The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace Is an Outstanding Accomplishment
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The Total Work of Art ‘The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace is an outstanding accomplishment. Matt Smith has written an original and provocative analysis that “fast forwards” the Gesamtkunstwerk into the 20th and 21st centuries, demonstrating how the project of creating a total work of art has been taken up by very different artists working not only in theater but also film, theme parks, experimental happenings, and digital media. This work will recast how scholars approach the total work of art and help stimulate new research across several fields.’ Jon McKenzie, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA ‘In this groundbreaking study, Matthew Smith shows us that the ideal of a total work of art was the driving engine behind the greatest accomplishments and the scariest fantasies of modern culture. Weaving Wagner, Warhol, and virtual reality into a rich and compelling narrative, The Total Work of Art is theater studies at its best. This book, written with precision and flair, should be required reading for anyone interested in theater history. And who knows, it just might serve as a blueprint for the theater of the future.’ Martin Puchner, Columbia University, USA Richard Wagner, Oskar Schlemmer, Bertolt Brecht, Leni Riefenstahl, Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Bill Gates: these disparate figures all represent important stages in the development of the total work of art. Impacting fields of theatre, architecture, music, literature and film, the tradition of the total work of art has exerted tremen- dous influence on modern culture, in a way that has so far been only partially understood. The tradition of the total work of art has been studied primarily as a branch of the history of opera. This wide-ranging study, however, stresses the connection between the total work of art and developments in mass culture. Comparing Bayreuth and Disneyland, the Crystal Palace and the Bauhaus Totaltheater, Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, Matthew Smith finds that the total work of art has as much to do with mass media as with high art, with commercial spectacle as with music drama. The Total Work of Art will be of interest to students and scholars across a broad range of disciplines, including theatre and performance studies, history of art, music history, cultural studies, and comparative modernism. Matthew Wilson Smith is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. The Total Work of Art From Bayreuth to Cyberspace Matthew Wilson Smith First published 2007 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Matthew Wilson Smith All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Smith, Matthew Wilson. The total work of art: from Bayreuth to cyberspace/by Matthew Wilson Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Aesthetics. 2. Performing arts. 3. Popular culture. 4. Mass media. 5. Art–History. I. Title. BH39.S5527 2007 700.1–dc22 2006029612 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-96316-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–97795–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–97796–7 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96316–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97795–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97796–8 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96316–6 (ebk) Contents List of illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 The total work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction 8 2 Total stage: Wagner’s Festspielhaus 22 3 Total machine: the Bauhaus theatre 48 4 Total montage: Brecht’s reply to Wagner 71 5 Total state: Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will 92 6 Total world: Disney’s theme parks 114 7 Total vacuum: Warhol’s performances 134 8 Total immersion: cyberspace and the total work of art 157 Conclusion 187 Notes 189 Works cited 206 Index 221 Chapter 6 Total world Disney’s theme parks Mr. A. Hitler, the Nazi old thing, says that Mickey’s silly. Imagine that! Well, Mickey is going to save Mr. A. Hitler from drowning or something some day. Just wait and see if he doesn’t. Then won’t Mr. A. Hitler be ashamed! (Disney, “The Cartoon’s Contribution” 138) Passage to America By the mid-nineteenth century, a reasonable German might well have concluded that the Romantic dream of an Aesthetic State had ended in failure. The answer to the old query, why has Goethe not been able to do for the Germans what Homer did for the Greeks?, seemed no longer that Goethe was a lesser talent but that modern society simply had no place for a new Homer. Where Schelling and the Schlegels had enthusiastically anticipated the rise of a unified Germany, a new mythology, and a modern synthesis of aesthetics and daily life, Germany had proven tenaciously resistant to such attempts. Society from the standpoint of 1850 might well have looked like a realm in which regionalism had triumphed over unity, and cold, hard “realism” over mythopoesis. What our hypothetical German would never have predicted was the resurgence of the Romantic dream of an aestheticized nation, and the new form that this resurgence would take. Wagner’s prescience lay largely in this: that he saw the resurgence and understood its form. However obliquely, Wagner understood that Goethe was not born too late but too early, his failure not of talent nor of will, but of media technology. In the wake of the collapse of the Dresden uprising, Wagner held not only to the dream of re-mythologizing society but, crucially, understood the central importance of mechanized total media in the fulfillment of this project. Though the founding of Bayreuth would change the nature of the question, the full effects of Wagner’s innovation would take some time to be realized. By 1933, the old query was fully transformed, and the new question could read, why has Wagner been able to do for Germany what Homer did for the Greeks? How has a new mythology taken hold, how have politics been reinvented as sacred ritual, how have the masses become aestheticized? Did the Geist of Wagner find its apotheosis in Hitler? And if one turns ahead again a few years, to 1980 perhaps, then the question undergoes Total world 115 yet another permutation. Why has Disney been able to do for America what Wagner did for Germany? Did the Geist of Disney find its apotheosis in Ronald Reagan? When he envisioned America as “the land of the future, where, in the ages before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself” (86), Hegel may have been more prescient than he knew. Who ever would have guessed that this burden – which is not, pace Hegel, the burden of “the World’s History,” but rather just the burden of German idealism – would end up revealing itself in American laughter? Laughter was always the enemy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the pin that punctured the over-inflated balloon. “Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn – to laugh!” (296) pronounces Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the “sooth-laugher” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), and then again in the “Attempt at Self-Criticism” (1886), Nietzsche’s anti- Wagnerian preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s weapon was well suited to the task. Of all the exclusions of the Wagnerian stage, laughter is perhaps the most completely barred, and would be the most corrosive if it were admitted. It is a prohibition that remains throughout the German tradition. From the Ring cycle to the Bauhaus Totaltheater to Brecht’s Lindbergh Flight to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: whatever its incarnation, the Gesamtkunstwerk has tended to be an earnest matter. Participation may be encouraged; joking generally not. If laughter is Nietzsche’s retort to Wagner, then Disneyland is America’s retort to Nietzsche. “Laughter is America’s most important export” (QWD 1751), said Disney, thinking of his own expanding empire of guffaws. A community of laughter, a factory of laughter, a world of laughter: Disneyland proves, against Nietzsche, that the total work of art can assume laughter, too, into itself, can totalize the gag. Another “Strength through Joy,” perhaps, but Joy this time as light-hearted, devil- may-care chuckles rather than as striving militancy. Or rather, as the two combined, as muscular Mickey-ism, squeaking softly while carrying a big shtick. As such, Disneyland marks the rebirth of the total work of art in the wake of its catastrophic realization in the Third Reich. After the collapse of Hitler’s Total State, after the transformation of the Nuremberg rally ground into a racetrack, after the “re-functioning” of the Nazi Party Congress Hall into a municipal storage depot, it would be a long time before German artists would again return to the Gesamtkunstwerk.2 No such memories troubled the world’s new superpower in the wake of the war. With the opening of Disneyland on 17 July 1955, the monumental German sublime found new life as the monumental American ridiculous.