The

“Gesamtkunstwerk”
About the evolution of interdisciplinary
performance practices and the “total work of art”
envisioned by Richard Wagner.
• Richard Wagner and Modernism.
• The Gesamtkunstwerk.
• A short history of interdisciplinary
performance practices.

• Synaesthesia.
• The brand as Gesamtkunstwerk.
• Creative Task.
Modern Romanticism:
• individual subjective experience
• the sublime
• the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject
for art

• revolutionary or radical extensions of

expression

• individual liberty
Modernism is a socially progressive
trend of thought. It affirms the
power of human beings to create,
to improve, and to reshape their
environment through practical
experimentation and new
technology.
 • spectatorship as empat
• abstraction
• estrangement
• distraction
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/K/koss_modernism.html
• Gesamt - entire, total,
comprehensive, complete , whole

• Kunstwerk - artwork (usually used

to describe a grand artwork)
The Gesamtkunstwerk is a
concept, in which the
individual arts are
subordinated to a common
purpose.
If we consider the relation of modern art—so far as it
is truly Art—to public life, we shall recognize at once
its complete inability to affect this public life in the
sense of its own noblest endeavor. The reason
hereof is, that our modern art is a mere product of
Culture and has not sprung from Life itself; therefore,
being nothing but a hot-house plant, it cannot strike
root in the natural soil, or flourish in the natural
climate of the present. Art has become the private
property of an artist-caste; its taste it offers to those
alone who understand it; and for its understanding it
demands a special study, aloof from actual life, the
study of art-learning. (Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future, 1949)
phantasmagoria, and psychedelia, the
term Gesamtkunstwerk often stands for
a an artistic environment or
performance in which spectators are
expertly maneuvered into dumfounded
passivity by a sinister and powerful
creative force. It is often mistaken for a
hazy mixture of art forms that
intoxicates those who gather in its
presence, encouraging the kind of
passive aesthetic response ascribed to
the spectacle culture famously
articulated by Guy Debord in 1968.” (Juliet
Koss)
treat such a
manipulation of passivity, implicitly or explicitly, as fascist,
proto-fascist, or neo-fascist, depending on the historical
moment in which it occurs.
Where the modernist work is thought to aim for a bracing
autonomy, forcing spectators to sit upright in their proverbial
chairs to concentrate on the difficult activity of aesthetic
reception, the Gesamtkunstwerk is believed to know no such
vigilance. It is thought, instead, to let down the guardrails
between the art forms, allowing them to intermingle in a kind
of vague interdisciplinarity that is equated with a lack of
discipline.
Yet notions of artistic purity and autonomy were central to
Wagner's initial formulation in 1849. In uniting the arts the
Gesamtkunstwerk would allow each to achieve its full
potential, growing stronger in the struggle to define itself
against the others. ‘By working in common,’ he declared, the
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 into
the other, proving her own purity, freedom, and
independence as that which she is.
The effort to unite the different art forms was thus predicated
on their individual refinement and purification, with the purity
of each dependent on the others’ proximity; the
"[...] the spectator
transplants himself
upon the stage, by
means of all his visual
and aural faculties."
(Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the
Future, 1849)
Immersive environments
could give birth to a new
form of participatory,
interactive, electronic
theatre.
“Twentieth century artists have
continued the effort to heighten the
viewer's experience of art by integrating
traditionally separate disciplines into
single works. Modern experience, many
of these artists believed, could only be
evoked through an art that contained
within itself the complete range of
perception. "Old-fashioned" forms
limited to words on a page, paint on
canvas, or music from an instrument,
were considered inadequate for
(Randall Packer, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality)
capturing the speed, energy and
contradictions of contemporary life.”
A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (better
known by the recursive acronym CAVE) is an
immersive virtual reality environment where
projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of
the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a
reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's
Republic where a philosopher contemplates
perception, reality and illusion.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Environment (Retrieved 02/03/2010)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKL0urEdtPU&feature=channel
Synesthesia [...] from the Ancient Greek σύν
(syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis),
"sensation"—is a neurologically-based
condition in which stimulation of one sensory or
cognitive pathway leads to automatic,
involuntary experiences in a second sensory or
cognitive pathway.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia (Retrieved 02/03/2010)
“The ‘(syn)aesthetic style’ is a contemporary
performance practice and mode of appreciation
which has emerged and developed in recent
years. [...] (syn)aesthetics describe both a
performance style (encompassing the artistic
process), and the audience receptive
experience.”

(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)

Synaesthetic performances fuse
the aural, visual, olfactory, oral
and tactile.
A leitmotif (from the German
leitmotiv, lit. "leading motif", or
perhaps more accurately
"guiding motif") is a recurring
musical theme, associated with
a particular person, place, or
idea.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif (Retrieved 02/03/2010)
“[Synaesthetic performances]
procure an exciting, complete
experience that affects a complete
perception – cerebral, corporeal
and emotional.”
(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)
 “This fusing of sense (semantic
‘meaning making’) with sense
(sensation) establishes a double-
edged rendering of making-
sense/sense-making which is
important to understanding the
(syn)aesthetic strategies of
(Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics and Disturbance - A Preliminary Overview)
performance and appreciation.”
Transform an empty shopping space
in central Lincoln into an all-
encompassing, multi-disciplinary,
multi-sensory, immersive,
durational, total art-performance-
event based on a chosen theme and
the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
• You have moderate budget for technical equipment, costumes,
lights, props, furniture, decoration, music, promotion etc.

• You will devise and perform your Gesamtkunstwerk as a group.

• You can employ other artists and helpers on a voluntary basis.
• You have rental-free access to your shopping space for 2 months
in order to devise, rehearse and perform your event.

• Your Gesamtkunstwerk should be open to the public for at least

an entire week.

• You have permission to alter your space in a way that will

reversible and acceptable for a new tenant.
1. Find a theme, the
connecting thread and a title
for your event.

2. Form groups to take over

certain tasks and the
responsibility for certain
elements of the event.

3. Present and discuss your

ideas.