Modernism after Wagner (review)

In Modernism after Wagner, Juliet Koss aims to return Richard Wagner’s seminal conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) to its original interdisciplinary status as conceived by Wagner in order to show how its principles lie at the very heart of modernism. Contrary to the frequent retroactive assessments of Wagner’s work, Koss situates it in the historical and political context of the period between the 1890s and 1930s in Germany. In doing so, she proposes that the common opposition of the Gesamtkunstwerk to the central themes of modernism, such as autonomy, medium specificity and artistic purity, does not hold once the concept is liberated from uncritical associations with fascist aesthetics and from misleading interpretations of spectators as entirely passive and engulfed in an overpowering force conveyed through a blurring of creativity among a variety of artistic disciplines. The Gesamtkunstwerk, as conceived by Wagner, retained on the contrary the specificity of the single discipline but enforced its strength through interdisciplinary collaborative effort. As quoted in Koss, Wagner declared that art forms

each attain the capacity to be and do the very thing which, of their own and inmost essences, they long to do and be. Each, where her own capacity ends, can be absorbed in the other . . . proving her own purity, freedom, and independence as that which she is

(p. xii) [1].

Departing from Wagner’s artistic focus on poetry (which he conceived as foremost and the art of the future), music and dance, Koss draws out the historical specificity of the wider implications of his conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk in art, and especially in architecture (as well as some sidelines into the areas of theater, music and film), with a focus on the active co-creation of the artwork on behalf of the spectator’s involvement. This chosen focus on the spectators’ involvement in the co-creation of the artwork sets up a framework to address core questions around politics and aesthetics as well as the relationship between form and content. This focus is carried through the book, starting with Chapter 1, with the exploration of Wagner’s original conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk against the backdrop of the failed revolution in the German Confederation in 1848–1849 as a “radical means of encouraging audiences’ active engagement.” Chapter 2 contextualizes the exemplification of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk in the establishment of the Bayreuth Opera House, which is drawn into the wider theatrical arena in Chapter 4 through critical reflections on the applications of the idea of the total artwork—in relation to among other things Nietzsche’s conception of the festival—in case studies of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony and the Prinz-regententheater in Munich, as well as, in Chapter 5, the Munich Artist’s Theatre. Chapter 3, most crucially from the perspective of the audience’s engagements, discusses some of the core investigations into the subject of empathy and the sympathetic relationship between spectator and perceived (art) object in 19th-century psycho-physiognomic approaches in the sciences and aesthetic theory. This chapter provides the foil for the apparent break between the 19th-century understanding of an active spectatorship (as present in Wagner and, for example, Robert Vischer’s work) and the 20th-century conceptions of the passive spectator as part of a mass audience. Whilst Koss posits technological media developments, among others, as key in the shift from the individual artwork to a mass audience—particularly in Chapter 6, with a brief sidestep into discussion of the emerging cinema—the controversies over contradictory models of the empathetic engagement of the spectator in Chapter 3 intrinsically reveal some of the prevailing paradigmatic shifts at the turn of the century that reshaped the understanding of subjectivity in most fundamental ways. Koss finds these epitomized in Hildebrand’s and Worringer’s conflicting approaches to theater and empathy in Chapter 5. It is on this more philosophical level that Koss provides an intriguing starting point for...