MERGING FICTION AND REALITY
THE
ROLE
OF
THE
CURATOR
IN
A
CONTEMPORARY
GESAMTKUNSTWERK
COCO ANDRÉ DE LA PORTE
RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN MA THESIS2
Merging Fiction and Reality
The Role of the Curator in a Contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk
Coco André de la Porte Student number: s2417669 Ma Thesis: final version
Lecturer: Ann-Sophie Lehmann Rijksuniversity Groningen
Ma: Art history Curatorial Master: Modern and Contemporary Art Datum: 21-6-2019
4
Index
1. Introduction ... 6
2. Critical description of current state of affairs with regard to the position of the curator ... 9
2.1. History of the field and historiography of curatorship ... 11
2.1.1. 1980s and 1990s ... 11
2.1.2. 2000s ... 14
2.1.3. 2010s ... 15
2.2. Curating now ... 19
3. Contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk/total artwork ... 22
3.1. The ‘classical’ Gesamtkunstwerk ... 22
3.2. Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk ... 25
3.2.1. The Avant-Garde Gesamtkunstwerk ... 25
3.2.2. Politics and the state as Gesamtkunstwerk ... 26
3.2.3. Post World War II Gesamtkunstwerk ... 28
3.3. Breaking down the term: Gesamtkunstwerk ... 29
3.4. Contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk ... 30
3.5. Role of the curator in a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk ... 32
4. Case studies ... 36
4.1. Case study 1: A blurring distinction between fiction and reality: The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. ... 37
4.1.1. The artwork: The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. ... 37
4.1.2. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. as total artwork ... 39
4.1.3. The role of the curator in The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. ... 42
4.2. Case study 2: Between Lies and the Truth: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Damien Hirst. ... 44
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4.2.2. Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. as a total artwork ... 46
4.2.3. The role of the curator in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. ... 55
5. Conclusion ... 58
6. Bibliography ... 62
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1. Introduction
In this thesis I will look at contemporary Gesamtkunstwerken, and the active role of the curator within this art form. The 1980s saw a shift in exhibition-making from a form of presentation to a more creative side of curating. The curator was becoming its own entity, with artistic and creative input. Over the past years it has become customary to name the curator alongside the artist in contemporary work, illustrating the growing importance of this profession. Now we can see the curator as exhibition-maker and the artists as the creator of art objects.1 But what happens when the entire exhibition is the artwork? Who then is the artist?
The exhibitions that I focus on are not displays of individual artworks installed in galleries accompanied by labels which instruct the viewer about what they see and how they should feel. I will focus on presentations that entwine objects, text, images, video, sound, or social engagement to create immersive environments. The art then emerges from a unique spatial and temporal involvement with the exhibition form in a way that implicates and apprehends the viewer. A term that can be applied here is Gesamtkunstwerk, deriving from Wagner in mid-nineteenth century Germany. It has no direct English translation but is often translated as
total artwork. It however also carries the meanings: unifying artwork, ideal work of art,
universal work of art, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, and all-embracing art form. This artwork unifies different art forms and consumes an entire space. If the entire exhibition is the artwork, a dilemma is presented. The curator becomes the exhibition maker, and the artists is the artwork maker, and the exhibition is in itself the artwork, the distinction between artist and curator becomes vague. This leads to my main thesis question: does the (new) highly involved role of the curator subtract artisticity from the artist or add artistic value to a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk?
The issue of authorship is recurring in contemporary exhibition and art making. We must consider that authorship of the curator differs within the field of exhibition making. One of the main differences a curator can encounter is working with a live or deceased artist. Naturally, with a live artist, there is the chance the artist will want to be involved in the exhibition making. The level of involvement will affect the authorship of the curator. Many exhibitions now pose a critical challenge to conventional forms of exhibiting art and ideas to the public. James Voorhies explains how exhibitions are no longer displays of individual artworks installed inside museums and galleries with texts that instruct viewers how to feel
7 and what they see. Rather, they are presentations that intertwine objects, texts, images, video, sound, and social engagement to create complex and immersive environments. This happens both inside and outside the art institutions and materially and virtually.2 In this thesis I focus
on exhibitions that are, in itself, the artwork. This occurs when the ‘idea’ becomes the artwork and art forms are combined and interwoven to create a total artwork. And when this artwork encompasses the exhibition as a whole and where the strong involvement of the curator in the artwork, and the involvement of the artist in the exhibition are not only inevitable but blend into one and other. The art world has even taken the issue a step further. In some exhibitions the artist him/herself has acted as curator. As Celina Jeffery has put it well, the issue is the authorial nature of curating and the professed autonomy of, and interrelationship between, artist and curator.3 It was in the 1960s that, for the first time, independent curators were taking
responsibility for the organization and making of exhibitions. These were often thematic in nature, creating a new perspective in which the curator took on the role of author, artist and cultural producer. The most significant instance of this is, Jeffery argues, Herald Szeemann who reconceived the exhibition as a performative ‘100 Day Event’ instead of a ‘100 Day Museum’, establishing the controversial reputation as a meta-artist.4 What happens to
authorship then? Can we go so far as to say the curator is a meta- or co-artist? Or is it a collaboration between two art-related professions, working in different fields? Such issues will be researched in this thesis combining the history and current state of affairs of curating with the definition of Gesamtkunstwerk.
This thesis is divided into five chapters to help answer the main question. The first chapter is this introduction. The second chapter gives a critical description of current state of affairs with regard to the position of the curator. I will give a historiography of the field of exhibition and curatorial studies and explain the history of curating, leading to the current role of the curator. The sub question asked in this chapter is: what is the curators role in regard to the artist? The third chapter goes into the Gesamtkunstwerk. In this chapter I will firstly give a history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, explaining what can be considered a classical Gesamtkunstwerk, and elaborating on different theories and philosophies written about this art form. Secondly, I will expand on the Gesamtkunstwerks evolution into modern day and explain what can be seen as contemporary Gesamtkunst. Finally I will research the role of the curator within contemporary
Gesamtkunstwerken.
2 Voorhies, 2017, p. 13 3 Jeffery, 2015, p. 7 4 Jeffery, 2015, p. 8
8 To answer the main thesis question and combine chapters two and three, two cases studies are presented in chapter four. In this chapter I will explain why these two works of art can be seen as contemporary Gesamtkunstwerken. The first case study is of The Boat is Leaking. The
Captain Lied. (2017), by artists Thomas Demand, Alexander Kluge, Anna Viebrock, curated
by Udo Kittelmann. The second case study is of Damien Hirst’s most recent work Treasures
from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. (2017), curated by Elena Geuna.5 In both cases, the role
of the curator is researched. Can the curator be seen as co-artist? What makes the first case interesting for this thesis is the close collaboration between four individuals, working in different artistic fields, one of which is the curator. The ‘idea’ was conceived by the group and executed by the four as well. The design of the work blurred the distinctions between individual works and a single massive installation piece. Raising questions such as: is curator Udo Kittelmann as much an artist as the other three? In the second case, the entire exhibition can also be seen as the artwork. The single pieces stand in duty of the whole, only bearing true importance and meaning when observed together. Contrary to case study 1, the ‘idea’ of case study 2 came solely from the artist Hirst. Elena Geuna takes on a much more background role than Kittelmann, yet her role must not be undervalued. This, in turn, raises other questions, such as: how does Hirst feel about an active role of the curator within his solo-exhibition? Does her self-effacing attitude mean she in fact can be seen this way? Leading to the eventual question can she be seen as co-artist in this exhibition-artwork.
5 Both exhibitions were shown during the 57th Venice Biennial in 2017. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.
was shown in the Fondazione Prada from May 13 until November 26 2017. Treasures from the Wreck of the
Unbelievable. was shown in two locations in Venice: the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogna, both owned by
9
2. Critical description of current state of affairs with regard to the
position of the Curator
“When you started out as a curator…” “Everything was different.”6 – Kittelmann
Since the second half of the twentieth century there has been a shift within the profession of curating. The groundwork for this shift was predominantly laid during the 1960s and 1970s. During these decades, in which conceptual art manifested itself, there was an intense interaction between artists and curators, an exchange that profoundly shaped both practices.7
Conceptual artists, such as Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Tony Smith, posed a threat to the paradigm of artistic autonomy upheld by art critic Clement Greenberg and later Michael Fried. For them, the bodily experience represented the contamination of the purity of modernist painting and sculpture, ultimately sacrificing artistic autonomy because it cannot be wholly present through visual immediacy at any given moment.8 Because of the lack of visual
immediacy, exhibitions had to evolve to support and abet this art. It was no longer enough to merely showcase the works. Consequently, the main change in curating was the shift from a curator being the caretaker of art and the collection of a museum to an involved role where the curator by creating exhibitions adds cognitive, and sometimes artistic, value to art. The curator controls our experience of art by selecting what is shown, contextualizing and framing artworks. In other words, they act as intermediaries between artists and our society. From the sixties, throughout the nineties, curators expanded the concept of curatorship, reacting to the artworld around them. Exhibitions as a critical form began to take shape in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, most notably by curator Herald Szeemann and his exhibition When Attitudes
Become Form (1969) and his controversial 100-day event which was Documenta 5 (1972).
Documenta takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany and is a major international contemporary art presentation. This specific Documenta of 1972, was a radically different pioneering presentation of happenings and performances, non-art, outsider art, and repeated Joseph Beuys lectures, among many other atypical art forms. It stepped outside the contemporary art sphere and into an expanded field of activity. Voorhies elaborates on Szeemann’s vision. The extraordinary diverse approaches he has to working with and alongside artists, his range of activity outside the museum, and the visionary belief in art and
6 Interview by Sergej Timofejev with Udo Kittelmann, 2014 (p. 5) 7 Smith, 2015, p. 14
10 the exhibition to connect differently with the public is seen in his Documenta 5 and When
Attitudes Becomes Form. These mark the beginning of Szeemann’s influence on the following
generations of curators, where both the curators presence and vision take on an enhanced presence.9 Following the trend, set by Szeemann, the exhibition as a critical form took even
more form in the 1990s by curators and artists operating within New Institutionalism.10 In
these years exhibitions were created with the common desire to engage the spectator. This engagement can occur through a broad range of activity and intensity. For instance it can encourage viewers to move around objects in a certain way, exit the museum and search for something outside the museum, or enter the artworks all together. These approaches utilize the exhibition as a productive way to explore and expand when, where, what, and how art reaches the public.11 As Terry Smith explains, especially in the 1980s and 1990s curators
were reacting to the artworlds obsession with money and the market, the recurring anachronistic mediums and conservative myths of the artist, the fear of far-reaching innovation, Old-Master “blockbuster” exhibitions, and the blindness to art being produced in parts of the world, other than the Western world.12 These trends drove curators towards new
tendencies within the field of curating. Curating has changed significantly over the past twenty-five years. German curator and director of the Nationalgalerie Berlin Udo Kittelmann illustrates in an interview in 2014, that the profession has notably changed since he started his career as a curator in the 1987, curating over 150 exhibitions since. In his interview with Sergej Timofejev in 2012 he explains that in late 1980s Germany, a term such as curator did not even exist:
In the 1980s you were a freelancer, you could not even imagine that you might make a living with this thing. […] Our goal was to make contemporary art as popular as possible and to introduce its ideas to as many people as possible.13
From the mid-2000s, books and articles about curating as a separate profession and a field begin to appear. In recent years, publications on exhibition practices, museum studies, and curatorial practices have evolved into an actual field with a great deal of publications devoted to the subject. Within the context of a continuous and acclaimed art history, the history of the exhibition remains a nascent but rapidly growing field.14 As Voorhies explains, many
9 Voorhies, 2017, p. 92 10 Voorhies, 2017, p. 10 11 Voorhies, 2017, p. 12 12 Smith, 2015, p. 15
13 Quote by Udo Kittelmann in an interview by Timofejev, 2014, (p. 5) 14 Filipovic, 2014
11 exhibitions now pose a critical challenge to conventional forms of exhibiting art and ideas to the public. Exhibitions are no longer simple displays of individual artists or artworks installed inside museums with labels that instruct the public what they should see. Rather, they are presentations that intertwine various art forms to create complex and immersive environments. Creating more than artworks in a space, creating an artwork as a whole.15 In
this chapter I will give a historiography of the field of exhibition and curatorial studies. The chapter is divided in to paragraphs based on the past three decades, ending with the current decade in the section titled Curating now. The following questions are asked: can the curator be seen as autonomous or is the curator inevitably linked to the artist? Can he/she, in some cases, be seen as a co-artist or co-author? Can the artists exist without the curator; and can an exhibition exist without the curator? The main question of the chapter is: what is the curators role in regard to the artist, illustrated by different views throughout recent history.
2.1 Historiography of Curatorship and exhibition making
2.1.1. 1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s, curating shifted even farther away from an administrative, mediating and caring activity to a more creative entity. It became more analogous to a form of artistic practice. This was first indicated by Johnathan Watkins in Art Monthly in 1987. In this polemic, Watkins uses Oscar Wildes’ idea that objects are transformed into art by the critic through writing. Hs provocative argument is that curating can be seen as a form of artistic practice, and that curated exhibitions are comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made artworks. Duchamp used existing objects as his medium, a curator uses existing artworks as medium. The display or exhibition is aided by the curator’s manipulation of the environment, the labels, the lighting, and the placement of the works of art.16 Since the late eighties, there
has been an ongoing tension within the critical debate regarding curatorial practice. From the late 1990s on, publications about exhibitions and curating started to appear more frequently. Evidently, as O’Neill writes, this is also the period that the idea of the curator as a type of meta-artist emerged.17 Hans Ulrich Obrist sees curator Herald Szeemann as a pioneer who, by
establishing structures of his own, initiated a practice which only in recent decades has come
15 Voorhies, 2017, p. 13
16 Johnathan Watkins, ‘The Cuartor as Artist’, Art Monthly, 111 (1987), p. 27 in O’Neill, 2007, p. 21 17 O’Neill, 2007, p. 22
12 to be called curator.18 In an interview between the two, Obrist states: “Given a century in
which the exhibition is more and more of a medium, more artists claim that the exhibition is the work and the work is the exhibition.”19 Not only were artistic practices being seen as a
medium, exhibitions were increasingly becoming the medium to transmit art and (artistic) ideas to the public. Paul O’Neill writes how the idea of the curator as some type of meta-artist became prominent in the 1990s. According to Sigrid Schade: “Curators [now] sell their curatorial concepts as the artistic product and sell themselves as the artists, so the curators ‘swallow up’ the works of the artists, as it were.”20 Throughout the nineties, issues such as
this one were prominently discussed. One of the first books to focus entirely on exhibition practices was published in 1996, titled Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by art historian Reesa Greenberg, curator Bruce W. Ferguson and art historian Sandy Naine. The book combines writings on exhibition practices and marks out the emergence of new discourses surrounding the exhibition. It illustrates debates centered on exhibitions in the nineties. The opening of the book states:
Exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known. Constantly reshaped by artists and curators, the exhibition has become a prominent and diverse part of contemporary culture.21
The book includes an article already written in 1975 ‘The Great Curatorial Dim-Out’, by Lawrence Alloway. Alloway expresses how the traditional definition and duties of the curator are based on the running of a permanent collection in a museum. The arranging of temporary exhibitions had already become one of the main occupations of curators of modern art in the late seventies.22 The reusing of this essay in the 1996 publication proves that this was again an
issue in the 1990s. Alloway gives an overview of the pressures with which a curator has to deal. One of these pressures is the desire to get along with artist(s).23 He sees this
subservience to artists as a weakness of the curators of his time, as he writes: “Because the artist made the work, he is not necessarily the sole judge of how it is best seen, or even of what it means.” 24 He sees production and consumption (interpretation) as two different acts.25
Therefore curators should be free to curate the artworks however they like. In 1992 John
18 Obrist and Szeemann, 1996, p. 99
19 Quote by Hans Ulrich Obrist (1995) in Obrist and Szeemann, 1996, p. 98 20 Quote by Sigrid Schade (1999) in O’Neill, 2007, p. 22
21 Greenberg et al., 1996, p. 2 22 Alloway, 1975, p. 221 – 222 23 Alloway, 1975, p. 224 24 Alloway, 1975, p. 225 25 Alloway, 1975, p. 225
13 Miller wrote an article for Texte zur Kunst, auf der Documenta 9. In this he highlights the ploy of portraying the curator as artist. He continues in this line explaining how the Documenta 9 – and many mega-exhibitions for that matter – presents itself as a kind of Wagnerian total work of art. In Millers eyes this represents a move to downgrade the artworks in the exhibition to the status of raw material. Meaning that the artworks themselves become the material of which the total artwork, here the exhibition, is made of. Miller finds that portraying the exhibition as an artwork itself is a blatant allusion to the discredited perceptions of inspiration and genius, which are qualities that curators have accumulated over time. It is a tactic of melding curator and artist.26 German art historian and museum director
Gerhard Storck states in the catalogue for the 1982 Documenta 7, that the show’s individual artworks maintained a kind of inherit value, justifying the enterprise of the mega-exhibition. He also suggests that artworks alone do not constitute an exhibition, and, controversially, an exhibition is not in itself a work of art.27 This reveals that the curator-as-artist has threatened
the undertaking for quite some time.28 In 1989 French art sociologist Nathalie Heinrich and
Austrian sociologist and historian Michael Pollak wrote an article on the curator as auteur. They write:
Specialized critics are increasingly attentive to the scenographic aspects; no longer content with discussing the exhibition’s subject, they tend to stress the exhibition as an object in and of itself, more frequently citing the ‘author’.29
In these decades, the press was starting to treat the exhibition as the work of an autonomous individual with a particular name, instead of a transparent medium produced by an impersonalized institution.30 At the end of the nineties Barry Bergdoll writes about
curatorship and authorship in an article ‘Curating History’ (1998). Bergdoll stresses the importance of addressing the negotiation between content and display. Curatorship is a different kind of authorship than that of the objects in the exhibition. Not only because insights and arguments are made with the displayed objects or artworks, but also because in the process from conception to installation, collaboration is an inherent aspect.31 This is an
important statement that Bergdoll makes. Collaboration will always per definition be a present aspect in the work of a curator, seeing as he/she uses the work of others as medium.
26 Miller, 1992, p. 272
27 Miller adds here that of course in extreme cases this could be the case. Miller, 1992, p. 272 28 Miller, 1992, p. 274
29 Heinrich and Pollak, 1989, p. 237 30 Heinrich and Pollak, 1989, p. 237 31 Bergdoll, 1998, p. 257
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2.1.2. 2000s
From the mid-2000s onwards the amount of publications on curating and exhibition practice started to grow exponentially. In 2007 the book Issues in Curating Contemporary Art
and Performance, written by Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, was published. The book
focuses on issues of curating as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture. It proposes that the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry. Also in 2007 curator, writer, and artist Paul O’Neill published Curating Subjects. This book consists of essays written by different curators, artists, researchers, and writers, all dealing with the development of contemporary curatorial discourses and exhibition history. In the introduction O’Neill explains to Annie Fletcher that many books on curatorial practices have appeared very recently.
The last twenty years have seen radical shifts in the perception of what the curator does, but curatorial criticism and the specific critical discourse surrounding curating has been slow to respond, inform or critique these modifications in a productive way. Curatorial histories are currently in the process of becoming part of this discourse and this is still at a very early stage in its development – there is a lot of catching up to do.32
Artist and writer Dave Beech writes that the possibility can be suggested of the curator becoming a co-producer with the artist, but this is dangerous territory.33 Okwui Enwezor, in
an interview with Paul O’Neill, points out an important difference between curating exhibitions in the eighties and in the 2000s. When he first started curating an exhibition meant simply organizing it. Later curators began to show interest in a wide variety of artistic approaches and Biennales began taking place.34 A biennial is a contemporary visual art
exhibition, so called because it is held in odd-numbered years. Artists and curators from all over the world are invited to show at these mega-exhibitions. The Venice Biennial was the first large scale biennial exhibition, founded in 1895 and has occurred fifty-seven times since. The origin of Venice was a unique cultural event. It was conceived on the model of a World-Fair with national pavilions, which promote the superiority of the nation-state with a strong political agenda presenting the cultural and economic wealth of participating countries.35 But
since the second half of the twentieth century hundreds of biennials are organized across the
32 Quote by Paul O’Neill in Fletcher, 2007, p. 12 33 Dave Beech in Beech and Hutchinson, 2007, p. 56 34 Okwui Enwezor in Enwezor and O’Neill, 2007, p. 112 35 Voorhies, 2017, p. 92
15 globe. The largest: Sao Paulo (1951), Sydney (1973), Istanbul (1987), Lyon (1984) and more recently founded biennials such as Shanghai (2000) and Singapore (2006). The biennial, became increasingly important during the 1990s and helped shift the focus of the contemporary art world from the major art centers to other locations and to focus on the economic and cultural prominence of the region. Venice however put nationhood on a competitive world stage, promoting nationalism.36 James Voorhies writes: “Biennials
intertwine and utilize both art and local conditions to generate cultural and economic capital, a practice Simon Sheikh regards as a case of the exhibition as commodity.”37 In this sense the
exhibition is the raw material the curator works with. The curator has a freedom to add or even create certain meanings to works by juxtaposing or connecting certain artworks and therefore adding another dimension to them. Hans Ulrich Obrist explains that J.G. Ballard once told him that curating is a form of junction making. A curator brings objects together, as the old traditional form of a curator as collection creator, but also as the newer form as exhibition maker. Not only objects, but quasi-objects – objects that gain meaning or significance when displayed or used in a certain way – non-objects, such as living art or human beings, and hyper-objects. Curating makes junctions between all these types of objects.38 For Obrist, curating is a medium in which he is immersed. He sees it as his task to
show this medium to the world, to exhibit it as a process, to show its forms, and its context. This is an important aspect we will later discuss when curating a Gesamtkunstwerk. In these types of works curators play a large role in concept and execution. Bringing together objects to create meaning adds cognitive value to the artwork. When objects become the medium of which the artwork is built, objects add artistic value.
2.1.3. 2010s
The debate on the boundary between curatorial practice and artistic production is one that curators have been engaging in among themselves. In 2010 artist and co-founder of the publishing platform e-flux, Anton Vidokle, wrote an article ‘Art Without Artists’, in which he tackles this subject. He mentions a conversation between curators Michelle White and Nato Thompson. White explains how she has found herself questioning the boundaries of her involvement in the aesthetic and conceptual production while working with living artists on site-specific projects or exhibitions, where collaboration is essential to produce meaning.39
36 Voorhies, 2017, p. 93 37 Voorhies, 2017, p. 98
38 Obrist, Hans Ulrich and Terry Smith, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist’, Talking Contemporary Curating, 2015, p. 129 39 White, Michelle. And Nato Thompson, ‘Curator as Producer’, Art Lies, 59 (2008) in Vidokle, 2010, p. 6
16 Vidokle points out that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled, and therefore less identifiable as art by the public when placed outside the exhibition space, exhibitions themselves become the only context through which art can be made visible as art.40 Meaning,
if ‘anything’ can be art, how do we identify something then as art? We need museological or exhibition contexts to help us realize something as art.
In 2014 Rossen Ventzislov wrote an article in which he proposes a way for philosophical aesthetics to make sense of a curators work, and specifically their claim to creating value. The statement he makes in this article is: selecting art should be thought of as a fine art, and therefore the curator as artist.41 He uses three main arguments in his article to explain and
substantiate his claim. The first argument is that the curator creates artistic value through the art of selection and through the introduction of new custodial narratives. The second is that over the past hundred years our understanding of what it means to be an artist has changed to include practices and approaches that are safely attributed to the contemporary curator. The third argument he uses is a critique towards the attitudes and normative assumptions that scholars, who oppose the curator’s claim to the creation of artistic value, typically use. Selecting artworks and incorporating them into narratives are activities that assume the presence of curatorial ideas. Ventzislov explains the term curatorial idea as: an exhibition theme, a single artwork placement, a mode of spectatorship, and so on. He sees these things as a genuine contribution to the life of the artwork, and when and where the artwork is presented has transformative effects on the artwork itself.42 Ventzislov sees the art of which the
exhibition exists as the curators ‘raw material’. The only difference, as he points out, is that the artists’ raw material are not always other artists’ work.43 He explains this notion using
Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades as the first to historically explore the overlap of artists and curators. He states:
If an artist can pick out any object and pronounce it an artwork, what she is doing, among many things, is adding value, through a certain mode of selection and a respective idea-driven narrative, to the object and the larger world. In this sense, the ‘artwork’ itself is not the object the artist picked out, but precisely the act of selection and the narrative which informs it.44
40 Vidokle, 2010, p. 8 41 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 83 42 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 83 43 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 84 44 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 84
17 In his paragraph Erasing the distance between curator and artist, Ventzislov brings up Duchamp and how in his mind, artistic selection goes well beyond the sanctification of commonplace objects. It extends to the choice and modification of display environments, the juxtaposition of different works, and even the tampering with artworks themselves. Opposingly, artist, curator, critic, and educator Robert Storr does not agree with Ventzislov’s claim that curators are artists. He traces this back to Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist (1891) and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Autor (1967). In Ventzislov’s view, Storr does give a positive proposal, although later it becomes apparent he does not agree with this notion. Storr wants us to consider the relation of curators to artists as comparable to that of editors to novelists.45 Ventzislov finds that in saying this the claim to curators creating value is rendered
null. He finds this troublesome because with the arrival of conceptual art the line between the creation of meaning and the creation of value has been erased.46Ivan Gaskell, also named by
Ventzislov, suggests that “meaning might be generated by the juxtaposition of works of art.”47
He finds that the ‘ideas’ – which are the carriers of meaning – that bring artworks to the same space should be looked upon as artworks – which are the carriers of value – themselves.48
Ventzislov agrees with Gaskell’s theory, as it supports his own. An important argument for Ventzislov is that artworks can be viewed as raw materials for curatorial creation just as, after Duchamp’s ready-mades, everyday objects became raw materials for artistic creation. Artists as well as curators here take on the role of, what Ventzislov calls, ‘generator-arbitrators’, meaning they create value through the powers of selection.49
In 2016 curator and scholar Sue Spaid revised Ventzislov’s thesis ‘Curating Should Be Understood as a Fine Art’. Her counter-claim is that, although she agrees with him that curatorial ideas offer a genuine contribution to the life of the artworks, curatorial ideas contribute cognitive value and not artistic value.50 She brings up four main arguments to
discard Ventzislov’s claim. Firstly, the production of artworks falls under fine arts; while the artistic directors’ presentations fall under design or management. Secondly, curators create cognitive value, not artistic value. Thirdly, Ventzislov associates a curator’s presentation mode with the ‘idea’-based nature of conceptual art. She argues that conceptual artworks endure even when lost, while temporary classification systems rarely survive. Fourthly, she
45 Storr, Robert. ‘The Exhibitionists’, Frieze, 94 (2005) in Ventzislov, 2014, p. 87 – 88 46 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 89
47 Gaskell, Ivan. Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums, London, 2000, p. 86
in Ventzislov, 2014, p. 89
48 Gaskell, 2000, p. 86 in Ventzislov, 2014, p. 89 49 Ventzislov, 2014, p. 89
18 argues: “An exhibition checklist requires some third party to stage it, but it does not require further interpretation the way artworks awaiting exhibition do.”51 Spaid is very convinced that
artworks do not change, meaning the curators transformative effects are minimal. Cognitive value is not an artworks main value but it is the main value of an exhibition, as Spaid sees it.52
Important to Spaid is the notion of beauty. She repeatedly claims that exhibitions do not have aesthetic content as exhibitions. Here, Ventzislov asks the question why then, is it possible for exhibitions to aid spectators into appreciating a piece of art?53 A personal experience I had
with curatorial work changing someone’s perception was at the Cy Twombly overview exhibition in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, spring 2017. I brought my aunt there, who appreciates many art styles and forms but knew nothing about this specific art or the artist. She heavily protested the art when she first saw it. Continuing through the exhibition, seeing the juxtapositioning of the works together with the total arrangement of the exhibition and the information provided, she came to appreciate the artist and his works more and more. Finally, arriving back at her apartment in Paris, I was happy to find that she so much enjoyed the art, especially the curatorial work of the exhibition, that she had bought the catalogue. I think this anecdote nicely illustrates Ventzislov’s argument. He suggests to Spaid that if the special and thematic positioning of the piece of art can help reveal an aesthetic aspect of the artwork that might otherwise be unavailable, is this not a case of added value?54
A very recent publication on exhibitions and curatorship is Beyond Objecthood: the
exhibition as a critical form since 1968 (2017), written by James Voorhies. The book gives an
analytical account of the exhibition as a critical form, and a history of exhibitions from 1968 to the present decade exploring how we arrived at this moment.55 Voorhies explains how the
art and exhibitions he examines in his book are united by a common desire to engage the spectator. This engagement can be as simple as encouraging viewers to move around the arranged objects.56 Voorhies does not focus on exhibitions that display individual artworks in
the classical sense, but concentrates on exhibitions that intertwine artworks, objects, images, text, sound and video, even social involvement, and create immersive environments. In his book Voorhies provides a historical basis and context for the emergence of the exhibition as a critical form, coinciding with the interest of the spectator within that work. He then builds on 51 Spaid, 2016, p. 87 52 Spaid, 2016, p. 89 – 90 53 Ventzislov, 2016, p. 92 54 Ventzislov, 2016, p. 92 55 Voorhies, 2017, p. 10 56 Voorhies, 2017, p. 12
19 this background and introduces curatorial strategies of Herald Szeemann, who borrowed conceptual foundations laid by artists such as Smithson and Asher to curate exhibitions that represented his own critical positions. Szeemann took strategies from Conceptual Art to subsequently inspire later generations of curators, artists and institutes to use the exhibition as a form in many different ways. Voorhies draws a corollary between artistic strategies and Szeemanns work to substantiate curating in contemporary times.57
2.2 Curating now
In his book Talking Contemporary Curating (2015) Terry Smith writes how the most significant development in the past decade in curatorial practice is that the field has become markedly more discursive in character and has become widely recognized as a significant profession. Smith proposes that the purpose of curating today might be said to be this:
To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) contemporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as these are manifest in art – present, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal.58
Smith emphasizes how contemporary curators, and others interested in the field, spend much time in discourse with one another. There is a growing number of journals and publications devoted to curating, illustrating the substantiating of the profession. Harald Szeemann gives an accurate description of his profession:
The Curator has to be flexible. Sometimes he is the servant, sometimes the assistant, sometimes he gives artists ideas of how to present their work; in group shows he’s the coordinator, in thematic shows, the inventor. But the most important thing about curating is to do it with enthusiasm and love – with a little obsessiveness.59
This quote illustrates the diverse and complex role of contemporary curators. One characteristic of contemporary curators is their cognitive and artistic role in an exhibition. Biennials, generally seen as the showcase of the newest current artistic practices, feature one curator who is given carte blanche for their show. In the national pavilions, the artist as well as the curator are named as authors of the pavilion. In many contemporary exhibitions the curator is named as equally important as the artist(s), if not more important. If the exhibition
57 Voorhies, 2017 58 Smith, 2015, p. 17
20 features live artists, there can be a question of collaboration, as is often in the national pavilions of the Venice Biennial. Along the line of Heinrich and Pollock and their paragraph ‘A Comparative Term: the Auteur in the Cinema’, I would like to propose the comparison of the role of the curator to the role of the director in film.60 Artists are the actors. Spectators
might be drawn to a film by well-known actors or the story of the film just as exhibition visitors might be drawn by a certain artist or subject. However, a respected director can be appreciated for his style and therefore draw people to his film. Without the actors, camerawork, cinematography, editing and so on, a film would not exist. Besides, the film can be appreciated for any of these elements. But in the end the director is the one to tie the whole together and ensure that the message is delivered to the viewer. The director sets the scene. The contemporary role of the curator is just that. If the artist is the actor, he/she is appreciated for his/her individual work and style. If the curator is the director, he/she is responsible for transmitting the overall message to the public and exposing the common thread of the artist’s works. Naturally the artworks must have their own power and meaning, but the curator is the one to ensure that this power and meaning is interpretable to the observers.
In the past decades, curating has changed from the traditional caretaker of art and collection to arranging exhibitions as main occupation. Curators articulate their thoughts and ideas, first and foremost, by staging an exhibition. In every exhibition, a conceptual framework is in operation.61 Opinions vary on whether the curator should be seen as meta- or
co-artist, using exhibition as his medium and therefore adding artistic value to art by the act of selecting. I think it is important to keep in mind the differences between art forms and how they should be curated in an exhibition. With a deceased artist, the curator will have much more freedom and room for personal input. With living artists, the curator might have obligations to confer with the artist. Another aspect is the subject of the exhibition or the type of exhibition. In a solo-exhibition, the artist might have more of an opinion than in a group exhibition. In a periodical- or genre-exhibition the curator will have more leeway. Then there is another paradigm, introduced by the practices of Hans Ulrich Obrist, in which curating becomes a medium in itself.62 Many of the curators Terry Smith interviewed for his book
Talking Contemporary Curating (2015) are established as independent curators and work
within alternative spaces. These curators have arrived during an age of contemporary art that, together with biennials and temporary exhibitions, initially was founded in such alternitive
60 Heinich and Pollack, 1989, p. 238 – 241 61 Smith, 2015, p. 18
21 spaces. This was before the growth of museums of contemporary art, and their dominance within auction houses and new private collection museums.63 These alternative spaces are
important for curating today and are essential for Gesamtkunst. In these alternative spaces that are created within a Gesamtkunstwerk curating has a whole new meaning. In an exhibition that is in itself the medium, or in other words the artwork, the curator will have a larger role. When the exhibition is the artwork we speak of a Gesamtkunstwerk, and in this case authorship between artist and curator becomes more vague. To go a step further, when there is multi-authorship between artist and curator, we could say curatorship is no longer bound to one person: there is a ‘collective work’. The artists must remain author though, otherwise there it has no right to exist. Roland Barthes, already in 1967, advocated in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’, that the author was no longer needed and can be left out completely.64
In his essay Barthes agues against the traditional literary criticism that incorporates the intentions and biographical context of an author in the interpretations of a text. He instead argues that creator and writing are unrelated:
The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human person”. Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s “person”.65
Capitalism makes this impossible to get rid of the author completely. Therefore we cannot get rid of the artist as author within a larger collective work. But we can consider a broader view to authorship when it comes to Gesamtkunst. Not the artist as author, not the curator as artist, but a meta-artist collective. To research the role of the curator in relation to the artist in an exhibition that is a complete space absorbing artwork, a Gesamtkunstwerk, I will first elaborate on the definition of the Gesamtkunstwerk and its place in art history in the following chapter.
63 Smith, 2015, p. 23 – 24
64 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, 1967 65 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, 1967, p. 2
22
3. Contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk/total artwork
To answer the main thesis question, a definition of the Gesamtkunstwerk must be established. Even though the term Gesamtkunstwerk has no exact translation to English and is often loosely translated as a total artwork – the term also carries such meanings as ideal work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, and all-embracing art form. The sub question researched in this chapter is: what is the role of the curator within a
Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork? To answer this I will firstly give a history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, explaining what it is, in the original and classical sense, and its evolution
within late modern history. Within this history many authors have philosophized, often in a very convoluted manner, about this art form. I will elaborate on different theories that I find applicable to my subject and my case studies. Although there are many other theories not mentioned in this thesis, I have tried to sum up the most important. Secondly, I will elaborate on the Gesamtkunstwerk’s evolution into the present day and by applying the theories of the classical Gesamtkunstwerk to modern day works I will explain what will be understood as contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk in this thesis. Lastly, I will research the role of the curator in contemporary Gesamtkunst by applying theories of curatorship and theories of Gesamtkunst to contemporary art.
3.1 The ‘classical’ Gesamtkunstwerk
What makes an artwork a total artwork is the first question that needs to be answered before anything else. The term Gesamtkunstwerk was first used by German philosopher and writer K.F.E. Trahndorff in 1827, but later became linked to Richard Wagner in 1849.66
Professor Nicholas Vazsonyi explains that certain terms have become associated with Wagner, either devised by or for him but now inevitably linked to him. Words such as: music drama, Leitmotiv, Festspiel, and Gesamtkunstwerk.67 Even though Gesamtkunstwerk did not
originally derive from him, Wagner adopted the term and made it his own. In terms of aesthetic and ideological motivations, the Gesamtkunstwerk as an idea predates Wagner by almost a century. Wagner used aspects from different sources ranging from fellow literary
66 Vazsonyi, 2016, p. 21
67 Music drama is an opera whose structure is governed by considerations of dramatic effectiveness, rather than
by the convention of having a series of formal arias.
Leitmotiv: is a term, borrowed from German, literally meaning “leading motif”. The term is used to indicate a
recurrent phrase or feature in a music piece, artwork or literature that tells you something important about it.
23 artist Friedrich Schiller to Romantic authors who had often expressed ideas about the union of the arts.68 The core of the Romantic ideologies derived from the urge to unite poetry, art and
music into one total artwork. The Romantics felt strong melancholy towards the lost unity of
things and wished to restore this.69
Before Wagner, no one had actually used the term. Wagner combined the ideas creating the word to describe the goal of his mature projects and the resulting works for the stage. Vazsonyi states that the term might have derived from Wagner, but that its afterlife has little to do with him anymore. The term has been applied to many different situations, it has evolved well beyond Wagner, almost completely taking on new forms.70 He was the first to
use the term and the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk can therefore be seen as the original
Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner used the term twice, in his 1849 essays ‘The Artwork of the
Future’ and ‘Art and Revolution’. In these essays he seeks the ideal of unifying all art forms through theater.71 Wagner finds that the Zersplitting der Künste – the split between the arts –
had already occurred in Greek tragedy, where music, word, and dance had existed in perfect harmony. With the fall of the Athenian Polis the arts started to diverge. Wagner felt that one should strive to once again create a perfect society in which perfect harmony of art forms could exist.72 As Roberts adds, Wagner saw the Athenian Polis as a work of art in itself that
founded the ultimate expression of its political-religious unity and identity in the ancient tragedy-dramas of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Wagner intended to recreate the union of art, religion, and politics in Athenian tragedy with the music drama.73 Philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche makes the distinction between spectator and participant. As spectator one perceives nature as the phenomenal world, as aesthetic phenomenon; as participant one becomes one with nature as noumenon, the abyssal ground of the world as Nietzsche calls it.74 Nietzsche
explains that in Greek tragedy and Wagner’s music dramas this duality of the world as noumenon and phenomenon is communicated to us, either as spectator or participant, through the interplay of Apollonian beauty and Dionysian sublime.75 Nietzsche opines that the
68 Vazsonyi, 2016, p. 21 69 Diedier, 2012, p. 6 70 Vazsonyi, 2016, p. 22 71 Rehn Wolfman, 2013 72 Rehn Wolfman, 2013 73 Roberts, 2011, p. 10
74 Noumenon is a term from Kantian philosophy: a thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich), as opposed to the
phenomena: the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. (see: Encyclopædia Britannica (eds.). ‘Noumenon’, Encyclopædia Britannica, May 16, 2013, source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/noumenon (accessed on December 15, 2017))
24 sublime lies neither in the subject nor the object but in the collective experience. This, as Roberts points out, leads us to the threshold of politics with its starting point: the French Revolution.76
The word Gesamtkunstwerk gradually became associated with aesthetic ideals, a branch of philosophy that examines the nature of beauty, taste, and art, and above all the appreciation of beauty. It is the study of subjective and sensory-emotional values called the judgement of sentiment and taste.77 Philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that aesthetic judgement needs to be
understood as an interplay between imagination and reason. The sense of beauty emanates from the harmony between imagination and the understanding, the sense of sublime arises from the disharmony between imagination and reason.78 Kant establishes here that the
aesthetic judgement lies in the subject, not the object. Even though the term Gesamtkunstwerk has no exact translation to English, it carries a variety of meanings. It is often loosely translated as a total artwork, but also carries such meanings as ideal work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, and all-embracing art form. This variety of translations gives us a general idea of the scope of interpretation that comes with this term. Wagner’s concept inspired many other later artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries throughout Europe and eventually America. Different art movements were concerned with the situation of the artist-craftsman in the newly and rapidly developing industrial world which threatened art and authenticity. Art movements such as The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland and England, with William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria, with Gustav Klimt and Adolf Loos; Walter Gropius’ Baushaus; The Succession in Dresden; and Die Brücke concerned themselves with these issues. All their endeavor was aimed towards recreating an artistic environment were all art forms could come together.79 In the years after the Fin-de-Siècle many artists from
different fields, including architects, musicians, writers, and painters inspired by Wagner, would follow his ideals and create objects of beauty that reach across different domains and achieve the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.80
76 Roberts, 2011, p. 202 77 Zangwil, 2014 78 Kant, 1992, pt. 2, secs. 6 – 8 79 Rehn Wolfman, 2013 80 Rehn Wolfman, 2013
25
3.2 Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk
3.2.1 The Avant-Garde Gesamtkunstwerk
After the first world war, regimes such as Russia, Germany, and Italy began to create totalitarian ideologies. The Avant-Garde formed the bridge between the nineteenth century idea of the total artwork and these postwar revolutionary regimes.81 The term Avant-Garde
derives from French and is used to indicate people who work in a radical, unorthodox, or experimental manner with respect to art, culture, and society. The Avant-Garde pushes the boundaries of the accepted norms and is considered the hallmark of modernism by many. Art movements that are considered Avant-Guard are Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Russian Futurism. Roberts explains that three main regimes adopted the totalitarian ideas of the
Gesamtkunstwerk. The Fascists used the disciplines of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche for the
aestheticization of politics. In Russia there was a tense relation between art and revolution, Avant-Garde and Vanguardism. The Stalinist state, which was built on the destruction of the artistic elite and the old Bolshevik, put an end to these movements. This was in relation to the Communist politicization of art.82 Robert states:
The Bolshevik revolution thus presents the limit case for the Saint-Simonian destination of the Avant-Garde. If in comparable fashion the Third Reich marked the terminus of the aestheticization of politics, the Fascist total work of art arrived at its totalitarian “realization” in a form that to my mind is only partially captured by [Walter] Benjamin’s concept of aestheticization.83
Even though Avant-Garde and Gesamtkunstwerk are often linked to one another they represent two very different senses of aesthetic modernism. The Avant-Garde contributes to the French-oriented history of modern art, where painting is the leading art form, while the
Gesamtkunstwerk contributes to the German-oriented history of modern art, with music-plays
being the leading art form. Roberts: “[…] the one the expression of Gallic dash and daring, the other the expression of Teutonic profundities.”84 There are however examples of affinity
between the Avant-Garde and the Gesamtkunstwerk. Roberts names three leading examples: the Ballets Russes, the Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus.85 Avant-Garde functioned as a bridge
between aesthetic experimentation and programs of spiritual regeneration and/or social 81 Roberts, 2011, p. 11 82 Roberts, 2011, p. 11 83 Roberts, 2011, p. 11 84 Roberts, 2011, p. 144 85 Roberts, 2011, p. 149 – 150
26 utopianism. Roberts points out that this is a enormously complex and varied field of national and international avant-gardism.86 In Russia the futurist opera Victory over the Sun was
produced in December 1913 in St. Petersburg as a total work of art. It was a collaboration between play writer Velimir Khlebnikov, poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, composer Mikhail Matyushin, and artist Kasimir Malevich. The artwork is known for its attempt to set up a new relationship between words, music, and staging. It is during this performance that Malevich claims he found his inspiration for his Black Square, and with this, this performance is indirectly the origin of Suprematism. Avant-Garde claims the powers of world construction, being Suprematism, and the formation of the New Man, being Futurism. “These claims,” as Roberts states, “expressed what we can call the utopian revolutionary credo of the Avant-Garde – the belief that artistic and political radicalism are natural allies”.87 In 1917, the
European Avant-Garde movement Dada was also laying groundwork for Gesamtkunst. Art and politics philosopher Henk Oosterling elaborates on how Dada did not only want to be an anti-art style, but also wanted to be a political and life ideology. In that sense Dadaism meets the criteria of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dada artist Kurt Schwitters for instance saw his collages as
Gesamtkunst, although Oosterling points out that he is the least explicit political Dadaist. His
collages are an interplay of commercial images, literary texts, and poetry. His poetry is concrete, material, and physical, focusing more on tone than form or content of words.88
3.2.2 Politics and The State as Gesamtkunstwerk
Wagner had laid the basis for the relation between art and politics, and we find this relation prominently returning in the twentieth century. In the 1930s we see, not only small scale artists such as Schwitters, working with totalitarian ideas, but also totalitarian ideas on a much larger scale: on a national-political level.89 In 1929 Stalin declared “the year of the great
break”, which would lead Russia into the future, destined to surpass and overtake the United States. Stalin’s total work of art, which was Russia, involved the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks and of the artistic Avant-Garde. But the liquidation of the Avant-Garde was at the same time its continuation, as out of its spirit socialist realism was born.90 Roberts concludes
his chapter on Stalinism with this: “the very project of the total work of art was always – from the French to the Russian Revolution – the work to come, its anticipations postscripts to a 86 Roberts, 2011, p. 149 87 Roberts, 2011, p. 219 88 Oosterling, 1996, p. 3 89 Oosterling, 1996, p. 4 90 Roberts, 2011, p. 225 – 226
27 future that never arrived.”91 The interbellum was a turbulent time in Europe, especially the
Weimar Republic of Germany, where any form of political coherence was lost. As Oosterling explains, in this nihilistic cultural climate, every political group wanted to gain power.92 Just
as in Italy and Russia, in post-WWI Germany the Workers separated from the bourgeois individual. Bourgeois society was the negation of the state as the highest means of power. With the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, all forms of communication and propaganda were used to create a Gesamtkunstwerk which would become the Third Reich. Just as Stalin did, Hitler began a manhunt for Avant-Garde artists. All art that was not in line with the myth of the Nation, Blood, and Soil was seen as entartete art, because it did not serve a political purpose.93 Anything that did not fit into the philosophy of Hitlers Gesamtkunstwerk was to be
destroyed and banned.94 Hans-Ulrich Thamer wrote, in context of the Nuremburg Party
rallies, that they were the most powerful examples of the political aesthetics of National Socialism, interestingly naming Adolf Hitler an artist-politician here.95 In short, Roberts
explains how de-individualization and the creation of the collective mass in post First World War Germany aided the creation of the nation as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Hitler’s main medium to distribute propaganda was film, proving to be very powerful and effective. For instance
Triumph of the Will‘s (1935) artistry was designed to sweep us into empathetic identification
with Hitler as a kind of human deity. Walter Benjamin was the one to identify the role of the upcoming medium film within the German national-socialism. Hitler created an image of Germany as a totalitarian state, with himself at the center. In other words the
Gesamtkunstwerk: the Thousand Year Reich. Every political decision was made to realize this Gesamtkunstwerk, of which everyone was a part. Politics was elevated to
all-encompassing-art, Oosterling states.96 As Roberts explains, both Wagner and Nietzsche dreamt of a total
work of art that would transcend the limits of theater to create a sublime union of art and life
91 Roberts, 2011, p. 231 92 Oosterling, 1996, p. 3
93 Entartete art (in english: degenerate art) was a term used in Nazi Germany. It was used to describe modern art,
art that was seen as un-German and therefore banned. Artists and those who identified with this entartete art were subjected to sanctions such as being forbidden to produce or sell their art or stripped from academic positions. (source: MoMA website, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3868)
94 Oosterling, 1996, p. 4
95 Quote by Hans Ulrich Thamer, ‘The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremburg Party Rallies
of the NSDAP’, Fascism and Theater: Comparitive Studies of Performance in Europe, 1925 – 1945, Oxford, 1996, p. 176 in Roberts, 2011, p. 249
28 through mobilization of the masses. Russia and Germany were on a path to create what Roberts calls the totalitarian total work of art.97
3.2.3 Post World War II Gesamtkunst
After the Second World War, art increasingly was becoming part of the cultural industry. Terms such as consumption of images became central. Abstract Expressionism is generally seen as the last Avant-Garde style. Jackson Pollock’s action-paintings were leaning more and more towards happenings, where the public’s presence played an important part. In
happenings and action-painting the production and reception of the work become part of the
artwork itself. Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk pops back up when dramatization and theatralization are increasingly applied. An example of Gesamtkunst from the mid-twentieth century are the environments created by musician John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham and painter Robert Rausschenberg. Similar to Dadaism, chance plays a large role in these environments. The 1960s Fluxus movement is also fully in line with Dadaist traditions and propagandized anti-art.98 Also, the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is researched in the sixties
with performance art. An example is the extremely violent and blasphemous work die Aktion made by the Wiener Aktionisten Schwartzkogler, Brus, Muehl, and Hermann Nitsch. Visual, acoustic, kinetic, and smell-impressions immerse the spectators in a total experience. Die
Aktion is a Gesamtkunstwerk that to this day is annually performed at Nitsch’s farm in
Austria.99 Joseph Beuys turned his life and art into Gesamtkunst. His life and his art
seamlessly intertwine with one and other, making it difficult to distinguish what is illusion and what is reality.100 This elimination of the boundary between reality and fiction is an
important aspect of Gesamtkunst. After Beuys, the impact of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk experienced a major fragmentation and transformation. New media have started to play a large role in the development of the Gesamtkunst. Mainly because they increase sensorial experience. In performances video is used to increase visual experience. The possibility of real-time strengthens the sense of the here-and-now aspect of said-performance. With the emergence of computer and Virtual Reality (VR), a whole new dimension has been added to installation and performance.101
97 Roberts, 2011, p. 12 98 Oosterling, 1996, p. 5 99 Oosterling, 1996, p. 6 100 Oosterling, 1996, p. 7 101 Oosterling, 1996, p. 8
29
3.3 Breaking down the term: Gesamtkunstwerk
The term Gesamtkunstwerk derives from Germany, but the concept, as David Roberts explains, refers to a reoccurring dream of European modernism, being aesthetic in nature but political in intent.102 Roberts explains the core elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk through,
what he finds, the most substantial theorization by German philosopher Odo Marquard.103
Marquard uses four main types in which the Gesamtkunstwerk seeks to cancel out the difference between (aesthetic) illusion and reality. The first two types are the most interesting for this thesis. They seek to realize art through the eliminating of the boundary that separates art and life. 104 The third and fourth types are less interesting for this thesis and will not be
elaborated on. The first type Marquard calls the direct positive total work of art, which uses, as Wagner exemplifies, the powers of art and religion to cancel out the boundaries of fiction and reality. The second he calls the direct negative total work of art, exemplified by the later Avant-Garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism and Italian Futurism. This eliminates the separation of art and life through the alliance of art and radical politics.105 Although
Marquand uses specific examples of Avant-Garde art and religion, these theories of the total work of art can be applied to our modern day Gesamtkunstwerk. Roger Fornoff defines the total work of art confining it to artworks, artistic projects and conceptions. He characterizes this by using four basic structural components. Firstly, there must be an inter- or multi-medial union of different arts sharing a comprehensive vision of the world. Secondly, there should be an either implicit or explicit theory of the ideal union of arts; thirdly, a closed worldview with a radical critique of existing society and culture should be implied; and finally, there should be a projection of an aesthetic-social or aesthetic-religious utopia, which looks to the power of art for its expression and to the aesthetic means for transformation of society.106 Oosterling
proclaims that art always acquires a political dimension in a Gesamtkunstwerk.107 As an
important sidenote Fornoff adds: “However important the political, social or religious elements, the Gesamtkunstwerk remains explicitly aesthetic.”108 Diedier states that in a total
artwork all art forms should be equally present and equally valued and the total should affect
102 Roberts, 2005, p. 104 103 Marquard, 1983, p. 40 – 49 104 Roberts, 2005, p. 105 105 Roberts. 2005, p. 105
106 Fornoff, Die Sehnucht nach dem Gesamtkunstwerk. Studien zu einer ästhetischen Konzeption der Morderne,
Hildesheim, 2004 in Roberts, 2005, pp. 108
107 Oosterling, 1996, p. 2 108 Fornoff, 2004, pp. 20 – 21
