Author: David Imhoof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
The Total Work of Art
Author: David Imhoof
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.
The Total Work of Art in European Modernism
Author: David Roberts
Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
ISBN: 0801460972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
ISBN: 0801460972
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Book Description
In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution. The total work of art is usually understood as the intention to reunite the arts into the one integrated whole, but it is also tied from the beginning to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. The synthesis of the arts in the service of social and cultural regeneration was a particularly German dream, which made Wagner and Nietzsche the other center of aesthetic modernism alongside Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The history and theory of the total work of art pose a whole series of questions not only to aesthetic modernism and its utopias but also to the whole epoch from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The total work of art indicates the need to revisit key assumptions of modernism, such as the foregrounding of the autonomy and separation of the arts at the expense of the countertendencies to the reunion of the arts, and cuts across the neat equation of avant-gardism with progress and deconstructs the familiar left-right divide between revolution and reaction, the modern and the antimodern. Situated at the interface between art, religion, and politics, the total work of art invites us to rethink the relationship between art and religion and art and politics in European modernism. In a major departure from the existing literature David Roberts argues for twin lineages of the total work, a French revolutionary and a German aesthetic, which interrelate across the whole epoch of European modernism, culminating in the aesthetic and political radicalism of the avant-garde movements in response to the crisis of autonomous art and the accelerating political crisis of European societies from the 1890s forward.
The Total Work of Art
Author: Matthew Wilson Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867313
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867313
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482
Book Description
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.
Tristan's Shadow
Author: Adrian Daub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608227X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022608227X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.
The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork
Author: Anke K. Finger
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801895821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term “total artwork.” The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801895821
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" was introduced in the romantic period. It describes the desire for and practice of combining various art forms into a whole, such as performances that combine text, visual arts, music, dance, and architecture. Richard Wagner was one of the early theorists of the concept, inspiring many modernist artists; yet, due to his ideological significance for the Third Reich, the concept has frequently been associated with totalitarianism since the Second World War. Nonetheless, artistic practice has continued to incorporate all-inclusive tendencies, even while avoiding the term “total artwork.” The contributors to this volume challenge us to think again about the total artwork, daring to suggest that it is alive and well, that it informs current art in ways that are deep, meaningful, contentious, and provocative. The essays come from authors steeped in literary culture, the world of art, philosophy, and music theory. Such diverse perspectives can only stimulate debate in the academy and beyond about the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk and open up paths that may be followed in its future.
Saarinen House and Garden
Author: Gregory Wittkopp
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
Saarinen House, the home of Finnish-American architect and designer Eliel Saarinen and textile designer Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the graduate school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is an important 1920s American house and the site of a dramatic garden. This book documents the history and diverse design elements of the house and garden, which have been recently restored.
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
Saarinen House, the home of Finnish-American architect and designer Eliel Saarinen and textile designer Loja Saarinen at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the graduate school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is an important 1920s American house and the site of a dramatic garden. This book documents the history and diverse design elements of the house and garden, which have been recently restored.
How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness
Author: Darby English
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262514931
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role. Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness—his metaphorical "total darkness"—primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists—Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture. The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able—and black artists less willing—to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262514931
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 387
Book Description
Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role. Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness—his metaphorical "total darkness"—primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists—Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture. The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able—and black artists less willing—to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.
The Total Art of Stalinism
Author: Boris Groys
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844678091
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Book Description
From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844678091
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Book Description
From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.
The Total Artwork in Expressionism
Author: Ralf Beil
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Pub
ISBN: 9783775727136
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 512
Book Description
"In the past, the various categories of Expressionism have usually been treated separately. The [title] is the first comprehensive publication ever to examine the remarkable interplay of --and parallel developments in-- art, film, literautre, theater, dance, and architecture in the years 1905 to 1925. The Exhibition and the catalogue bring together the masterpieces of Expressionist film such as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and 'Genuine', architectural models, set designs, stage photographs, poster art, dance masks, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures to present a unique panorama of the Expressionist period. Addressing a disastrous war, a revolution, urban modernity, and the reinvention of the world, this is the first book in which renowned authors, key works, and source texts from all disciplines come together to allow the reader to thoroughly experience the ways in which the various areas of activity mutually influenced each other, as well as the equally dramatic and fascinating fruits of Expressionism's networks." --Jacket.
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Pub
ISBN: 9783775727136
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 512
Book Description
"In the past, the various categories of Expressionism have usually been treated separately. The [title] is the first comprehensive publication ever to examine the remarkable interplay of --and parallel developments in-- art, film, literautre, theater, dance, and architecture in the years 1905 to 1925. The Exhibition and the catalogue bring together the masterpieces of Expressionist film such as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' and 'Genuine', architectural models, set designs, stage photographs, poster art, dance masks, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures to present a unique panorama of the Expressionist period. Addressing a disastrous war, a revolution, urban modernity, and the reinvention of the world, this is the first book in which renowned authors, key works, and source texts from all disciplines come together to allow the reader to thoroughly experience the ways in which the various areas of activity mutually influenced each other, as well as the equally dramatic and fascinating fruits of Expressionism's networks." --Jacket.
Modernism After Wagner
Author: Juliet Koss
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816651597
Category : Arts, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This is a critical history of Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its impact on European modernism. Koss explores the legacy of Wagner's concept, laying out its genealogy and the political, aesthetic, and cultural context from which it emerged.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816651597
Category : Arts, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This is a critical history of Wagner's concept of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and its impact on European modernism. Koss explores the legacy of Wagner's concept, laying out its genealogy and the political, aesthetic, and cultural context from which it emerged.