Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne (review)

In his 1983 exhibition catalogue "Hang zum Gesamtkunswerk," Harald Szeemann rightly described the pathos formulas and energy symbols concerning the unity of thought, will, and capability as "European utopias," and showed the convergences of the concept with synthetic intermediality. The present book analyzes the genealogy of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a leading category of modernism from the beginning of the nineteenth century right up to today's international, multimedia world. Aesthetic modernism itself is read as a Gesamtkunstwerk: "Modernism and the Gesamtkunstwerk are intertwined, for the Gesamtkunstwerk seems to be a metonymy of modernism, whose contradictions, programs, and historical transience are embodied in the Gesamtkunstwerk" (13).¹ Connecting the concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and aesthetic modernism within the analytical framework of literary and cultural studies, the author includes examples from literature, film, multimedia, virtual reality, and cyberspace. Finger links the historical specificity of these concepts with the international character of the project, and the idea of unity with the project of the hybrid and of the fragmental. In this way, she establishes a historical linearity which helps to show how—in a dialog and correlation with aesthetic modernism—traces of the synthetic and the need for a "reconciliation of art and life" started to inform contemporary society and how they still operate in the aesthetic domain, because the Gesamtkunstwerk, despite its affinity to the fragmental and the hybrid, conveys a longing for a reconciliation of text and image, subject and nature, body and spirit.² Moreover, through its openness as a project, but simultaneously, through its inherently indefinite and visionary character, it may both appear in religious salvation schemes and be an object of firm aversion.

With reference to the newest international and interdisciplinary research which speaks about divergent modernisms and their polymorphic form, and understands modernism, following Susan Stanford Friedman, as a period of "transformative change" (12), the book rereads modernism from the perspective of the "aesthetic colossus of the Gesamtkunstwerk" (13).³ It asks in what guises the "monster" appeared on the modernist stage and, conversely, demonstrates how we can approach modernism in all its contradictions through a new perspective on the Gesamtkunstwerk (10). According to the author, such a rereading of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a central concept of modernism has not yet been tried; but did not works in media theory by Friedrich Kittler and Norbert Bolz accomplish precisely this, by rereading, above all, Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk as a signature of a revolution in media theory? Furthermore, Oliver Grau's "Immersive Art" project showed how virtual art can be integrated into the history of illusion and immersion.⁴

What makes the book likeable, however, is the passion with which it tries to understand the history of a fascination with a phenomenon that resulted in numerous aesthetic programs yet itself did not exist as an art form, but only as a project. And the answers it provides to the question of how we can understand the interconnections between modern aesthetic discourse and the Gesamtkunstwerk are quite persuasive.

To ask about the potentiality of a project is to explore spaces in their mobility, spaces that have not been fully closed off. The reconstruction of this dynamism appears here in separate chapters as discussions of central concepts of aesthetic modernism, such as manifesto, genre, unity, fragment, technology, and avant-garde.

First the book provides a detailed discussion of the origins of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in romanticism and its international differentiation around the year 1850, and exemplarily analyzes the notion of democracy in Whitman, the French symbolists, and Wagner. The fact that the semantic history of the concept can be traced back to the sixteenth century, and Giordano Bruno, is indicated through the reference to Wolfgang Storch's article in "Ästhetische Grundbegriffe."⁵ This, consequently, initiates an exploration of the differentiation between the concept and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the nineteenth century: as synaesthesia, festival, opera, and revolution leading to the democratization of society, and as an orientation towards an aesthetic, cultural, and political reconceptualization of the arts within...