The “Gesamtkunstwerk”

About the evolution of interdisciplinary performance practices and the “total work of art”

envisioned by Richard Wagner.

•Richard Wagner and Modernism.

•The Gesamtkunstwerk.

•A short history of interdisciplinary performance practices.

•Synaesthesia.

•The brand as Gesamtkunstwerk.

•Creative Task.

• individual subjective experience

• the sublime

• the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art

• revolutionary or radical extensions of expression

• individual liberty

Modern Romanticism:

Modernism is a socially progressive trend of thought. It affirms the power of human beings to create, to improve, and to reshape their environment through practical experimentation and new technology.

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/K/koss_modernism.html

•Gesamt - entire, total, comprehensive, complete , whole

•Kunstwerk - artwork (usually used to describe a grand artwork)

The Gesamtkunstwerk is a concept, in which the individual arts are subordinated to a common purpose.

If we consider the relation of modern art—so far as it is truly Art—to public life, we shall recognize at once its complete inability to affect this public life in the sense of its own noblest endeavor. The reason hereof is, that our modern art is a mere product of Culture and has not sprung from Life itself; therefore, being nothing but a hot-house plant, it cannot strike root in the natural soil, or flourish in the natural climate of the present. Art has become the private property of an artist-caste; its taste it offers to those alone who understand it; and for its understanding it demands a special study, aloof from actual life, the study of art-learning. (Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future, 1949)

“Loosely associated with synesthesia, phantasmagoria, and psychedelia, the term Gesamtkunstwerk often stands for a an artistic environment or performance in which spectators are expertly maneuvered into dumfounded passivity by a sinister and powerful creative force. It is often mistaken for a hazy mixture of art forms that intoxicates those who gather in its presence, encouraging the kind of passive aesthetic response ascribed to the spectacle culture famously articulated by Guy Debord in 1968.” (Juliet Koss)

Source: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/zeitung/Sonderthemen%3Bart893,2613346 (Retrieved 01/03/2010)

“Scholars and critics of German history and culture tend to treat such a manipulation of passivity, implicitly or explicitly, as fascist, proto-fascist, or neo-fascist, depending on the historical moment in which it occurs. Where the modernist work is thought to aim for a bracing autonomy, forcing spectators to sit upright in their proverbial chairs to concentrate on the difficult activity of aesthetic reception, the Gesamtkunstwerk is believed to know no such vigilance. It is thought, instead, to let down the guardrails between the art forms, allowing them to intermingle in a kind of vague interdisciplinarity that is equated with a lack of discipline. Yet notions of artistic purity and autonomy were central to Wagner's initial formulation in 1849. In uniting the arts the Gesamtkunstwerk would allow each to achieve its full potential, growing stronger in the struggle to define itself against the others. ‘By working in common,’ he declared, the art forms each attain the capacity to be and do the very thing which, of their own and inmost essences, they long to do and be. Each where her own capacity ends can be absorbed into the other, proving her own purity, freedom, and independence as that which she is. The effort to unite the different art forms was thus predicated on their individual refinement and purification, with the purity of each dependent on the others' proximity; the Gesamtkunstwerk would simultaneously sustain and destroy the autonomy of the individual arts.”

"[...] the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties."

(Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future, 1849)

Immersive environments could give birth to a new form of participatory, interactive, electronic theatre.

“Twentieth century artists have continued the effort to heighten the viewer's experience of art by integrating traditionally separate disciplines into single works. Modern experience, many of these artists believed, could only be evoked through an art that contained within itself the complete range of perception. ‘Old-fashioned’ forms limited to words on a page, paint on canvas, or music from an instrument, were considered inadequate for capturing the speed, energy and contradictions of contemporary life.” (Randall Packer, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality)

A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (better known by the recursive acronym CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic where a philosopher contemplates perception, reality and illusion.Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment (Retrieved 02/03/2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKL0urEdtPU&feature=channel

Synesthesia [...] from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation"—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia (Retrieved 02/03/2010)

“The ‘(syn)aesthetic style’ is a contemporary performance practice and mode of appreciation which has emerged and developed in recent years. [...] (syn)aesthetics describe both a performance style (encompassing the artistic process), and the audience receptive experience.”

(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)

Synaesthetic performances fuse the aural, visual, olfactory, oral and tactile.

A leitmotif (from the German leitmotiv, lit. "leading motif", or perhaps more accurately "guiding motif") is a recurring musical theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif (Retrieved 02/03/2010)

“[Synaesthetic performances] procure an exciting, complete experience that affects a complete perception – cerebral, corporeal and emotional.”

(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)

This fusing of sense (semantic ‘meaning making’) with sense (sensation) establishes a double-edged rendering of making-sense/sense-making which is important to understanding the (syn)aesthetic strategies of performance and appreciation.

(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)

Transform an empty shopping space downtown into an all-encompassing, multi-disciplinary, multi-sensory, immersive, durational, total art-performance-event based on a chosen theme and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

• You have moderate budget for technical equipment, costumes, lights, props, furniture, decoration, music, promotion etc.

• You will devise and perform your Gesamtkunstwerk as a group.

• You can employ other artists and helpers on a voluntary basis.

• You have rental-free access to your shopping space for 2 months in order to devise, rehearse and perform your event.

• Your Gesamtkunstwerk should be open to the public for at least an entire week.

• You have permission to alter your space in a way that will reversible and acceptable for a new tenant.

1. Find a theme, the connecting thread and a title for your event.

2. Form groups to take over certain tasks and the responsibility for certain elements of the event.

3. Present and discuss your ideas.