars and general theatre-goers is the strictly formal. Patrice Pavis, for example, defines it as “a synthesis of music, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, stage design and other elements” (159). And there is much to be said for this approach, as there is undoubtedly a formally aesthetic aspect to Wagner’s discussion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In The Artwork of the Future, for instance, he argues that there are three fundamental arts: dance, tone, and poetry. These “are so wondrous closely interlaced with one another . . . that each of the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inbreathed and borrowed life” (1:95/3:67).¹ Having fallen away from their original dance, the “three primeval sisters” now answer to “despotic rules for mechanical movement” (1:95/3:67). Thus is the organic whole degraded into the artificially and mechanically fragmentary. The trouble is worsened by the fact that a cheapened pseudo-synthesis of the three primal arts exists in the form of opera, which, “as the seeming point of reunion of all the three related arts, has become the meeting-place of these sisters’ most self-seeking efforts” (1:152/3:120). Opposed to opera, writes Wagner, stands the total work of art, which shall reunite the three arts into their original sacred dance.

The trouble with a formalist approach, however, is that Wagner’s aesthetics are always inseparable from his larger political vision. As Wagner stresses throughout the Zurich writings, the Gesamtkunstwerk is a social and not simply an artistic dream, and the social dream is essentially a communitarian one. At the end of his discussion of the “three sisters” in Part II of The Artwork of the Future, for instance, Wagner emphasizes that the Gesamtkunstwerk “cannot arise alone, but only in the fullest harmony with the conditions of our whole life” (1:155/3:71). The Gesamtkunstwerk will be a collective, not an individual effort; it will be a “mutual art-work of the future” (1:77/3:50) in which “all will participate actively in genius, genius will be communal” (Sämtliche 12:264). In his Zurich writings Wagner insists that the Gesamtkunstwerk is an “associative work” that “is practically conceivable only in the fellowship of every artist” (1:196/3:162). “It is not the lonely spirit, striving by Art for redemption into Nature, that can frame the Art-work of the Future”; he writes, “only the spirit of fellowship, fulfilled by life, can bring this work to pass” (1:88/3:61).² When this work does come to pass, all social divisions will be transcended as surely as the divisions between the three arts are harmonized. “[T]he folk,” writes Wagner, “will no longer be a severed and peculiar class; for in this artwork we shall all be one, – heralds and supporters of necessity, knowers of the unconscious, willers of the unwilful, betokeners of nature, – blissful men” (1:77/3:50). At last the curse of modern culture will come to an end, and humans will return to harmonious, truly artistic relations with each other and with nature.

This brotherhood of artist-men will mould its works of art in unison with, in complement and rounding-off of mother nature; accenting every quality and individual trait evoked by special need, in answer to the special call of nature’s individual features, but marching forward from the base of this particularity toward a common pact with common nature – as toward the utmost fullness of man’s being.

(1:261–2/3:217)

Wagner’s theory of the total work of art is inseparable from this revolutionary vision of an age when commerce, industry, mass production, mechanics – the component parts of the “man-destroying march of culture” (1:55/3:31) – are at last incorporated, annihilated, and transcended in a great Erhebung of the human race.

A number of scholars have proven more sensitive to these social and political dimensions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Barry Millington’s entry for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, for instance, opens with a description of the formal artistic features of the Gesamtkunstwerk in a manner similar to Pavis’, but goes on to add that “the reuniting of the constituent parts in the Gesamtkunstwerk mirrored the socialist aim of restoring integrity to a fragmented, divided society.” By connecting the theory and practice of the total work of art with the nineteenth-century dream of an organically unified state, Millington (as well as Bermbach, Borchmeyer, and Fischer-Lichte, among others³) rightly sees the artistic aspirations of the Gesamtkunstwerk as inseparable from its political aspirations.

Indeed, the emergence of the modern dream of the organically unified “Aesthetic State” ought to be placed in the context of the dialectics of art and mass culture that emerge at the end of the eighteenth century and come to dominate public discourse by the middle of the nineteenth century. In this endeavor, Adorno’s reading of the Gesamtkunstwerk in In Search of Wagner (1939, pub. 1952) proves esential. Adorno argues that Wagner’s attacks on the marketplace conceal a deeper affinity between the attacker and his target. Never far from Wagner’s Wahnfried was the world of Second Empire kitsch, with its “fake Gothic castles” and “aggressive dream symbols of the Neo-Gothic boom, ranging from the Bavarian castles of Ludwig to the Berlin restaurant that called itself ‘Rheingold’” (123). Adorno’s point is not simply that Wagner could not escape the world of commodities and kitsch; his point is that Wagner’s theory and practice of the Gesamtkunstwerk were fundamentally linked to the culture industry. Through techniques such as the absorption of the spectator into the artwork (which turns the audience into a reified object of calculation), the use of the leitmotif (which leads the audience along through insistent repetition), and the systematic occultation of production (which reveals the traces of labor behind a façade of spontaneous origination), the Wagnerian music-drama echoes many of the strategies of industrial commerce that it attempts to combat. The inseparability of Wagner’s theory and practice from nineteenth-century mass culture is ultimately a subset of the larger inseparability, ab origine, of modernism from mass culture, a larger inseparability on which Adorno insisted throughout his career.⁴

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that television, which “aims at a synthesis of radio and film,” should be seen as “derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk” (124). Adorno and Horkheimer’s point is provocatively hyperbolic, but it expresses more than a kernel of truth. While their reduction of the multiplicity of mass-mediated cultures to a “total” aesthetic system overstates the case, the ongoing influence of the total work of art is far more central to contemporary mass culture than has generally been acknowledged. If Adorno’s central claim is so – if the emergence of the sovereign artist and the emergence of the culture industry are simultaneous occurrences, and merged in a single figure who becomes a fountainhead for both, and if the culture industry is somehow an extension of the Gesamtkunstwerk – then the Gesamtkunstwerk becomes crucially important for understanding the pas de deux of high art and mass culture in the twentieth century. The place to begin this investigation is at the root of this dialectic. Let us turn back, then, to the closing years of the eighteenth century.

The Romantic roots of the total work of art

One weakness of Adorno’s otherwise indispensable reading of Wagner is that it lacks an account of the Romantic precursors of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In In Search of Wagner, Adorno argues that “[t]he Gesamtkunstwerk is actually unrelated to the Romantic theories of fifty years earlier” (97), which explains the absence of such considerations from his study. Adorno is rightly at pains to emphasize the Gesamtkunstwerk’s ties to industrial capitalism, and yet he somewhat overstates the break with late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century cultural formations. However much bound up with late nineteenth-century commodity culture Wagner’s work may be, the origins of the theory of the total work of art do indeed lie with Romanticism, and more precisely with Romantic idealist aesthetics.

While Adorno overemphasizes the discontinuity of the tradition of the total work of art with earlier theories, others have overemphasized the continuity.⁵ To say that the theory of the total work of art has its roots in Romanticism is not to say that the theories and practices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music-drama are irrelevant to the history of total theatre. But Renaissance or Baroque theorists never advanced anything like a full-fledged theory of the total artwork; although festival productions such as the Viennese ludi cesarei or the Medici intermedi may have been lavish multimedia extravaganzas, they were not Gesamtkunstwerke. The total work of art is neither a court festival nor a celebration of a particular monarch or regime. As we shall see when we turn to Schiller, the total work of art implies not only an intermingling of art-forms but also an attempt to create an organic synthesis of arts that recovers supposedly original, lost, organic unities: unity of the individual subject, unity of the social body, unity of life and art. The Gesamtkunstwerk, as it first takes form in Wagner, is a theory and practice that reaches back to Romanticism in order to combat and appropriate the emergent pressures of mass culture.

If the precursors of the theory of the total work of art lie in German Romanticism, then no single source is so influential as Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education. The treatise has correctly been referred to as a “turning-point” in the history of aesthetics and of utopian thought, a transformation of the Kantian idea of taste into a radical imperative to live aesthetically.⁶ Though rarely considered in relation to the Gesamtkunstwerk, Schiller ought to be given his proper place as its theoretical progenitor. In many of Schiller’s aesthetic theories – particularly those of the Aesthetic Education – we see, in utero, Wagner’s theory of the total work of art, and its relationship to industrial production and commodity culture.

Schiller’s Aesthetic Education was composed, like Wagner’s Zurich writings a halfcentury later, in the wake of failed revolution. It was a failure that encouraged Schiller, like Wagner, to turn to aesthetics as both compensation for political loss (the souring of the French Revolution, in Schiller’s case; the defeat of the revolutions of 1848–89, in Wagner’s) and hope for future political transformation. Wagner, who read Schiller throughout his life, suggested that Schiller’s aesthetic theories, particularly the Aesthetic Education, be read as “prelude” to his own (6:116/10:121– 2). He praised Schiller in revealing terms: Schiller was the “first,” continued Wagner, “to have recognized and described our State-machinery as barbaric and utterly inimical to art” (6:116/10:121–2).

In the Sixth Letter of the Aesthetic Education, Schiller argues that organic Greek culture has given way to

an ingenious clock-work, in which, out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and Church, laws and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labor, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge.

(35)

Modernity (chiefly marked, in Schiller’s account, by the division of labor) has torn asunder the basic fabric of social life, until nothing remained but a “single little fragment of the Whole.” It thus stands in marked contrast with the “whole organism” of ancient Greek society (35), in which the poles of reason and feeling within each individual were harmonized, as were relations between one citizen and another. But commerce and industry, beginning with the division of labor but gaining steam with the advancement of capitalist production, had replaced unified, organic culture with a mechanized collective life, and the way back toward a lost totality lies through the gate of art.

Schiller’s distinction between the “whole organism” of ancient Greek collective life and the “mechanical” nature of modern life recalls not only Winckelmann’s grecophilia but also Kant’s distinction between mechanism and organism. One of the central innovations of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education is that it adapts Kant’s distinction between organic and mechanical form to a social and historical argument. The ideal state, like the Kantian work of art, is “organic,” and the modern condition is “mechanical.” Indeed, Schiller uses Kant’s own illustration of mechanical form – a watch – to make his point, comparing modernity to an “ingenious clock-work,” thus suggesting that the modern individual is living within the watch of Kant’s illustration. In one sense, Schiller’s argument was not original: the Deists had similarly compared the world to a clock. But Schiller’s innovation was to ascribe humanity’s mechanical condition to historical forces rather than universal laws, and to see in this mechanical condition something infernal. Schiller’s clock-work world is neither natural nor necessary nor desirable, but the fragmentation of the human and the antithesis of the beautiful. Schiller’s argument thus historicizes and politicizes Kant’s notion of mechanical form in Critique of Judgment, and places the mechanical allegory of Deism on its head.

While Schiller’s historical narrative of humanity’s fall from organism into mechanism would prove crucial to Wagner’s historical narrative of the total work of art, his idea of the reunion of the separate art-forms would influence Wagner’s theory of the “sister-arts.” In “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy” (1803), Schiller longs for the return of a dramatic form that is unified and idealized in all its parts. Since nature “never comes to sensory perception” but is available only as “an idea of the spirit,” it is left to art “to grasp this spirit of the All and bind it into bodily form” (“Über” 243–4). Art performs this function not by bringing nature to sensory perception, which is impossible, but rather by bringing nature “to the powers of the imagination,” powers which are “truer than any actuality and more real than any experience.” In order to remain uncorrupted by crude “actuality” or haphazard “experience,” art must strive toward total idealization. “It follows, then, that the artist cannot use a single element from actuality as he finds it, that his work must be ideal in all its parts if it is to have a total reality and correspond to nature” (244).

Schiller ends his Aesthetic Education with an evocation of this ideal condition. Turning, in his final Letter, to the millenarian language of the medieval mystic Joachim di Fiore, Schiller associates this state with the gl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction
• Chapter 2: Total stage: Wagner’s Festspielhaus
• Chapter 3: Total machine: The Bauhaus theatre
• Chapter 4: Total montage: Brecht’s reply to Wagner
• Chapter 5: Total state: Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
• Chapter 6: Total world: Disney’s theme parks
• Chapter 7: Total vacuum: Warhol’s performances
• Chapter 8: Total immersion: Cyberspace and the total work of art
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works cited