David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This book 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 ...
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This book 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 to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. 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 anti-modern. 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. This book 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.Less
This book 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 to the desire to recover and renew the public function of art. 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 anti-modern. 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. This book 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.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0002
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter serves as the starting point for tracing the idea of the total work across the nineteenth century from the French Revolution through to the Wagnerism of the fin de siècle. Specifically, ...
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This chapter serves as the starting point for tracing the idea of the total work across the nineteenth century from the French Revolution through to the Wagnerism of the fin de siècle. Specifically, it explores Rousseau’s critique of representation in the theatre and in politics. His antitheatrical ideal of the popular festival inspired French revolutionary attempts to make such festivals central to the new civil religion of the nation. It argues that the idea and the practice of the total work of art will be driven by the same sublime imperative of transcendence as the Jacobin festivals and will confront the same dilemmas. In searching for transcendence, the revolutionary festivals were forced to reproduce the two inescapable dilemmas of representation. The one is political and can be phrased in the following fashion: do the people make the festival or does the festival make the people? The second is theatrical: how can the public festival escape spectacle if it is already itself a spectacle? In each case there is an appeal to the sublime in order to transcend these contradictions.Less
This chapter serves as the starting point for tracing the idea of the total work across the nineteenth century from the French Revolution through to the Wagnerism of the fin de siècle. Specifically, it explores Rousseau’s critique of representation in the theatre and in politics. His antitheatrical ideal of the popular festival inspired French revolutionary attempts to make such festivals central to the new civil religion of the nation. It argues that the idea and the practice of the total work of art will be driven by the same sublime imperative of transcendence as the Jacobin festivals and will confront the same dilemmas. In searching for transcendence, the revolutionary festivals were forced to reproduce the two inescapable dilemmas of representation. The one is political and can be phrased in the following fashion: do the people make the festival or does the festival make the people? The second is theatrical: how can the public festival escape spectacle if it is already itself a spectacle? In each case there is an appeal to the sublime in order to transcend these contradictions.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter explores Nietzsche and Mallarmé’s critical response to Wagner, where they articulate the two poles of the total work, the political and the spiritual, respectively. Both Mallarmé and ...
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This chapter explores Nietzsche and Mallarmé’s critical response to Wagner, where they articulate the two poles of the total work, the political and the spiritual, respectively. Both Mallarmé and Nietzsche affirm the absolute need of great art at the same time as they assert the primacy of “great poetry and thought” against the seductive power of music. Both are led through their agon with Wagner and the idea of the total work of art to confront the question of aesthetic illusion and to ponder the staging of the absolute in the age of aesthetics that is also the age of nihilism. Mallarmé’s grandiose idea of the Book as symbolist Mystery announces the avant-garde quest for a resacralized theatre; Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming theatrical age of the political actor and the masses foreshadows the mass politics of the twentieth century.Less
This chapter explores Nietzsche and Mallarmé’s critical response to Wagner, where they articulate the two poles of the total work, the political and the spiritual, respectively. Both Mallarmé and Nietzsche affirm the absolute need of great art at the same time as they assert the primacy of “great poetry and thought” against the seductive power of music. Both are led through their agon with Wagner and the idea of the total work of art to confront the question of aesthetic illusion and to ponder the staging of the absolute in the age of aesthetics that is also the age of nihilism. Mallarmé’s grandiose idea of the Book as symbolist Mystery announces the avant-garde quest for a resacralized theatre; Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming theatrical age of the political actor and the masses foreshadows the mass politics of the twentieth century.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0006
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter analyzes the total work as symbol. Wagner’s Parsifal, one of the most important inspirations for the European symbolist movement, stands as the paradigm of the restoration of the ...
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This chapter analyzes the total work as symbol. Wagner’s Parsifal, one of the most important inspirations for the European symbolist movement, stands as the paradigm of the restoration of the symbolic function of art and of the will to the resacralization of the stage. It discusses how Wagner’s path from the festival of the revolution to a renewal of art religion takes us from the unique celebration of the revolution in a temporary theatre constructed for the occasion, as envisaged by Wagner in 1851, to the establishment and institutionalizing of a festival theatre, a temple of art, intended as a site of pilgrimage and sacred performances. It also argues that Parsifal is the pivot on which Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music turns, forming the bridge between the history of music, which culminates in Wagner’s last work, and the theory of music, which takes the form of a speculative aesthetics.Less
This chapter analyzes the total work as symbol. Wagner’s Parsifal, one of the most important inspirations for the European symbolist movement, stands as the paradigm of the restoration of the symbolic function of art and of the will to the resacralization of the stage. It discusses how Wagner’s path from the festival of the revolution to a renewal of art religion takes us from the unique celebration of the revolution in a temporary theatre constructed for the occasion, as envisaged by Wagner in 1851, to the establishment and institutionalizing of a festival theatre, a temple of art, intended as a site of pilgrimage and sacred performances. It also argues that Parsifal is the pivot on which Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music turns, forming the bridge between the history of music, which culminates in Wagner’s last work, and the theory of music, which takes the form of a speculative aesthetics.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0007
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter considers the reception of the idea of the total work of art in European symbolism, as it is reflected, on the one hand, in the tributes in the media of sculpture, painting, literature, ...
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This chapter considers the reception of the idea of the total work of art in European symbolism, as it is reflected, on the one hand, in the tributes in the media of sculpture, painting, literature, and music; and on the other, in Mallarmé’s and in Scriabin’s ambition to surpass Wagner by creating the absolute and ultimate work. It argues that Mallarmé’s Book can only gesture toward the unrealizable idea of the total work of art. It is also an appropriate complement and antithesis to Scriabin’s Dionysian version of dematerialization in his Mysterium, which was to bring about the ecstatic realization—through return to the godhead—of the universal correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm.Less
This chapter considers the reception of the idea of the total work of art in European symbolism, as it is reflected, on the one hand, in the tributes in the media of sculpture, painting, literature, and music; and on the other, in Mallarmé’s and in Scriabin’s ambition to surpass Wagner by creating the absolute and ultimate work. It argues that Mallarmé’s Book can only gesture toward the unrealizable idea of the total work of art. It is also an appropriate complement and antithesis to Scriabin’s Dionysian version of dematerialization in his Mysterium, which was to bring about the ecstatic realization—through return to the godhead—of the universal correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0008
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines the total work as synthesis of the arts. It argues that the avant-gardes functioned as the bridge between aesthetic experimentation and programs of spiritual regeneration and/or ...
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This chapter examines the total work as synthesis of the arts. It argues that the avant-gardes functioned as the bridge between aesthetic experimentation and programs of spiritual regeneration and/or social utopianism. The group spirit, intensified by the apocalyptic-millenarian expectations of the time, radicalized aesthetic and political tendencies in equal measure. Three representative examples of the elective affinity between the avant-garde and the Gesamtkunstwerk are considered: Stravinsky’s collaboration with the Ballets Russes; Kandinsky and Schoenberg’s experiments with alternatives to the Wagnerian conception of the union of the arts in the music drama; and Bruno Taut’s manifesto for the crystal cathedral as the transcendent spiritual center of the city.Less
This chapter examines the total work as synthesis of the arts. It argues that the avant-gardes functioned as the bridge between aesthetic experimentation and programs of spiritual regeneration and/or social utopianism. The group spirit, intensified by the apocalyptic-millenarian expectations of the time, radicalized aesthetic and political tendencies in equal measure. Three representative examples of the elective affinity between the avant-garde and the Gesamtkunstwerk are considered: Stravinsky’s collaboration with the Ballets Russes; Kandinsky and Schoenberg’s experiments with alternatives to the Wagnerian conception of the union of the arts in the music drama; and Bruno Taut’s manifesto for the crystal cathedral as the transcendent spiritual center of the city.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0009
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin ...
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This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin Artaud’s theatre writings and manifestos for a “theatre of cruelty.” The connections between them rest on inner and outer coincidence: the Catholics Hofmannsthal and Claudel both turned to the world theatre of the Spanish baroque. Hofmannsthal collaborated with the director Max Reinhardt in the Salzburg Festival, and a commission from Reinhardt was the occasion of Claudel’s spectacle Christopher Columbus, with music by Darius Milhaud. Brecht was greatly impressed by the premiere of Claudel’s play at the Berlin State Opera in 1930; his own treatment of the crossing of the Atlantic, the 1929 Lehrstück on the aviator Lindbergh with music by Paul Hindemith, can also be read as his version of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Artaud (1896–1948) and Brecht (1898–1956)—like Mallarmé and Nietzsche—were almost exact contemporaries.Less
This chapter examines the total work as the regeneration of sacred theatre. It considers three dramatists of the 1920s: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul Claudel, and Bertolt Brecht, together with Antonin Artaud’s theatre writings and manifestos for a “theatre of cruelty.” The connections between them rest on inner and outer coincidence: the Catholics Hofmannsthal and Claudel both turned to the world theatre of the Spanish baroque. Hofmannsthal collaborated with the director Max Reinhardt in the Salzburg Festival, and a commission from Reinhardt was the occasion of Claudel’s spectacle Christopher Columbus, with music by Darius Milhaud. Brecht was greatly impressed by the premiere of Claudel’s play at the Berlin State Opera in 1930; his own treatment of the crossing of the Atlantic, the 1929 Lehrstück on the aviator Lindbergh with music by Paul Hindemith, can also be read as his version of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Artaud (1896–1948) and Brecht (1898–1956)—like Mallarmé and Nietzsche—were almost exact contemporaries.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0010
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines two texts—Romain Rolland’s Théâtre du peuple (1903) and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Il fuoco (1900)—both of which represent in particularly clear fashion at the turn of the ...
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This chapter examines two texts—Romain Rolland’s Théâtre du peuple (1903) and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Il fuoco (1900)—both of which represent in particularly clear fashion at the turn of the century the dual lineage of the total work of art. Both texts have in common in the context of fin-de-siècle decadence the theme of national regeneration, in the service of socialism with Rolland (1866–1944), who draws his inspiration from the French Revolution; and in the service of nationalism with d’Annunzio (1863–1938), who draws his inspiration from Wagner and Nietzsche. Each author dreams of the total work that will transcend the limits of the theatre to effect a reunion of art and life through the mobilization of the masses. Both texts thus stand in the continuity of the conjurations of the total work across the nineteenth century. Their interest for the present purposes lies in their relation to the postwar totalitarian revolutions. The connection in the case of Rolland is straightforward; the reception of Le théâtre du peuple in Russia underlined the continuity (at least initially) between the French and the Russian revolutions. The connection in the case of d’Annunzio is more substantial in that he is acknowledged as a crucial figure—together with the futurists—in the elaboration of a Fascist aestheticization of politics.Less
This chapter examines two texts—Romain Rolland’s Théâtre du peuple (1903) and Gabriele d’Annunzio’s novel Il fuoco (1900)—both of which represent in particularly clear fashion at the turn of the century the dual lineage of the total work of art. Both texts have in common in the context of fin-de-siècle decadence the theme of national regeneration, in the service of socialism with Rolland (1866–1944), who draws his inspiration from the French Revolution; and in the service of nationalism with d’Annunzio (1863–1938), who draws his inspiration from Wagner and Nietzsche. Each author dreams of the total work that will transcend the limits of the theatre to effect a reunion of art and life through the mobilization of the masses. Both texts thus stand in the continuity of the conjurations of the total work across the nineteenth century. Their interest for the present purposes lies in their relation to the postwar totalitarian revolutions. The connection in the case of Rolland is straightforward; the reception of Le théâtre du peuple in Russia underlined the continuity (at least initially) between the French and the Russian revolutions. The connection in the case of d’Annunzio is more substantial in that he is acknowledged as a crucial figure—together with the futurists—in the elaboration of a Fascist aestheticization of politics.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0011
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter examines the fraught relationship between art and revolution in light of three distinct attempts to realize the total work of art in the name of the revolution: the mass festivals of the ...
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This chapter examines the fraught relationship between art and revolution in light of three distinct attempts to realize the total work of art in the name of the revolution: the mass festivals of the revolution, which took the French revolutionary festivals as their guide; the avant-garde’s quest for a truly revolutionary culture that would transcend the limits of bourgeois art and reunite art with life; and Stalinism’s total work of art. Stalin’s total work—the show trials—represents something new: the specifically totalitarian total work, which literally liquidated the gap between art and life, just as conversely Soviet realism aimed to leap over the gap between reality and potentiality. The historical course of the Russian avant-garde may be measured against the total works that provide their prologue and epilogue, the futurists’ Victory over the Sun (1914) and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, commissioned by Stalin in 1941.Less
This chapter examines the fraught relationship between art and revolution in light of three distinct attempts to realize the total work of art in the name of the revolution: the mass festivals of the revolution, which took the French revolutionary festivals as their guide; the avant-garde’s quest for a truly revolutionary culture that would transcend the limits of bourgeois art and reunite art with life; and Stalinism’s total work of art. Stalin’s total work—the show trials—represents something new: the specifically totalitarian total work, which literally liquidated the gap between art and life, just as conversely Soviet realism aimed to leap over the gap between reality and potentiality. The historical course of the Russian avant-garde may be measured against the total works that provide their prologue and epilogue, the futurists’ Victory over the Sun (1914) and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, commissioned by Stalin in 1941.
David Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450235
- eISBN:
- 9780801460975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450235.003.0012
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter focuses on the path to the totalitarian total work in Germany. It discusses Benjamin’s views on the Fascist aestheticization of politics, which has its origins in Nietzsche and ...
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This chapter focuses on the path to the totalitarian total work in Germany. It discusses Benjamin’s views on the Fascist aestheticization of politics, which has its origins in Nietzsche and fi-de-siècle decadence but ends with Hitler’s seizure of power. It then argues that in order to understand Hitler after 1933, to understand the totalitarian dimensions of “aestheticization,” we need, on the one hand, the German counterpart to d’Annunzio and Marinetti—Jünger, aesthete, war hero, Nietzschean—and on the other, the Nazi mobilization of the masses through the medium of film. Jünger completes the Nietzsche-inspired trajectory from the overcoming of decadence in prewar France and Italy to the postwar vision of the totalitarian state as total work of art in Der Arbeiter (1932). Its analogue in film is the monumentalizing of the masses in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).Less
This chapter focuses on the path to the totalitarian total work in Germany. It discusses Benjamin’s views on the Fascist aestheticization of politics, which has its origins in Nietzsche and fi-de-siècle decadence but ends with Hitler’s seizure of power. It then argues that in order to understand Hitler after 1933, to understand the totalitarian dimensions of “aestheticization,” we need, on the one hand, the German counterpart to d’Annunzio and Marinetti—Jünger, aesthete, war hero, Nietzschean—and on the other, the Nazi mobilization of the masses through the medium of film. Jünger completes the Nietzsche-inspired trajectory from the overcoming of decadence in prewar France and Italy to the postwar vision of the totalitarian state as total work of art in Der Arbeiter (1932). Its analogue in film is the monumentalizing of the masses in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).
