The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (review)

For those of us who long suspected Richard Wagner might yet take over the world from beyond the grave, Matthew Wilson Smith's The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace confirms our worst fears. The book does so with such exhilarating virtuosity, however, that one cannot but marvel at the remarkable staying power of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal (total artwork). Smith's persuasive argument, rendered in fluid prose and mobilizing a sophisticated interdisciplinary methodology, traces manifestations of the total work of art in six case studies: the Bauhaus movement, Brecht's epic theatre, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Walt Disney's theme parks, Andy Warhol's performances, and cyberspace. The essential common denominator is the creation of a totalizing experience – via a synthesis of mass culture, technology, and utopia – as a means of engendering community in pursuit of a sociopolitical agenda.

Smith begins with an illuminating back history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a concept most often associated with Wagner but shown to have roots in the Romantics Schiller, Schlegel, and Schelling. The Wagnerian version was a response to anxiety about the Second Industrial Revolution, the resulting estrangement from nature, a failed political revolution, and the relationship of art to mass culture. Smith establishes a binary opposition that shapes his argument throughout the book, distinguishing between the iconic Gesamtkunstwerk (in which cutting-edge technology conceals the machine, as at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus) and the crystalline Gesamtkunstwerk (in which the exhibition of technology celebrates the outward signs of mechanical reproduction, as in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in London).

Each case study unveils extraordinarily original insights. In "Total Montage: Brecht's Reply to Wagner," Smith's perceptive reading of the oft-quoted "Notes to Mahagonny" makes the crucial distinction that Brecht rejected Wagner but not the total work of art as a concept. As he writes, "His embrace of montage is radically anti-Wagnerian . . . but in the end it is a contrapuntal unity and a dialectical totality that Brecht occasionally seeks" (90). This unity Smith demonstrates in his analysis of The Lindbergh Flight, which dovetails nicely with the next chapter, "Total State: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will," in which Smith focuses on the flight imagery of that film's opening sequence. His sophisticated analysis of the film far surpasses the casual conflation of mobile film technique, Wagner, and Albert Speer's rally that characterizes many such discussions, however. Smith identifies four allusions to the disgraced Ernst Röhm as structural devices in the film and draws a brilliant parallel to the construction of the Jewish outsider Beckmesser in Wagner's Meistersinger, powerful evidence that Gesamtkunstwerke are predicated upon strategies of exclusion.

The most disturbing chapter is "Total World: Disney's Theme Parks," in which the patina of innocence and nature calculated to appeal to children is made to feel supremely insidious. The similarities to Wagner's iconic Gesamtkunstwerk and to his idealized theatre-going experience at Bayreuth, are legion: "Disney's search for 'good culture' often led him, like Wagner, to folk sources" (119); "like Wagner's Festspielhaus, Disneyland was intended as a counter-space to the modern city, and as such was counter-cultural, so to speak, in its origin" (121), encouraging the visitor to make a dedicated pilgrimage away from daily life; and "the ontological claim that Disneyland is more real than 'the outside world"' is suspiciously reminiscent of the claims for natural utopia at the Festspielhaus (125). Smith tightens the web of total works of art when he notes that "like Brecht's Lindbergh Flight, Disneyland takes a unidirectional mass medium and stages it as participatory" (126).

In his chapter "Total Vacuum: Warhol's Performances," Smith makes the case that "Warhol's ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk may have been Warhol himself" (140). He links this total work of art to earlier examples, noting Warhol's debt to early Bauhaus training and a Brechtian ambivalence about the tension between collaboration and domination. Unlike his predecessors in the total-work-of...