HSz

as is/as if

HSz

as is/as if

HSz
Julian Myers & Leigh Markopoulos, eds.

California College of the Arts / MA Program in Curatorial Practice San Francisco

as is/as if

HSz: As is/As if

2010 CCA MA Program in Curatorial Practice and the authors California College of the Arts, MA Program in Curatorial Practice 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 http://curatorial-practice.blogs.cca.edu/ Design: John Borruso Printing: McNaughton and Gunn, Inc. Reproduction Rights: You are free to copy, display and distribute the contents of this publication under the following conditions: You must attribute the work or any portion of the work reproduced as to the author, publication title and date; If you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. However, you must state that it has been altered and in what way; For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work; You must inform the copyright holder and editor of any reproduction, display or distribution of any part of this publication.

Contents

7 As if

Leigh Markopoulos

10 Totality: A Guided Tour Julian Myers 25 Grandfather: an exhibition and an invitation for subscription Harald Szeemann [S. Lerner, Trans., Joanna Szupinska, ed.] 30 Grandfather, A History Like Ours Joanna Szupinska 42 Live in Your Head: Attitudes of Arte Povera Katie Hood Morgan 52 How To Move Forward: On Rudolf Laban at Monte Verit Nicole Cromartie 66 Coming to Terms: Bazon Brocks Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk Sharon Lerner 72 The Tendency Towards the Total Work Bazon Brock [S. Lerner, Trans.] 88 Notes on The Tendency Towards the Total Work Sharon Lerner 96 Building Utopia: Thoreau, Cheval, Steiner Emily Gonzalez 102 Total Artwork and Early Cinema: Lang, Griffith, Lamb Jackie Im 115 Room #1: In Midst of Passions and Obsessions Maria Elena Ortiz 125 From Wagner to Artaud Kristin Korolowicz 137 Reading Du Bois, Reading Wagner Jacqueline Clay 152 Pictures of ExhibitionsAn Interview with Balthasar Burkhard Arden Sherman 162 A Possible Pataphysical CourseAn Interview with Christian Bk Josephine Zarkovich 172 Utopia and GesamtkunstwerkA Critical Timeline Courtney Dailey 185 Notes 200 Colophon

The activities of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice in 20089 were made possible in part through substantial funding from The Getty Foundation, which has supported the development of the international visiting faculty and site-specific courses (20048), and the Adobe Foundation. Our thanks also to Mrs. Frances F. Bowes for once again generously offering her collection for the purposes of study and for funding the spring 2009 class Property from an Important Collection II.

As if
Our Curatorial Practice projects often involve ignoring the limitations of as is in favor of the possibilities of as if. It was in a particularly extended pataphysical moment that the ambitious undertaking concretized in this publication was conceptualized and realized. The starting point was assistant professor Julian Myerss inspired choice Harald Szeemanns 1983 exhibition Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800as the subject for a sustained, semester-long analysis. This resultant anthology reverberates with that exhibitions impact. HSz: As is/As if replaces the usual, more general survey format of Curating Now with a focused collection of essays and interviews. It marks our sixth year of achievement as a program at the same time that it, we hope, contributes to the discourse around Szeemanns work. Szeemann has been called the grandfather of independent curating, in acknowledgment of his role in legitimizing the notion of curatorial identity, or authorship, in exhibition making. The ensuing and ongoing dialogue about curatorial theory and practice has assured his status as the godfather of curatorial studies programs. His example continues to guide much of what we teach about curating, and his perennially relevant exhibitions continue to provoke diverse responses. This year, the moment seemed right culturally and politically for revisiting earlier impulses toward utopianism. In addition to paralleling the traditional response to moments of crisis, a critical reconsideration of Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk also allowed us to examine the implications of the total artwork for exhibition practice. The complex interdisciplinarity that characterized Szeemanns exhibition extended an invitation to leap into areas beyond the usual parameters of curatorial practice, and the
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monogrammatic title we chose for the publication reflects our frequent and familiar use of the curators name. The subtitle speaks for itself. Richard Wagner has a leitmotif-like presence in HSz: As is/As if. And in fact Wagner is said to have been the first to use the term Gesamtkunstwerk. It appeared in his 1849 essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) and referred to an integrated work of art, or performance, that utilizes as many art forms as possible. It was in part a response to a perceived stultification in opera production, and Wagners theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk informed his revolutionary operatic works in which literature, poetry, music, and drama unite to create immersive, total environments. And therefore it is perhaps not surprising that Szeemannin Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk identifies the German composer as the locus of the conjunction utopia and the synthesis of the arts. If their subject is, in a way, old, the materials in this publication are new, illuminating a range of personal responses to Szeemanns propositions. In setting out to unravel his orchestration of various artistic theories and manifestations of utopia, the class pursued paths he signposted into the realms of art, architecture, music, poetry, literature, cinema, politics, and history. HSz is prefaced by Julian Myerss essay Totality: A Guided Tour, first published in Afterall magazine in 2009. The students contributions range from interviews with Balthasar Burkhard (Szeemanns photographic collaborator and the author of much of the iconic documentation of his exhibitions) and Christian Bk (the Canadian experimental poet), to essays on W. E. B. Du Boiss complex relationship to Richard Wagner and the approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk evinced in the cinema of the early 20th century. Szeemann is once again revealed in these pages as a catalyst for
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evaluating not only the curatorial discipline, but also the subjects he framed in his exhibitions. Everything we do is a collaborative effort, and as always we have been overwhelmed by the generosity with which our requests for assistance have been met. We would first of all like to thank those most immediately involved with the project: interviewees Christian Bk and Balthasar Burkhard. Many thanks also to the individuals without whose support and gracious permission this project would have been unthinkable: Bazon Brock, Ingeborg Lscher, and Una Szeemann. We are delighted that so many reproductions enliven the following pages, and are particularly grateful to the following for their generous help with sourcing images and assisting with permissions: Dr. Christian Bauer, Christoph Bonin, Ccile Brunner, Jeff Cramer, Danile Guerlain, Ron Mandelbaum, Sharon Maxwell, John Pennino, and William S. Swain, and to Melissa Gronlund and Pablo Lafuente for their editorial contributions. The publication benefits from the skill of John Borruso, who has yet again created a design that perfectly articulates our ideas, and from the assistance of CCA colleagues Allison Terbush and Lindsey Westbrook, whose continued support we greatly value. Not least, I would like to thank faculty member Julian Myers, who contributes so much on so many levels to the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice and without whose vision and dedication this publication would not exist. The determination and precision with which he collaborated with the students has enriched their writings immensely. And, finally, I must of course congratulate the authors, whose texts offer such an interesting index of their collective and individual interests. Leigh Markopoulos Chair, Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice

Markus Raetz and Albin Uldry, Poster for Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk in Zrich, 1983 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

Totality: A Guided Tour Julian Myers

There, readers, there is the next milestone for you, in the History of Mankind! That universal Burning-up, as in hell-fire, of Human Shams. The oath of Twenty-five Million men, which has since become that of all men whatsoever, Rather than live longer under lies, we will die!that is the New Act in World-History This is the truly celestialinfernal Event: the strangest we have seen for a thousand years. Thomas Carlyle1

I. PSYCHIC HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE

Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800 (the first phrase is translated, variously, as The Inclination Towards a Synthesis of the Arts or The Search for a Total Artwork; the second as European Utopias since 1800) was installed at the Kunsthaus Zrich in 1983. Organized by Harald Szeemann, the exhibition was the third installment of a triptych of traveling shows, starting with Jungesellenmaschinen (Bachelor Machines) in 1975, and continuing with the different incarnations of Monte Verit (named after the Hill of Truth in Ascona, Switzerland) in 1978. Together these exhibitions offered a kind of psychic history of modern European affectionate, if critical diagnosis of its deepest drives and impulses. Moreover, they are an ambivalent part of the articulation and critical establishment of, for the lack of better way to put it, a postmodern condition in Europe.2 Szeemanns trio took on an ambitious multiple function in this moment: it was a kind of exorcism perhaps, an attempt to shed the habits and narratives of modernity; but it was also a morgue, where its corpses
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could be named and maladies discovered, as well as a fragile and loving archive of its ideas and images, assembled and stored away for future use. A meditation on the dream of a radical integration of artistic disciplines, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk drew together a head-spinning selection of socialist dreamers (Charles Fourier and Henry Thoreau), avant-gardists (Erik Satie and Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp and El Lissitzky, Marcel Broodthaers and John Cage), charismatic ritualists (Hermann Nitsch and Joseph Beuys), dreamlike and dystopian filmmakers (Fritz Lang and Hans-Jrgen Syberberg), iconoclastic architects (Antoni Gaud, Carl Friedrich Thiele, Rudolf Steiner) and enthralling outsiders (Henry Dunant, Adolf Wlfli and others). According to Szeemanns thesis, they were united by their drive to create a total art work; in this drive he discovered the very best and worst of European culture in the twentieth centuryutopias of beauty, social justice, sexual liberation and emancipation from labour on the one hand; consumer spectacle, totalitarianism, and genocide on the other. This essay attempts a partial tour of that exhibition, and assembles evidence towards a line of thinking on some of its modalities and ideas. It is an attempt to recover Szeemanns diagnosis of this doomed European drive.
II. A STEEL SNAKE, CONSTRAINED AND ORGANIZED BY THE ONE GENERAL MOVEMENT

Divided and sorted into hexagonal bays in the main hall of the Kunsthaus, Szeemanns exhibition on first glance achieves a clean and conventional Modernist styleeschewing, for the most part, the performative densities of his exhibitions of the 1970s, such as documenta 5: Interrogation of RealityPicture Worlds Today (1972), The Bachelor Machines (1975), and the expressionist floor plan of James Ensor at the Kunsthaus
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Zrich (1983). Compared to those delirious exhibitions, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk seemed relatively sober and austere, a cold clinical registration of a tendency in European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Look at individual pictures, however, and this impression of sobriety is thrown suddenly and violently off balance. Up close the pictures expose ecstatic or deranged views of imagined universes inhabited (if they are inhabited) by ciphers: not quite fully humans, but hermaphroditic half-people with globes for headsfigures of the future whose humanoid bodies have smooth, full, hard, geometric surfaces. Swiss artist Markus Raetz and Swiss designer Albin Uldry composed one such faceless figure for the exhibition poster: suspended in the zero gravity of some inner or outer space, concentric halos of lavender, blue, pink, and ochre emanate from the figures spherical skulllines of transformative force. One of Oskar Schlemmers abstracted corps de ballet pirouettes around a corner; a sly King Ludwig II fingers his sword behind Gauds inverted fossil-model for the Colnia Gell at Santa Coloma de Cervell. The limited walk through the Kunsthaus, wrote Peter Rumpf in his review at the time, becomes a boundless mental walk in ones heada cranium now apparently swollen, rounded, and transfigured by its utopian fantasizing.3 Architecture was an integral part of the exhibition. Alongside architectonic abstractions by Kurt Schwitters and Kazimir Malevich were paintings by Carl Friedrich Thiele (the night sky imagined as a giant, glittering domea classical agora by way of Sun Ra); a 1824 lithograph depicting an aerial perspective of Robert Owens imagined co-operative of New Harmony, which the nineteenth-century utopian industrialist would establish in 1826 with disastrous results, in Indiana; Karl Friedrich Schinkels transmogrified gothic cathedral;
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and photographs of Walter Gropiuss model for Erwin Piscators Total Theatre in Berlin, 1927. The utopian inclination in architecture lends itself to spirals and spheres: a reconstruction of Tatlins model monument a dynamic image, wrote Nikolai Punin in 1919 for the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment, imbued with the powerful tension of endlessly disturbed and clashing axes, oscillating like a steel snake, constrained and organised by the one general movement of all the parts, to raise itself above the earthsat in view of Hermann Obrists model Design for a Memorial (1895)a shabby Jugendstil premonition of the communist monument, which extended itself skyward like a tendril.4 Similarly, spherical temples, palaces, and planetariums put forward the image of secession (from a compromised reality) and totalization (of a created and harmonious order).5 See the haunted cross-sections of tienne-Louis Boulles Newtons Cenotaph (178384), or the Russian theosophist Alexander Skrjabins sketches of MysteryTemples and Consciousness-Stones (c.1914)or, seen from its colossal, infinite interior, a Temple of the Great Unity (1898) by Fidus dedicated to the archaic veneration of Mother Earth and Nature which are nevertheless excluded, except in ornamental form, from its wordless, cultic center.6 In other cases architectural interiors are suffused by fragmented, elemental or triumphant inscriptions: the marked columns of Rudolf Steiners wooden Goetheanum (1913); the cumulated assemblage of Johannes Baaders megalomaniacal self-portrait, The Great Plasto-DioDada- Drama (1920), an inversion of his 1906 design for a World-Temple-Pyramid;7 a section of a room from Broodthaerss Muse dArt Moderne, Dpartement des Aigles, its walls covered in an amassment of tautologies (1968/1975);8 a 1973 painting by Anselm Kiefer
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Marcel Broodthaers, Salle Blanche, 1968. A reconstitution, as faithful as possible(?) of an installation created by the artist in 1968, who has attacked, over time, the concept of the museum and its heirarchy. M.B. Paris 1975 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels

Johannes Itten, Kinderbild, 1921/22 oil on wood. Kunsthaus Zurich 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

that pictures, by way of Richard Wagners Ring cycle (184874), a majestic Valhalla-esque hall of honour for Germanys Spiritual Heroes, whose names Kiefer has written with charcoal across the painted wooden floor.
III. FORCE AND PRECISION

As inscribed at the bottom of Kiefers painting, it is Wagners name that is written largest in the exhibition. Alongside its bastard offspring cinema and performance, the composers innovations in theatre had central importance. In theatre the wordwritten, spoken or sungpervaded and invigorated architecture; in the same way that it had, in the form of education, pervaded Owens architectural utopiathat is, with force and mathematical precision.9 If the synthesis of the arts was not Wagners invention it had precursors in both the Wunderkammern of the seventeenth century and in the world expositions of the early nineteenth centuryit was in his essay Art and Revolution that the tendency traced by Szeemanns exhibition had its earliest clear articulation. Wagners formulation looked to Greek tragedy, which he described as a great unitarian artwork that lived in the public conscience. Tragic theatre, in this sense, was the abstract and epitome of everything expressible about Grecian life. The nation itself, he wrote, stood mirrored in its artwork communed with itself and, within the span of a few hours, feasted its eyes with its own noblest essence. While ancient tragedy deployed singing, orchestrated movement, music, visual effects and the built environment to produce an integral wholean actual, living artin Wagners time this whole had been brutally dismembered: separated into its component parts each one to take its own way, and in lonely self-sufficiency to pursue its own development. This traumatic dissevering was to be
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Joseph Beuys, Capital, 197077. Crex Collection, Zurich. Installation View 2, 1980 Venice Biennale 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

traced to religious self-alienationthe duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular oneput forward by Ludwig Feuerbach in his 1843 essay The Philosophy of the Future and criticised by Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach.10 In this shattered modernity, Drama was dead and art was beholden toas well as split betweencommerce and the church. Separating the arts, Wagner argued, had fatally wounded arts public function. Art could no longer effectively mirror communal life of the folk; in the modern era, art lives alone in the conscience of private persons, the public un-conscience recking nothing of it.11 What is more, in its diminished and necrotic form, art became commercial entertainment: compelling nothing more than amusement or distraction. No mere restoration was possible, Wagner claimed. What was taken for granted by the ancients presented itself as revolutionary in Wagners present: not only the radical re-synthesis of the arts, but the reunification of art and polity, art and public life:
Only the great Revolution of Mankind, whose beginnings erstwhile shattered Grecian Tragedy, can win for us this Art-work. For only this Revolution can bring forth from its hidden depths, in the new beauty of a nobler Universalism, that which it once tore from the conservative spirit of a time of beautiful but narrow-meted cultureand tearing it, engulphed.12

This nobler universalism, Wagner argued, would be regained in a new and forceful form of dramatic theater for in such collective production each separate branch of art is at hand in its own utmost fullness.13 In the grip of this full and reintegrated Drama, distracted and atomised consumers would be shocked into a new, revolutionary, nationalistic collectivity.
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With its modest arrangement of plans, pictures and miniatures, the exhibition-form of Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk definitively located such fullness elsewheretotality was the myth to which all of its inadequate sign-systems referred. Plans, photographs, and renderings; costumes, maquettes, models, and props; fevered scribblings, doodles and abstract paintings; reconstructions in miniature of Ferdinand Chevals model of Le Palais Idal, Gauds Hanging Model for the Church of the Colnia Gell (190612) and Vladimir Tatlins Monument to the Third International (1919/20; unrealised): scan Verena Eggmanns photographs of Szeemanns exhibition and these are things you see.14 Pictures and plans of the Bayreuth opera house gestured not to the intense experience invoked by Wagner but to the bare framework for that experiencethe seating, stage-setting, the doubleproscenium that, if one were to encounter it in person, might produce Wagners mystic gulf between performers and audience. The Zrich version of the exhibition, on the other hand, included an expansive and ambitious program of performances: Kurt Schwitterss Ursonate (192232) was performed by the dance company Tanzfabrik Berlin at the Kunsthaus; Oskar Schlemmers Triadic Ballet (1927) was realized at the Schauspielhaus Zrich; Laurie Anderson performed America on the Move (197983) at the Volkshaus Zrich; Wagner operas were performed at the Opernhaus Zrich and Robert Wilson lectured on his unfinished opera the CIVIL WarS: A Tree is Best Measured When It Is Down (1984) at the Kunsthaus.15 The program of events also included film screenings: Langs Metropolis (1927) and Syberbergs operatic, 410-minute montage Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977). The events and films presented the insane, synthetic plenitude absent from, but immanent within, the exhibitions bare constellation of artifacts.
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That such a collection of works should make for a queer exhibition perhaps is obvious. There is the dizzying fact that each work aims to beor is caught in the act of imagining itself asan entire, elaborate, inclusive world. Where most exhibitions depend on constructing relationships among various fragments, here each artifact, in more or less ruthless fashion, understands itself as the destruction of everything that opposes it.16 Indeed this totalitarian negation is explicit in the very essays where Wagner first asserts the idea of the total artwork. As Slavoj Zizek asserts, the early revolutionary Wagner is definitely more protofascist than the late onehis revolution looks rather like the restitution of organic unity of the people who, led by the Prince, have swept away the rule of money embodied in Jews.17 In his essay for the catalogue of the exhibition, Bazon Brock offered a comparable if even more brutally reductive equation: TOTALKUNST und TOTALITARISMUS total art and totalitarianism.18 (Later Brock warns his readers against feeling too sure that the fascist form is a thing of the past: If we want to experience an actualized Gesamtkunstwerk, we have only to visit Walt Disneys EPCOT Center.)19 On this point Szeemann was clear: there is no such thing as a synthesis of the arts and there mustnt be.20 For if the dreams and ideas of fantasy connections would come true and be forced on society, we would end up in a totalitarian state, the way we have known it.21 Attempts to put the Gesamtkunstwerk into practice were categorically barred, because then it is no longer art; it is power politics.22 Rather than nostalgically glorify Wagners idea (which Szeemann acknowledged wasnt articulated all that completely in the first place) his exhibition would use the concept of a synthesis of the arts as a poetic vehicle in the museuma place where fragile connections can still be tried out and take sensual form.23
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The utopias put forward, then, were to be partial, failed or unfulfilled: however hideous or alluring, however ambitious, they remained individualized dream-images of a totality that might existnot practical plans for their realization. Color theory alone made for a properly harmless (if fanatically overdetermined) predispensation: Johannes Itten with his color wheel (Appendix to Utopia, 1921) and painting of a fat toddler-icon (Kinderbild, 192122); Piet Mondrian and his new plasticism. And then there is the emblematic dispossession of Swiss humanist Henry Dunant. His horrified response to Louis-Napoleon Bonapartes bloodbath at Solferino in 1859 led to the founding of the Red Cross and the establishment of the Geneva Conventions; he was subsequently disgraced in a credit scandal and expelled from the organization he had founded. And yet here are his stunning watercolour tablets from 1890: apocryphal retellings of the lives of the Christian saints, which seem to have invented, with no precedent, their own meticulously dense pictorial languagean unhinged combination of scroll, map, broadsheet and webpage. Transformation sociale soit Nouvelle Terre, reads one inscription. Dieu est amour.24 The danger was in sentimentalizing failureindulging in the pathos of the outsider or lost figure. But the pictures tell another (still romantic) story of ecstatic and paranoid geometry remaking the universe Christian virtue and terror: That universal Burning up, as in hellfire, of Human Shams.25
IV. THE PRINCIPLE THAT ALONE, I AM NOT A PROBLEM FOR MYSELF

It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions.26 This version of an absolute present seems nevertheless to require a present patrimony, its seminal figures. Had Szeemann not existed
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it would have been necessary to invent him. Perhaps he was invented. So Szeemann may really be the last of those melancholic figures that people his exhibitions.27 A catalogue of what he stands for today might begin: exhibition-maker as auteur; Meister und Grossvater of postproduction; godfather and patron saint of freelance and itinerant curators; archetype and original; guarantor and affirmer of the art worlds neoliberal present. Szeemann is to the twentieth century what the flneur or the dandy was to the nineteenth. You catch yourself saying this kind of thing. Never mind that he remade himself in 1969 into the Agentur fr geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for Intellectual Immigrant Labor): a bureaucratic bachelor machine, more disseminator than inseminator. His was a beautifully convoluted form of pataphysical self-exploitation: a clear, selforganizing, institutionalizing sense of self which provided the basis for pursuing a possible pataphysical coursein the form of a constantly self-renewing control circuit.28 His departure from Kunsthalle Bern after organising When Attitudes Become Form in 1969 is conceived on these terms as well, as if by leaving the institution he was escaping a bad marriage. In our case, everything worked perfectly, since we adhered literally to the principle often expressed in marriages that alone, I am not a problem for myself: it is you and the others that make me one. That having been established, there were no further problems.29
V. REGRESSION CLOSURE EXPECTATION

Concerning the exhibition as a catalogue of possible futures:

I take the concept of politics to be essentially a temporal concept. In its clichd, classical form, people talk about politics as the art of possibility. Following Walter Benjamin, I like to think of politics as not the art of possibility but the art of actualization, which actually turns out to be considerably
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harder than the art of possibility. I think were probably back with possibility nowadays because we havent got much actualization. And I think that probably one reason that theres an interest within the art world and other cultural spaces about the temporal dimensions of the works is because of a certain regression from actualisation to possibility, if you like. Politics has regressed to the idea of finding the possibilities that you might actualize.30

Concerning enclosure and territorialization:

The properly Utopian program or realization will involve a commitment to closure (and thereby to totality): was it not Roland Barthes who observed, of de Sades Utopianism, that here as elsewhere it is closure which enables the existence of system, which is to say, of the imagination? [] Totality is then precisely this combination of closure and system, in the name of autonomy and self-sufficiency which is ultimately the source of that otherness or radical, even alien difference.31

Concerning great expectations: a certain quote from Robert Walsers Fritz Kochers Aufstze (1901) served Szeemann during his preparations for Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. It reads:
My brother paints, writes poetry, sings, plays piano and does gymnastics excellently. Hes very, very talented. I love him, and not only because hes my brother. He is my friend. He wants to become a bandleaderbut I would rather he became something that combines all the arts of the earth. Certainly, he has high ambitions.32

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Grandfather: an exhibition and an invitation for subscription Harald Szeemann

TRANSLATED BY SHARON LERNER AND EDITED BY JOANNA SZUPINSKA

Shortly after WWII, I was at the Swiss lakes on vacation. It was during those rainy days that I came across a magazine, Der Schweitzer Spiegel (The Swiss Mirror). Framed as a spiritual defense of the country, and as a way to pass the time for foreigners separated from their homelands, this magazine offered a pastime for refugees during wartime. It printed true stories, lived and told by Swiss men. I can still recall Friedrich Glausers adventures in the Foreign Legion, and in particular the life story of Captain Heinzelmann from Bern, who sailed the seas in his boat. He mostly transported an undeniably ambiguous cargo, jettisoning the occasional Armenian body into the Bosphorus.1 Nevertheless, he never forgot to collect stamps from everywhere he went, and in the end his collection came to rest in Bern, where he settled and opened a philatelic shop. Therefore it was only right that, after reading the memoir of my own grandfather (he wrote the first version when he was 89 years old), I recommended he send his story to the Spiegel. However, it was not until around his 95th birthday that the complete version of his years of wandering, entitled The Master Hairstylist Journal, appeared in the Der Schweitzer Spiegel. The Hungarianborn subject (b. 1873 Diosd, d. 1971 Bern) wrote the way he lived: important points were big, and everything else was little. His autobiography (To begin with God and to end with God is the best way to live) contained a wealth
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of stories, no great adventures, but on the whole, the selfmade friseur master led a very full life. Little like Napoleon, decent, enchanting, bulky, and stubborn all at once, he fought his way through the world. He was a tough, unstoppable hair artist who didnt shy away from industrial espionage; he used to spy on the famous hair-curler Marcels Vienna demonstrations through a keyhole (the same Marcel who invented the bogus hair-coloring combs and one of the first perm machines, and made wigs with his wife). [Grandfather] died in 1971 at the age of 98. He had already survived all of his children. His wife Leontine (ne Drtilek), born in 1881 in Vienna, a Bohemian goldsmith, followed him only two months after his death. Grandfather always knew very well what he wanted to become, so he always stayed very healthy. He never became rich, however, because he risked everything at the wrong moments. He speculated boldly and never bought the right stocks. When somebody offered him real estate at the train station at a very low price, he calculated the asking price by the 100,000 shaves it would cost him, so he decided that the land wasnt worth it. His businesses in Bern were always in the best spots: Falkenplatz, Christoffelgasse, Bundesgasse, Hirschengraben, Spitalgasse. In short, he wanted to stay healthy and therefore he rejected any kind of medicine. Instead he subscribed to extended walks, spiritual gatherings with colleagues, leisurely visits to the traditional Viennese coffeehouses in the Schweizerhof and the Wchter, chats with musicians from the Hungarian ladies orchestra in the casino, and, for the health of his spirit, chemical tests in his laboratories. I think its no coincidence that all of my grandfathers years of wandering which drove him through Hungary, Romania, Greece, Turkey, and then Vienna, Carlsbad,
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Wiesbaden, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Nice, and London, only led him to Bern. His whole affection belonged to this city since 1897, when he first made a stop here. He allowed the dream of the poor, hungry, boy that loved Switzerland above all to become a reality. During his travels, he had always been happiest among Swiss people. When he arrived in London with only half a penny, it was a Swiss woman who accommodated and entertained him. He returned the favor with his arthe made for her a hairpiece, and she never forgot that. And the offer from Lord Allen? He said that I had to stay in London. He wanted to furnish a first class business for me at his place in Old Bond Street, [my grandfather recalled in his memoir]. That was such a feudal offer. But I didnt want to allow myself to be bound to London. I want to be settled in Switzerland, Bern as my objective destination. In 1904 he and his family moved from London to Bern, and in 1919 he became a naturalized citizen. It was in this time, certainly, that a peculiar work was originated: a Swiss emblem from felt, and bleached, reddish and blackened hairs from his clients, mounted above a glass mirror bearing the title: TRYBOL: the first herbal mouthwash of the world. Above all, Grandfather was a coiffeur. His life belonged to this form of art. To it, everything else was subordinate. But he was also a very passionate collector: documents from work, stamps, stitches, badges, collectible rifleman cards,2 monetary bills. His home at Ryffligsschen 8 was an overflowing lodge that began as three, and later became two, rooms. At the clearing of it in 1971 after his death, I took everything that reminded me of my grandparents. For years, I had found this house worthy of exhibit, as a visualization of a history, as a testimony to a lifestyle, as an illustration of the recognition that in the life of every man, there is a point when each sign
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becomes self-evident, and the accumulation of these signs and objects is no longer obstructive. Grandmother was married to him for 69 years. She was deaf since the birth of her children, but only for outsiders. Everything that he did, spoke to her. Very often she found him impossible, but he was her life, and she was his. She shone as a cook, and loved festivities. She was always there, and in spite of the fact that deaf people are usually sad, she retained a healthy mentality. This little pair (52 and 51) didnt make the lives of their children easy they forced both sons to become friseursbut they were very good to their grandchildren. Grandfather worked meticulously in preparation for big parties, to prepare extensive programs of jokes. Christmas presents from Grandfather, in the form of props and costumes that occupied us (me and my brother) for hours, in a very artistic way reproduced the little labyrinth of the house. After the early death of all their childrenmy father was the last to go in 1958my mother, full of altruism, attended to the grandparents. As an elderly man, Grandfather had more free time, though even as a 92 year-old, he still served his original lady clients. But his principal interest was the grandchildren, so he visited every exhibition Doctor Harry, as my grandmother called me, organized at the Kunsthalle. Dressed in his Sunday best, kissing the hands of the ladies, he was the doyen of the vernissages. When I visit memorial sites, and also in the making of my own exhibitions, I have always been fascinated by the problem of how to artistically represent a life through the display of objects. A one-to-one reconstruction of the home would not have sufficed here. Only in a guided form could my grandfathers own order be shown. This exhibition presents the following highlights: Tree of origin, Grandmother, Roots in Austria-Hungary, Bern and Switzerland, the Occupation (the years of wandering
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and learning, his own businesses, his printed matter, meetings, and distinctions), Grandfathers relationship to money, Role models, Grandparents dwellings, Grandfathers contribution to the triumph of beauty, and What the others say. It is a very happy coincidence that Tony Gerber took my previous home, and simultaneously with this exhibition of a centenarian, celebrates the 10-year anniversary of his gallery. I have had Grandfathers possessions for over two years, and I have carried them along through three moves, only to exhibit them here at Tony Gerbers in my last Bern home. The exhibition is an homage to that person who came to Bern, organized by the one who now departs. A grandfather exists long after his death in the conversations about him, and also in his stories that are retold. This here is only an exhibition. He narrated his own life through stories, and even preserved them in his memoirs. I have included everything here, for even you should know what snake fat is good for, how to dress the hair of an emperor, how to throw marble cake from the window of a train, what to do when jealous colleagues, in the middle of the night, build a brick wall covering the entrance to your business, and what ethics are: I have also experienced very difficult times, but I thank dear GOD for my health, and for His good guidance. He never let me do anything wrong. But how did He know, Mr. Szeemann, that you shouldnt do something good or bad? I cannot explain to anyone, how in certain moments I felt a good feeling and reassurance, but also sometimes when something bad was on its way, I was always concerned. This is all that I can say about that. I am a man of emotions.

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In Grossvaterein Pionier wie wir (1974), Szeemann used the personal story and belongings of his late grandfather to craft a social critique of 1970s Europe. Above, a partial view of the apartment-wide installation. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard Harald Szeemann Archive

Grandfather: a history like ours Joanna Szupinska

Following the hugely successful Documenta V and the reinvention of the exhibition as a 100 Day Museum in 1972, the former Kunsthalle Bern director and famed independent curator Harald Szeemann turned to the more intimate subject of his recently deceased paternal grandfather. In 1974, about 100 years after the birth of the subject, Szeemann staged Grossvaterein Pionier wie wir (Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us) in an altogether unheard of, at that time, exhibition space. Held at Tony Gerbers apartment gallery in Bern for two months, the exhibition presented Etienne Szeemanns collectionsobjects accumulated over decades. Szeemann had lived in the private apartment for months, all the while working on the deliberate installation of his grandfathers belongings (which he had saved for over two years and through three moves since his grandfathers passing in 1971): furniture, memoirs, stamp collection, monetary bills, as well as instruments of his beloved hairstyling trade and advertisements for his services.1 Harald Szeemann presented the project with a proposition for a publication, should enough subscribers commit to purchasing copies. The heading on the exhibition leaflet read, GRANDFATHER: an exhibition and an invitation for subscription. Here the curator outlined his grandfathers devotion to his family, chosen occupation, and adopted country in what amounts to a sentimental, four-page eulogy. A grandfather exists long after his death in the conversations about him, and also in his stories that are retold, he writes. This here is only an exhibition. He narrated his own life through stories, and even preserved them in his memoirs. I have included everything here, for even you should know what snake fat is good for, how to dress the hair of an
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emperor, how to throw marble cake from the window of a train, what to do when jealous colleagues, in the middle of the night, build a brick wall over the door of your business, and finally, what ethics are.2 The proposed book, which was to contain images of the grandfathers collections as well as his own writings, was never produced. Grossvater has been briefly cited numerous times as evidence of the curators adventurous stylehis brave willingness, on the heels of international acclaim, to make small, personal exhibitions of non-art objects. Three decades after the exhibition Hans-Ulrich Obrist, in his eulogy, compared the relatively small show with the monolithic, sprawling exhibitions for which Szeemann is widely known, [An] important facet of his career was the way he oscillated between large and small, private and public. After the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, for example, there was the exhibition dedicated to his grandfather, held in a private apartment in Bern, with no hierarchy between the larger and the smaller showentirely in keeping with Robert Musils observation that art can appear where one is least expecting it.3 In Obrists interpretation, Grossvater serves as little more than a curious example of Szeemanns many interests, and the astonishing breadth of his practice. Often retold as an anecdote, the endeavor as a whole has come to stand as proof of the curators artistic-curatorial practice; the actual content of the exhibition has not been sufficiently analyzed despite Szeemanns own articulated commitment to the seriousness of the project. On the occasion of Szeemanns seventieth birthday, in an article tellingly entitled The Artist-Curator, Roman Kurzmeyer reflects on Szeemanns past exhibitions and ongoing practice, He initially surprised the art world with a little show entitled Grossvater: Ein Pionier wie wir [, ...] offering the legacy of his grandfather, hairdresser Etienne Szeemann, in the form of an imaginary museum. This
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muse sentimental was a loving homage and at the same time a work critical of institutions, comparable with Marcel Broodthaers Muse dart moderne....4 Characteristic of analyses of Grossvater, Szeemanns practice is here likened to that of an installation artist, and his concerns are aligned with institutional critique. Certainly these elements are present, and may have been so striking in the mid-1970s that they eclipsed the content of the exhibition. However, Grossvater is perhaps worthy of deeper investigation and consideration. Arguably the installation was a personal meditation on the important familial figure, the brave immigrant who built a business and reputation as a master coiffeur from nothing, or a gesture of personal respect and mourning. Perhaps the exhibition was a feat of curatorial innovation, an arresting and unique glimpse of the evasive, heavenly museum of obsessions,5 therefore more about art and exhibitions, than Etienne Szeemann the person. However, if the exhibition is interpreted fully, the grandfather comes to stand for more than what he represented for the curator personally; furthermore, the exhibition offers more than institutional critique. Indeed, perhaps Szeemann mined the particular, personal story of his own family member to make a statement about a more general Swiss or European condition. To understand that message, however, the viewer is required to delve into the cringe-inducing sentimentality of the content and move beyond the urge for premature dismissal. In an attempt to read meaning in the exhibition, then, let us at least briefly acknowledge the installation itself and key moments from the named subjects life story, including why he left his home country and settled in Switzerland. Let us also consider elements as small as the exhibition title, as seemingly superfluous as the guests invited to the opening, yet as complex as the contemporaneous socio-political realities of 1970s Europe. According to Szeemanns exhibition leaflet, the installation
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was a composition of objects supporting several themes. He enumerates these in the exhibition text: Tree of Origin, Grandmother, Grandfathers Roots in Austria-Hungary, Bern and Switzerland, Grandfathers Occupation (the years of wandering and learning, his own businesses, his printed matter, honors and distinctions), Grandfathers Relationship to Money, Grandfathers Role Models, Grandparents homes, Grandfathers Contribution to the Triumph of Beauty, and finally, though somewhat cryptically, What the Others Say.6 Only some of these themes, especially Occupation, are represented in the surviving installation photographs, whereas others may have been apparent in his grandfathers memoirs or other, possibly undocumented, portions of the installation. Regardless, Szeemann is careful to clarify that the exhibition is neither meant to be a literal representation of how his grandfather lived, nor an exact retelling of his life story, but rather an interpretation of an atmosphere, attitude, and a life lived. At a remove from the reality of the grandfathers experience, the grandson could only attempt to offer his own perspective. He covered the walls of the rooms with advertisements and framed pictures, he placed mannequins in unlikely arrangements that rendered them assemblages, and he piled books and diaries on tables for visitors to peruse. Harald Szeemanns grandfather had an interesting life. Istvan (later, Etienne) Szeemann was born in Disd (a small town in Pest County) in 1873, the same year that Buda, buda, and Pest were united into todays Hungarian capital Budapest, less than 10 miles away from his hometown.7 Following the failed Hungarian democratic revolution in 1848, the country had been subsumed into the AustroHungarian Empire, in which under the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph it thrived economically but suffered enforced Germanization and cultural oppression. Disd might have provided a particularly difficult setting for Hungarians, as
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the majority of the population was made up of Swabians (Southern Germans) until the end of World War II, at which point they were chased out of the country. Coming of age during the large Hungarian emigration wave of 18801915,8 it is not surprising that Istvan departed his small town9 to pursue capitalist dreams abroad. As is often the case with other groups of immigrants, one can deduce with some certainty the economic class of the family depending on when the Magyar left his country: prior to 1880, many Hungarian emigrants were highly educated academics and professors; during the great wave (during which Istvan left), they were most often unskilled or semiskilled workers from rural areas, who moved to urban settings looking for employment; and around World War II, many were highly skilled professionals like doctors and lawyers.10 Istvan, the poor, hungry boy, as his grandson writes, traveled through many countries including Romania, Greece, and Turkey, and throughout Western Europe, including Vienna, Carlsbad, and Paris, among other cities. As the family story goes, Istvans affections for the Swiss were sown when, in London, with only half a penny in his pocket, he was offered accommodation by a Swiss woman. He returned the favor by making her a hair piece, for which she was eternally grateful.11 There is no doubt that Etienne Szeemann was, in the eyes of his loving family, a colorful character. Little like Napoleon, decent, enchanting, bulky, and stubborn all in one, he fought his way through the world, writes Szeemann in his exhibition leaflet. He was a tough, unstoppable hair artist who didnt shy away from industrial espionage; he used to spy on the famous haircurler Marcels Vienna demonstrations through a keyhole. In 1904the same year that Harald Szeemanns father was bornthe traveler and his wife, Viennese-born Bohemian Leontine Drtilek (eventually the curators grandmother), settled permanently in Bern, where he opened
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his first salon. Whereas Switzerland had been predominantly a country of emigration in the mid-1800s, by the turn of the century it became a destination for various European immigrant groups. By the start of World War I in 1914, nearly fifteen percent of the entire population was made up of foreigners.12 (The Szeemanns gained Swiss citizenship in 1919.) Having left Hungary during a large emigration wave, and settled in Switzerland during an equally significant immigration trend, Istvan Szeemanns personal history might have been analogous to numerous Swiss family stories. In his exhibition text for Grossvater, Szeemann conjectures that a particularly patriotic object, made by the enthusiastic immigrant, must have been created around the time this young family settled in their chosen city: a Swiss emblem made of felt and dyed black, red, and bleached white hair from salon clients. Not unlike his own characteristic installations, the curator recalls his grandfathers idiosyncratic mounting of the emblem above a mirror bearing an advertising slogan for a popular herbal mouthwash. Etienne Szeemanns enthusiasm for his trade was, if with some insistence, inherited by Haralds father and uncle. His grandchildren were afforded a freedom never enjoyed by his immediate progeny. The curator writes, [Grandfathers] principal interest was the grandchildren, so he visited every exhibition Doctor Harryas my grandmother called me organized at the Kunsthalle. Dressed in his Sunday best, kissing the hands of the ladies, he was the doyen of the vernissages.13 Here, in a touching retelling of Etienne Szeemanns life and loves, the curator offers nostalgic ruminations on his grandfathers genuine displays of support and old-fashioned style, somewhat out of place in his grandsons 1960s art world, though undeniably charming. Seemingly Szeemann made choices about his invited audiences as deliberately as he chose the artists and thinkers that were included in his exhibitions and catalogues. No doubt he
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considered his grandfathers attendance at When Attitudes Become Form as yet another example of concept, situation, or information, as the subtitle for the show suggests. Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, and Etienne Szeemann in one space together would create an inspired collision of distinct worldviews, all of with which the curator could presumably align himself to varying degrees. Similarly, we might read great intention in the selection of guests that the curator invited to Grossvater. Wealthy former clients of his grandfather as well as accomplished contemporary artists filled the apartment on the night of the opening. In recalling the evening, Szeemann writes that it, was attended not only by the ladies whose hair my grandfather had done but also by Sigmar Polke, Michael Buthe, Katharina Sieverding, Christian Boltanski, Mario and Marisa Merz, Udo Kier, and many other artists. It was an almost orgiastic night in my grandparents furniture.14 Reminiscing about the opening as a pagan sensual indulgence, Szeemann reveals the taboo of mixing social classes. Was the bacchanal party itself an anti-class gesture? By juxtaposing these distinct 1970s audiences with the disappearing generation of his grandfather, Szeemann proclaims, at least for his peers, the end of class and national hierarchies. Indeed, he seems to enjoy the tension between his grandfathers former clients, and the intelligentsia of his own moment and generation. Accepted into the art world by his peers, Harald Szeemann was nevertheless discriminated against by the Bern aristocracy. In the introduction to the catalogue raisonn Harald Szeeman: with by through because towards despite, Szeemann recalls with amusement a certain landlady, Mme. De Meuron, and her reaction to his familial heritage. The elderly, aristocratic woman interrogated him, What did your grandfather do? she asked. My answer: But you know him. He is a matre-coiffeur. And your father? Same
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answer. And you are a museum director. What disorder! Amused at her distaste for the mixing of classes, he goodheartedly mocks the member[s] of the ancien rgime and what for them was obviously a scandalous defiance of genealogical predestination...15 By inviting the Mme. De Meurons of the world to the opening of Grossvater, Szeemann amplifies this separation of classes, and in a shock tactic mixes groups of people to make an emphatic political point that seems to have gone largely undetected at the time. The proud ladies and the nonconformist artists were surely invited to the opening to participate, to sit among the furniture as Szeemann writes, as props and elements of the exhibition itself. For it was not until the room filled with these characters that the objects took on their multifarious meanings. In addition to Istvan Szeemanns humble Hungarian beginnings at the end of the 19th century in Disd, it is important not to overlook Hungarys place in Europe at the time of the exhibition. By the 1970s, the widespread internal disillusionment with the Soviet vision had begun to be understood in the West: this dream was not going to come true. Hungary, following the 1956 Revolution against the harsh policies of Stalinism, entered the so-called Kdr Era, named after moderate communist leader Jnos Kdr. By the time of the exhibition, Kdrs country was already practicing a hybrid capitalist-socialist economythe Goulash Economy, as some pungently described it16and came to be knownfor the relative availability of foreign and domestic goods, and its improved human rights recordas the happiest barrack in the Eastern bloc.17 Meanwhile in the West, Szeemann was experiencing firsthand the impact of changes in Swiss politics. Following the controversial 1969 exhibitions When Attitudes Become Form and Friends and Friends of Friends at the Kunsthalle Bern, and devoid of patience for the stultifying Kunsthalle artist
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board, Szeemann decided to work as an independent exhibition-maker, starting what he called the Agentur fr Geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor). He outlined his process as such: I have an idea. I hire myself, as an Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor, to realize the idea. [...] Since the decision is ultimately passed down to me by the agency, and because I am the agency, I accept the commission to carry out my idea.18 Although his text describing the Agency is satirical, Szeemann put a great deal of thought into the endeavor. His desire for creative independence was not merely rooted in the hope of freeing himself from the exhibition halls bureaucracy; there were other political motivations. It was during that period, he said years later, that the hostility to foreign workers began to manifest itself; a political party was even founded to lower the number of foreigners in Switzerland. I was attacked since my name was not Swiss but Hungarian. In response, I founded the Agentur fr Geistige Gastarbeit, which was a political statement since the Italian, Turkish, and Spanish workers in Switzerland were called guest workers.19 Following the Second World War, Switzerland had begun to actively recruit construction and factory laborers from Italy, and starting in the 1960s, from Spain. Implementing what was called a rotation model, the Swiss laws encouraged only temporary settlement. The required residence period for a guest worker was increased from five to ten years for the procuring of a permanent residency permit, and restrictive family reunification policies were implemented. As Switzerland enjoyed an economic boom in the 1960s the laws were not strictly adhered to by the government, but the oil crisis in 1973 rendered many foreigners unwanted, and large numbers of unemployed guest workers were deported. Around the time Szeemann was conceptualizing his Agency, the reviving Swiss economy was again starting to attract workers from Portugal and Turkey, as well
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as from Spain and Italy,20 something that might have been looked upon with apprehension by some Swiss nationals. Furthermore, Agency for Intellectual Guest Labor is alternately translated as Agency for Spiritual Guest Labor. By offering, under the guise of an Eastern European immigrant, his spiritual expertise, Szeemann sarcastically acknowledges the primitivist myth of a transformative alterity.21 The political temperature in Switzerlandthe small country otherwise known for its political neutrality, decentralized government, and ethnic and linguistic diversityresulted in Szeemann feeling that he was being discriminated against for his Hungarian roots. All this despite the fact that, as was the case with his grandfather, people who emigrate in search of a better life are often, when it comes to their adopted nations, among the most patriotic, as was demonstrated in Szeemanns case by the creation of the national symbol from collected clients hair clippings. Keenly attuned to the Swiss politics of the late 1960s, Harald Szeemann consciously played with his familial history by calling himself a guest worker who offered spiritual labor from theromantically speaking, both less civilized and more authenticEast. Finally, let us consider the exhibition title: Grossvaterein Pionier wie wir. Grandfather Etienne, with all his quirks and old-fashionedness, particular yet charged with representing an entire older generation, is an ancestor and predecessor. Distanced by time and culture, he is nevertheless undeniably linked to the present: without him, Szeemanns generation (who made up much of the audience of the exhibition) would not exist. Ein Pionier: a Magyar immigrant, workingclass turned small-businessman, a Western success, he is someone who paved the way for his family. Traveling throughout Europe, his rootlessness was not unlike the itinerant nature of his future international curator grandsons approach to exploring the art field and pioneering new ways of exhibiting. But perhaps most importantly, let us
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consider wie wir, like us. The titular us identifies a generation, if not perhaps a specific social milieu. It is compelling to consider that the term might include everyone who attended the exhibition, aristocratic ladies and bohemian artists alike. Notably, us is an ambiguous term because it changes direction depending on who is speaking, and is variably inclusive. Undoubtedly Szeemann reaped pleasure from its slipperiness: perhaps us narrowly points to his generation, born in the 1930s, or alternately to cultural producers, artists and exhibition-makers, or maybe to the postmodern society of 1970s Bern, where the exhibition took place. Finally, us conceivably delineates a new, classless intelligentsia, who sought to look beyond national borders and familial rankings. Regardless, us is not exclusive, but rather a term loose enough to contain all of these groups, and inviting enough that it can accommodate new and future members. The effect of the exhibition, when considering the relationship of the title to the curated audience, the contemporaneous relationship between Western European capitalism and Soviet socialism, and Switzerlands attitude toward immigrant workers, is that the specific and local story of one person, Etienne Szeemann, points to the complex European realities of the moment. Perhaps the curators role in creating this environment installation is not that of curator-artist, but curator-ethnographer. Indeed, through the analysis of his own family member performed within the parameters of a small exhibition, Szeemann reveals to his audience the ambiguities among the work of the hairdresser and the curator, the politics of capitalism and socialism, as well as the specific realities of Hungarian and Swiss cultures. Through this self-ethnography,22 contained within the parameters of a physically small exhibition, Szeemann offers a culturally transgressive social critique that simultaneously and succinctly addresses the politics of class, economics, and cultural otherness.
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Installation view, Live in Your HeadWhen Attitudes Become FormWorks, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information, Kunsthalle Bern, 1969. Works by Alghiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Bob Flanagan

Live in Your Head: Attitudes of Arte Povera Katie Hood Morgan

In this essay I will take a closer look at the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, focusing in on the large grouping of Arte Povera artists included. I will review the respective manifestos of Szeemann and Arte Povera, as represented in the writings of Germano Celant and the artists in question. I examine the driving forces behind these two projects, the Attitudes exhibition and the Arte Povera movement (for lack of a better word). What are the political commitments of Celant, Szeemann, and the Arte Povera artists? Where do they diverge or converge? I am also interested in the political moment in which the Arte Povera artists, or the poveristi, were working and in which Szeemann was pulling together his exhibition. Szeemanns diary for Attitudes begins one month after the chaos of May 1968 in France and the exhibition was developed during a period of intense social unrest worldwide. Is it possible to pin down Szeemanns politics or even his level of criticality? To what extent does his inclusion of eleven Arte Povera artists implicitly indicate his alliance with their political intentions? As a running thread throughout, I consider perceptions of what the role of the artist is meant to be in a time of political upheaval. The phrase arte povera first appeared in a text accompanying the exhibition Arte povera e IM Spazio, curated by Germano Celant. He is widely recognized as actively inventing himself alongside identifying Arte Povera as a movement. Celant wrote several manifestolike texts defining Arte Povera, partially by describing what it was not, but also making strong claims for the major goals these artists had in common.
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On view at the Bern Kunsthalle in March and April, 1969, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form is one of Szeemanns most well-known and controversial exhibitions. Reviewers were alternately bemused, excited, and disgusted. Although eleven artists affiliated with Arte Povera were included in Attitudes, Ive chosen to focus on threeGiovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, and Mario Merzwho were favorites of Celant and whose work Ive been able to identify in the available installation shots. I will consider their work in the context of some of the larger aesthetic and political aims of Arte Povera, the Attitudes exhibition, and by extension Szeemanns curatorial practice. I perceive Szeemanns catalogue for the show and Celants essays about Arte Povera as manifesto-like proposals promoting their aesthetic priorities. In their texts, Szeemann and Celant are searching for language that will incorporate the projects of artists with similar artistic goals and aesthetic sensibilities. The similarities in their writings make for interesting comparisons. Which is to say that its important to gain a sense of the political moment during which these artists and curators were working. May 1968 was a time of great political upheaval, worldwide, sparked by events in Paris. Following months of student free speech demonstrations, courses were suspended at the University of Paris at Nanterre and the Sorbonne. On May 3, 20,000 students and teachers marched to protest these closures, and on May 13 they were joined by thousands of workers after a general strike was declared by the three major workers unions. The actions of May 1968 are generally considered a political failure for the protesters, but they had an enormous social impact. The government and polices heavy-handed reaction brought a wave of sympathy for the strikers and
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young people became increasingly disillusioned with liberal politics. There was also significant turmoil in Italy, especially in Turin, a huge working-class industrial center, where many of the Arte Povera artists were based. September 1969 in Northern Italy is referred to as the Autunno Caldo (Hot Autumn) during which groups of workers rallied for better wages, bypassing government and the unions in favor of direct action. The ideology of operaismo, or workerism, is generally believed to have originated with the Fiat factory strikes in Turin. This philosophy arose out of socialism and came to be known as autonomism as these ideas were expanded to include non-workers. Political philosopher Antonio Negri was a leading proponent of operaismo in the 1960s and wrote in 2000:
Operaismo builds on Marxs claim that capital reacts to the struggles of the working class; the working class is active and capital reactive. Operaismo takes this as its fundamental axiom: the struggles of the working class precede and prefigure the successive re-structurations of capital.1

The emphasis here is on self-organization outside of traditional structures, hence the workers demonstrations without the support or involvement of government, unions, or political parties. The workers in Turin employed strategies of resistance that were in direct opposition to capitalist efficiency, such as absenteeism and slow working. Like other socialists, autonomists saw class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class. In addition to white- and blue-collar workers, autonomists also advocated for students, the unemployed, and homemakers, groups traditionally left out of union representation.2 In the aftermath of the Fiat strikes, industry throughout Italy was crippled for nearly
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two years. It is inconceivable that the events of the late60s did not impact the work and ideas of the Arte Povera artists and in fact, their work is defined by and arises directly out of this moment. The primacy of Celants voice in any discussion about Arte Povera can be a bit off-putting and I feel that there is more to be done to counteract the dominance of his writings. Many of Celants writings, in accordance with trends of the time, read like utopian manifestos of liberation from the social function of art and the commercial/cultural system. He describes the Arte Povera artist as wanting to feel his vitality in order not to feel that he is a solitary vital individual. He does not accept cultural control (artistic, intellectual, etc.) that suggests slavishness (spectator, public, etc.) as a pattern of values.3 The direct engagement of the artist and viewer and a sense of solidarity are essential here. Connections with the struggles going on outside the art world are apparent and are reminiscent of calls for solidarity among students and workers, united in a common cause. Whether in art or political struggle, there should be no bystanders. Celant stressed the dematerialization of art (and the foregrounding of concept and artistic process) as a way to uproot the art system through decommodification, identifying this strategy in the works of the Arte Povera artists.4 In Celants Notes For a Guerrilla War, (Flash Art, November 1967), Anselmo and Merz are added to Celants original roster of Arte Povera artists, established in the text for his Arte povera IM Spazio exhibition two months earlier. In this later text, Celant sees two alternatives to what he perceives as a world dominated by inventions and technological limitations: artists can either assimilate or actively work toward the free self-projection of human activity.5
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[His new attitude] leads the artist to shift his position continuously, to throw off the clich that society has attached to him. The artist, who was exploited before, now becomes a guerrilla warrior. He wants to choose his battlefield, to possess the advantages of mobility, to make surprise attacks and not vice versa.6

Referring to the attitudes promoted by his Arte Povera artists, Celant argues here for a continuous shifting of the artists position to allow him to operate as a mobile and agile guerilla warrior. These strong metaphors of warfare are interesting. Is Celant really advocating artistic agonism, or art that aggressively makes the hegemonic struggle visible? The main goals of Arte Povera as outlined by Celant include breaking down the barrier between art and life, making art more democratic, and moving outside the gallery. Celant saw the gallery as a place for launching projects, not a repository for finished objects whose meaning is closed off. He argues for an understanding of alternative uses of materials and the disruption of the art world system. In Notes For a Guerrilla War, Celant goes on to advocate existential precariousness as a constantly shifting state of being that protects us from complacency and forces us to continuously re-examine our beliefs and claims.7 Celant wanted to bring disparate, but similar, artistic communities together. (At the time, it was difficult to bring Italians from different cities together, let alone find a gallery to host such an exhibition, due to intense regionalism.) Arte Povera has been criticized for the heterogeneity of its artists and the works they produced; Richard Lumley derides Arte Povera as incoherence and inconsistency theorized as practices and attitudes.8 Celant acknowledged this briefly in his essay Stating That, in which he argues that his writing on Arte Povera does not aspire
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to be a unique definition of works of art, and that he realizes it furnishes only a special aspect of the infinite charge that can be found in the same works...9 He seems to recognize the heterogeneity of the art and artists he has brought together in the guise of a movement. These criticisms sound very similar to those leveled at Szeemann after Attitudes. Szeemann, however, did not explicitly refer to the politics of his chosen artists nor did he make any reference to the political climate of that time. His catalogue essay for Attitudes takes a different approach to bringing artists together under a common, if loosely defined, set of goals. He seems to embrace heterogeneity without needing to attach a label. He wrote in the essay:
The lack of a real centre has persuaded increasing numbers of artists to remain in their hometowns and to work against all the ideas and principles of the society in which they found themselves. Evident at the same time is the desire to break down the triangle in which art operates the studio, gallery, and museum.10

We can perceive similar ideals in Celants writings. Szeemann refers to the lack of a real centre, which I take to refer to a fractured and heterogeneous art world as well as the tumultuous state of politics in Europe. This idea of working against sounds characteristically antagonistic and he appears to advocate a distinct level of criticality among the artists in the exhibition. The common threads he isolates among the artists in the exhibition include freedom from the object and foregrounding process instead of result. [The artists] want the artistic process to be visible within the final product and in the exhibition. Szeemann places quotes around exhibition to apparently refer to the inappropriateness of this term as applied to the work of certain artists as well as to his own unconventional curatorial practice.
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The exhibition was criticized at the time for a lack of focus. Select art review headlines include: Live in the Headand everything becomes art. Heap of Manure Completes Kunsthalle Exhibition (Berner Tagblatt), Attitudes without Form: The Bern Kunsthalle as a Garbage Dump (National-Zeitung), and Poor, Amorphous, Anarchistic (Sddeutsche Zeitung).11 Its true that images of the exhibition convey the impression of disjointedness and clutter, and the vague language of the catalogue essay merely outlines the loose set of values that the artists share, rather than delivering the bold, definitive curatorial statement that we might expect. Its possible that Szeemanns chosen exhibition form, with its generous, seemingly all-inclusive roster, intends to embrace this heterogeneity, this lack of a center. This approach projects a vision of the curator as facilitator with intentionally flexible and variable politics in the name of egalitarianism. Szeemann thus represents the slippery cultural and political moment through the exhibitions lack of a center or singular focus. I want to take a closer look at a few select artworks that I was able to identify in the available Attitudes installation shots. In Mario Merzs Sit-in (1968), an iron structure has been filled with wax and covered with wire mesh. The words sit in are written in neon and laid on top of the wax, softening it, and sinking in slightly. The work has been interpreted as a commentary on the futility of political action and exploration and a questioning of the sit-in as form of protest.12 The words directly link the work to the contemporary socio-political climate and resonate with other works of the artist from this period involving text, including Solitario solidale (Solitary Solidarity) and Che fare? (What is to be done?). Igloo con Albero (1969) is featured prominently in many of the installation photographs for Attitudes. Merzs
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igloos express his pre-occupation with the fundamentals of human existence: shelter, food, and mans relationship to nature. This structure is at once a pre-historic and postapocalyptic protective zone. Today shelter has an added significance considering the political climate and the widespread destruction in urban centers. Igloos project an image of survival and humans co-existing with the natural world. Knowing Merzs political awareness, the igloo could provide shelter from capitalist strictures and the chaos of political upheaval as well as the natural elements. Alighiero Boettis Me Sunbathing in Turin on January 19, 1968 (1968) is a schematic of his body made with balls of quick-drying cement that he crushed in his fist and laid on the ground. The work is a new take on the self-portrait, which emphasizes the action taken on the material by the artist. A butterfly on the figures nose contrasts with the texture and quality of the cement and mirrors the relationship between chance and design.13 Tensione (1968) by Giovanni Anselmo achieves the dematerialization that Celant so emphasized in his writing. The ends of a long strip of leather are embedded in a block of cement with the loop of free material twisted tightly and held fast by a thick wooden dowel-rod braced against the wall. Dematerialization is realized here in an opening up towards an experience with the audience; of course these forces of tension cannot be seen, only their effects can be perceived and imagined. The subject of this work is literally the tension between materials. Anselmo has written that he wants to work within the heart of reality, indicating his desire for his artworks to transcend the object and the material.14 It can be no accident that the main values of Arte Povera align so closely with those of operaismo. Both advocated a subversion of consumerism and an emphasis on labor. New strategies of labor resistance were in development
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concurrently with new strategies of representation. Hans Haacke wrote in 1969: A sculpture that physically reacts to its environment and/or affects its surroundings is no longer to be regarded as an object ... it thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a system of interdependent processes [...] A system is not imagined, it is real.15 Perhaps this is a more accurate description of the artworks I have addressed here. In the work of Anselmo, Boetti, Merz and many other poveristi, the constraints of the objects form are overthrown by the works impact on the immediate environment. It may be a stretch, but I see this impetus as linked to these artists desires to rise above the political turmoil, the backlash of government repression. They disrupt the traditional commodification of the object, pushing back against and in some cases destroying the established hegemonic ordering of the art world. The triangle may not have been broken down, but it was definitely turned on its side and analyzed critically. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1934 on the role of the artist in an age of political upheaval. He firmly advocated for reflection, not just reproduction, in which the viewer/reader/spectator is implicated in the work and made into a co-worker, rather than remaining passive and removed.16 In their writings, both Szeemann and Celant promote direct experience and presentation over the merely representative. Likewise, although the artists of Arte Povera may not have realized their more radical goals, they succeeded in promoting a more active engagement with art and the political environment.

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How To Move Forward: On Rudolf Laban at Monte Verit Nicole Cromartie

The following texts are excerpts from the narrative script accompanying the How to Move Forward slide presentation, which aimed to present Rudolf Laban (18791958), an early 20th century dancer, choreographer, and theoretician who appeared in two of Harald Szeemanns exhibitions: Monte Verit, mounted at various venues in central Europe in 197879, and The Tendency towards a Total Artwork, staged first at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1983. A study of Labans practice at Monte Verit will illuminate not only the role of dance in Szeemanns exhibitions, but also the central role of education, performance, and physical expression in the practice of the utopian gesamtkunstwerk. In 1900, businessman Henry Oedenkoven purchased a hillside in Ascona, Switzerland to establish a colony of people seeking an alternative lifestyle.1 The site became a curative resort and asylum in early 20th century Europe. Many of the artists and thinkers there participated in Monte Verits School for Arts, or School of all the Arts of Life which served as the structure for their daily routine.2

Ascona, Monte Verit, 1913 L/F/1/13 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Rudolf Laban was born in Bratislava, Austria-Hungary in 1879, and in 1900 moved to Paris to study graphic arts and architecture. The leaders of the Monte Verit community were familiar with his classes in Munich and asked him to serve as director of the new School of all the Arts of Life.3 Laban brought his students from Munich in the summer of 1913 and began teaching movement outdoors for the school. Laban served as director and instructor at Monte Verit until 1917.

Rudolf Laban in 1907, after the death of his wife, Martha L/F/1/11 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Laban formulated four divisions of his curriculum: Bewegungskunst, or Movement art, encompassed all outdoor body movement including labor in the garden, participation in dances and plays, as well as the choreography of movement;4 Wortkunst, or Word art, included discussions, lectures, and composition; Tonkunst, or Tone art, was for vocal and instrumental music; and Formkunst,literally translated, Form artis the study of applied art, architecture, and composition in art.5

Rudolf Laban, early 1920s L/F/2/38 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Laban was directly involved with teaching Bewegungskunst: he led daily warm-ups, directed improvisation sessions and arranged movement choirs. These photographs capture moments of improvisational exercise. Each student is doing something different, yet they seem to be responding to each others movements. Improvisation was more important to Laban than choreography. Rather than imposing a rigid, set style or technique like ballet, his dancers emphasized spontaneous, sympathetic movement. Accordingly Labans classes were often conducted without clothes or with loosely wrapped fabric around the body, to allow the greatest freedom of movement. Outdoors in Monte Verit, the participants movements responded to the natural world rather than the expectations of an audience. Labans movement choirs started with his own core group of dancers but also incorporated other artists from the Monte Verit community. Laban believed in the importance of all types of people moving together in unison. The movement choirs were choreographed so that each person within the group was doing the same movement at the same time, but this choreography often came out of his guided improvisational classes. Thus, even in his choreography, Laban allowed the students to determine what movements they executed.

Ascona, 1917 L/F/2/34 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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After leaving Monte Verit, Laban published his influential Kinetographie Laban (1928), in which he put forward Labanotation, a system of graphic symbols used to record human motion, but not tied to a specific technique, person, or system of movement. Once a reader understands how to interpret the symbols, almost anyone can perform the movement they describe; like music notation, the symbols are universal. Additionally, Labanotation can also record performances. The first published example of Labanotation was produced in 1928 for Martha Graham, an American modern dancer and choreographer fiercely against photographic or filmic documentation of her performances. Labanotation made recreation of her dances possible.

Kinetographie Laban Rudolf Laban on publication of his notation system in 1928 L/F/1/38 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Labanotation describes the direction of movement, the part of the body doing the movement, the level, or elevation, of movement (meaning how far it is off the floor), and the length of time it takes to do the movement. There is a staff, as in Western musical notation, but it is read from bottom to top. The geometric shapes on the staff represent directions of movement. Where the shape is placed on the staff, indicates which body part is performing the action.

Excerpt from page 3 of a Labanotation score of Titan, a choreographic work by Rudolf Laban L/F/78/4 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Even with the normalization of recording technology in dance, Labans notation system is still used today. Labanotation activity is centered in the Dance Notation Bureau, which was founded 1940 in New York. It was established to help choreographers own their work as well as to have their work staged internationally. The organization independently notates modern dance and publishes collections of choreography for purchase. More recently they have been working to develop software called LabanDancer that could recognize movement of the human body on a computer and translate it into notation.6 The years Laban spent at Monte Verit laid the foundation for his practice and system of notation. Later, as the director of the School for Arts, he prioritized the routine of class rather than performance, experimented with swinging scale warm ups, movement choirs, and improvisation for the development of movement. The rest of his career was based on these developments he formulated while he was in Monte Verit teaching dancers and residents. Subsequently, Laban remained in Switzerland and established the Art of Movement School in Zurich,7 which is considered his most significant contribution to Modern Dance.

The Studio 19531954 and students writing and reading dance notation Kinetography Laban, undated L/F/2/67 & L/F/4/35 From the Rudolf Laban Archive held at the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

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Coming to Terms: Bazon Brocks Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk Sharon Lerner

I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION

In 1983, Bazon Brock wrote Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Pathosformel und Energiesymbole fr die Einheit von Denken, Wollen und Knnen (The Tendency towards the Total Work. Emotional formulas and energetic symbols of the unity between Thought, Will and Savoir Faire), as one of the opening essays that appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Europische Utopien seit 1800 curated by Harald Szeeman that same year.1 The present work consists of a critical annotated translation from German into English of the first section of the essay. In particular, it focuses on Section A, entitled First Passage, which comprises three sub-sections divided as follows: 1) A general introduction which proposes a way to understand the historical development of the terms Gesamtkunstwerk (translated as Total Work), Totalkunst (Total Art) and Totalitarismus (Totalitarianism). 2) A section entitled First Summary, in which the abstract formulations exposed in the first section are traced back to Wagner and his ideas of a Total Work, the development of leitmotifs and the use of Topoi. After which Brock returns to emphasize the eventual unfolding of the term as Total Art and Totalitarianism. 3) A small interstitial text (a coda of sorts to Section A) entitled Taschenpanorama which I translate as Pocket Panorama, where Brock refers directly to Szeemanns exhibition and suggests some keys for how to approach and understand it. The second section of the essay, namely Section B (Second Passage), has not been translated here; however
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there will be an eventual reference to it included in the [Notes, pp. 8895] to this translation. In this second section, Brock concentrates on two particular examples of Total Works: Hans-Jrgen Syberbergs Hitlerein Film aus Deutschland (Our Hitler, 1977) and Anselm Kiefers Unternehmen Seelwe I (1975).2 There, Brock applies many of the concepts he sketched more abstractly in Section A, in particular the notion of Total Art as a secondary iteration of the general concept of Total Work and its possibilities in modern art practices.3 Besides the actual translation of Brocks essay, this essay includes some references for the translation in the form of endnotes. These endnotes, although general and partly fragmented, aim to present the reader with a glimpse of the interpretative process of the translation, hinting towards ways of contextualizing certain terms otherwise left loose. Whether as a sort of conceptual pun or due to reasons of argumentation, Brocks essay privileges the number three: through its overarching structure, through the repetition of certain key words, and finally even through its emphasis on religious concepts such as the Holy Trinity.4 My general introduction, endnotes and [Notes] offer a closer look at the text as a subject of study, and aim to provide some links that might be useful regarding some of the topics Brock addresses. However, it has to be noted that the translationas long as it implies a certain kind of interpretationrisks flattening out some of the levels of meaning implied by the original use of the German. As Brock stated in his 1977 text Aesthetics as Mediation,
To use words and terms not in accordance with their meaning in everyday language is problematic, however, it is often necessary. In general, there are several different meanings for every word or term. Every specific term may be considered an expression for a complex statement. Any
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given terminology can be transformed into colloquial language if the meaning of the statement inherent in the term is analyzed. Terms are names for meaningful statements; they can become independent of their original meaning and even differ very much from it.5

The risk of flattening out several layers of meaning in this translation is particularly evident due mainly to three reasons. The first corresponds to the vagueness with which Brock utilizes several terms that have a philosophical origin, without specifying exactly his particular intention.6 The second corresponds to the fact that Brock, in several instances of the text, refers to specific terms and concepts he has previously coined in other writings.7 This means that, to a certain extent, the text is partially auto-referential, or perhaps could be claimed to be. The third corresponds to the flexible character of the German language, which allows for the creation of new concepts by the simple joining of words, a characteristic that the English language more or less lacks. On the other hand, the text seems relatively lyrical and presents other particularities that are problematic for a straightforward translation. Among these it is worth mentioning the sudden insertion of whole passages in italics, which make the text resemble some kind of oratory or poetical declamation, and the frequent use of capitals and lists (again curiously enough the short lists are mainly in the tripartite form). These particularities of the text, although confusing, have been preserved as far as possible in the translation, in order to attempt to track their meaning or source. In general, the essay seems to me a passionate defense for the space of the Total Work in the realm of art practice. However, this defense is always accompanied by a warning about the risks of understanding hypothetical constructs literally, with the subsequent violent imposition
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of ideas of totality on the masses, which inevitably leads to totalitarian political regimes.
II. SOME GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT A GENERALIST:

Before confronting the actual essay, it is important briefly to contextualize its author in order to equip ourselves with some tools for its reading. Who is Bazon Brock? This is definitely a difficult question to answer, or perhaps in an ironic way a simple one. Bazon Brock (b. 1936) considers himself a generalist who operates in many different media such as performance art, education (mediation), critical writing (with a particular emphasis in alternative approaches to aesthetics), and history among many others. Brock has formally studied German philology, philosophy, art history, and political sciences as well as dramaturgy, and his most recent field of interest resides in neuronic aesthetics and imaging sciences. Above all, he considers himself an artist without oeuvre. 8 However, one thing seems certain: his written and performative work has been highly influential in the German context, even as this context is, at the same time, his main field of interest. Most of his texts circle around ideas regarding German culture, history, and identity. A statement like this becomes clearer if one looks at some of his writings such as The German-ness of German Design (derived from a talk given in a symposium in Denver),9 or at his multiple texts that aim to deal critically with art and National Socialism, like for example Art by command? (1991).10 In the late 60s Brock participated in (or at least collaborated with) the first Happenings, together with figures such as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Allan Kaprow.
() artists such as Wolf Vostell, Bazon Brock, and Joseph Beuys revived the potential of the European tradition of modernism by using a comprehensive social criticism that encompassed both art and life to set radical new priorities. Their
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works and efforts through Fluxus and beyond were a stimulating component of a wide-reaching social protest movement that would eventually explode violently in the second half of the 1960s.11

Brock was also involved with the critical development of video art in Germany at that time, and was therefore appointed by Szeemanntogether with Karl Heinz Kringsas the co-curator of the audiovisual sub-section, entitled The War of Images (BilderKrieg), at Documenta V. About this specific collaboration with Szeemann, Brock mentions that:
In 1972 I was responsible for defining sub-sections of d5 by devoting them to themes such as The war of Images, The claim of reality within Images, and The relationship between arts and images. Beyond this, I developed a version of The Visitors School as an action teaching with mixed media (technically realized by my assistant Jeannot). I started by offering The Visitors School for exhibition events like documenta in 1968 (d4) and I continued with special versions of visitor schools within documenta in 1977, 1982, 1992. All the participating artists were named by the different curators, but chosen by collective decisions and of course Harry Szeemann was the moderator-in-chief.12

Indeed, one of Brocks best known practices includes the implementation of Visitor Schools in exhibition contexts. Together with his series of teaching performances entitled Pleasure March through Theoretical Territory, these aim to reflect on his notions of aesthetics and their role in the reintegration of culture in everyday life. However, it may be more important for this particular essay to look at two of the terms he coined in the decade of the 60s, namely Negative Affirmation (which has also been translated as the Strategy of Affirmation) and Yes Revolution. Both of these are terms used to describe processes that he identified in different contexts
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including art, philosophy, and politics. These terms refer to certain kinds of affirmative practices that imply an exaggerated and radicalized affirmation (150%) of the object to be critiqued, therefore inverting the logic that sustains it originally. It will be important to revisit these terms at the end of the [Notes] in order to extend the comments regarding certain Total Art practices in the essay.

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The Tendency Towards the Total Work Bazon Brock

TRANSLATED BY SHARON LERNER

Pathosformeln (emotional formulas) and energetic symbols of the unity between Thought, Will and Savoir Faire A proposal for an agreement regarding the use of the terms Total Work, Total Art, and Totalitarianism
A. FIRST PASSAGE

If someone wished to see the particular features of European cultural ideas represented in a singular artistic concept, the only option would certainly have to be Total Work. The idea behind the word is older than its name. Unfortunately, it is not very clear which specific concept is actually implied by the use of the term. Which is not least why the idea of Total Work has assumed multiple forms, in which, over the past century, the Germans seem to have developed a particular interest. Of course, one should understand all cultures as being equally valuable and accomplished in this respect. All societies seek to provide their members an experience of a unified worldview. However, the particularities of these various conceptions of Totality are certainly very different. The few, obvious, commonalities of European cultures are bound together by common representations of ideas of wholeness, particularly in how they portray: gothic cathedrals, the University, and the idea of The State; and the unity of the world as:
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the creation of the Christian God, the field of activity1 of natural laws, and as the creation of Man. What is central to these European worldviews is the belief that certain individuals are in the position, through their personalities as well as through their actions, to be the bearers of these ideas of wholeness. The saint, the artistic and/or scientific genius, and the political leader are role-descriptions for these individuals. It must be recognized that we can no longer conceive of Saint, Genius, or Leader as universal men in the same way that they were understood in the Renaissance; that is to say, we can no longer understand them as the all-willing, all-knowing, and all-capable. Nevertheless, their individual importance will be determined according to the way in which they, as specialists, agree to contribute to allow the construction of overarching connections, the personal embodiment, and the general devotion to a whole, to become all powerful motivations. Therefore, the Saint, the Genius, and the Leader appear as curious characters ruled by an obsession, and so do those who follow them. The concept Total Work is primarily characterized by the obsession with which the individuals seek to realize: the image of a totality, the personal embodiment of the totality, and a general submission under a totality.
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The degree to which these ideas seek to be implemented, however, is decisive. The historical examples since the Middle Ages (since we are speaking about European culture) indisputably demonstrate that it is truly impossible for a single person to concurrently embody Saint, Genius, and Leader. The Abbot Suger of St. Denis, indeed, by conceiving vital design ideas for gothic cathedrals as heavenly Jerusalems, managed to become the adviser of a leader. However, he was never canonized like his adversary Bernard de Clairvaux, who for his part gave up on developing a contemporary representation of the unity of Gods creation and the work of men. Michelangelo, an artistic genius, created the unsurpassable conception of totality (The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel) for his time, and simultaneously himself embodied these thoughts. However, unlike the leader, he was very far from wanting to subjugate others to his vision. Louis XIV represented, through both his person and his role, the submission of the individual to the State, of which he was also the embodiment. However, he did not develop new concepts for an overarching connection, either through a philosophical system, or as an artistic depiction. All of this indicates that even the individuals with the biggest obsessions are not in a position to embody the unity of Thought, Will, and Savoir Faire in relation to an all-encompassing and superior totality. Furthermore, in those instances where this is tried, in the face of experience, obsession turns into violence against others. It becomes totalitarian, as the various examples of a Cola di Rienzi, a Robespierre, or even an Adolf Hitler show us. Only the Gestalt of the historical Jesus Christ and Buddha appear to have accomplished the concentration of the power of Thought, the courage to reconnect Thought to their own lives and to transmit it to others, without becoming
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totalitarian. Their followers could most often secure an allegiance to their role-models only by totalitarian means. The concept Total Work represents those who, despite all historical and principal attempts by individuals, keep alive the ancient dream. And this to the point of heroic ridiculousness. Or even presumed self-sacrifice. With the emotional gesture of the Nonetheless Since the Renaissance, people have understood artists as exemplary individuals. Their creativity resembles that of the almighty Christian God. Their craft represents the selfpreservation of humans through labor. Moreover, the result [Resultat] of creation and labor, the art work, elevated the artists level of prestige, since only a few men, namely artists, were capable of achieving such works. Nevertheless, the concept Total Work is not only limited to artists, and not even to the fine arts. Originally, the term Kunstwerk (work of art) was not only applicable to the results of the actions of artists. Testimony can be seen in the common expressions Kochkunst (cuisine), Kriegkunst (the art of war) and Heilkunst (healing arts). Moreover, all the individuals whose thought, will, and action compelled interest as particular and inimitable mediations of labor and creation, acted as artists. These could be creative entrepreneurs, artist-politicians or academic scientists. Their different conceptions of Total Work could be cultivated as scientific systematizations, as politicalideology constructs, or as models for economic processes. And, as artistic visions. We have, then, to think about Total Work conceptions in the economic-political realm, and the scientific and artistic spheres. And, in each of these spheres, we have to be attentive to the degree the accomplishment of Total Works is represented by particular historical examples.
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We want to understand through three lenses the term Total Work when individuals develop theoretical constructions of overarching connections: as figurative and epic representations, or as scientific systems, or as political utopia. Total Works exist, then, only as fictional greatness, as conceptual constructions brought to language. Insofar as Total Works raise demands for truthand they must when they claim to encompass a Totality their statements do not remain bound to their historical originatorsthey merely become anonymous as the truth itself through their extensive claim. They become narrations without an origin; they become myths, or at least, myth-like. WHAT IS TOTALITY? The bringing-into-language2 of Totality, and by extension Totality as a construction derived from human thinking, is a mythic narration. However, to think about Totality, and to enunciate it, presents us only with a primary layer. The secondary layer would be the embodiment of these images and thoughts regarding Totality, in effect incorporating them into the reality of our lives (the same way that saints do). The tertiary layer refers to the unalterable desire, to subjugate other, hopefully many if not all, men under a unique truth. Commonly, these last two stages of the unfolding of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk are known as: TOTAL ART (TOTALKUNST), and TOTALITARIANISM (TOTALITARISMUS). The totalitarian unfolding of the concept Total Works poses the rhetorical question: DO YOU WANT TOTALITY? The answer is already certain and can be proven only ritualistically. The rite (Ritus) is the consummated submission under the myth (Mythos) as an anonymous represen76

tation (Reprsentanz) of the overarching connections. Total Art (Totalkunst) poses the question: WHAT SHOULD TOTALITY DO? and replies: It should facilitate culture, without forcing any commitment through the imposition of totalitarian violence. Neither the identity of myth (Mythos), as the hypothetical construction of Totality, nor rite (Ritus) as the factual reality of the Totality, secure this allegiance, that would merely be the totalitarian realization of Total Work. Neither should rite be allowed to be a practical execution of the myth, nor the myth a rigid image of the rite. Culture has to mediate between a speculative image of the world, and the real course of life, because they are not, and should not be claimed as identical. If that were the case, then we could neither differentiate myth from the fixed idea, nor rite from delusional acting. However, one would miss the real issue, if one understood totalitarian attitudes towards lifemeaning the rituals of Totalitarianismgenerally as delusional acts; and if one simply wanted to understand the myths diluted in these rites as fixed ideas. This kind of interpretation was (and still is) destined to fail. One could expect with great probability that unfortunately, in the near future, many men will start to believe again that the solution to our economic and political crises could reside in directly realizing some sort of scientific, political, or artistic construction of a superior Totality. This would imply replicating a myth about Totality directly in the lives of the masses. The heroic pathos of the nevertheless (DennochPathos) already shrouds (umflorts) political, intellectual, and artistic statements about the conditions of world society. The interest in myths has increased dramatically without always making clear that such myths are only hypothetical constructions. It seems to be clear to everyone, that we tend
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to think in overarching connections. However, the relation of thought constructions to actual deeds still appears to be understood as a nave congruence between plan and execution. To deal with the concept Total Work, especially with its appearance as TOTAL ART and TOTALITARIANISM, could lead us to suggest other mediations between Thought (Gedanke) and Action (Tat).
FIRST SUMMARY/SYNOPSIS (ERSTE ZUSSAMMENFASSUNG)

One could be led to the assumption of having achieved the bringing-into-language of totality through the simultaneous use of all possible linguistic media and cultural techniques. In the artistic domain especially this is a widelyheld assumption, insofar as it is claimed that a Total Work is originated through the addition of these independent linguistic media and artistic techniques. But that is not exactly the case. Even a unique worklike a painting for examplecan develop a Total Work concept. However it is crucial that the work takes on the concept Total Work if it seeks to question and to demonstrate how human abilities combine to allow men to perceive themselves as well as their world, so that the experience of overarching connections is possible. It is above all crucial how this work reflects the relationship between mental constructions and actions. A Total Work is not its own realization. Instead, it is a postulate3 in the Gestalt of the Total Work that aims to understand the world as a unity, and the individual life as well as the lives of others in this context, against all historical experience and principal objections. However, in spite of negative experiences and these objections it is still possible to justify the concept Total Work. In order to do so, we have no
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choice other than to bring-into-language Totality in the form of hypothetical constructions. And, in doing so, it is of great importance that we remain conscious which status we accord utopias, myths, visions, and system-constructions. To that end, the activation of all our aptitudes for intellectual as well as sensorial perception is required. The history of the concept Total Work is bound to the discovery that each perceptual taskeven a work in one medium, such as painting, sculpture (Plastik), drawing or musical compositionstimulates all of our sensorial and intellectual perceptions at the same time. The notion that painting only stimulates the eye (or for that matter music the ear, sculpture the touch and architecture our spatial perception [Raumsinn]), does not correspond with the actual processes of human perception. The historically originated specialization of different disciplines (Gattungen) attempted to artificially isolate and channel the perceptual activities, in order to increase the individual sensorial and intellectual performance of perception. Richard Wagner was one of the artists who wanted to confront arts tendency to self-negation through renouncing pure effects.4 His musical drama aimed to develop the Total Work as a model for the future. Even if, as Wagner often admitted, the collaborative work of many highly specialized artists, like himself, had yet to be realized in his day. Therefore, he first had to ensure his own specialization in many different areas, in order to achieve the harmonization of different disciplines and media. He also had to try first, and alone, to elaborate an engaging world-view. Even though he was the historically identifiable originator of his world-view narratives, he thought that he could guarantee the decisive criterion for a binding character, by relying on narratives that had lost their originthat is to say myths, and presenting his narratives as poetry (Dichtung). The spirit of poetry surpasses
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(berschreitet) the subjectivity of the poet to the same extent that the poet succeeds in creating stories in which many people see their own will to live and their own world-views represented. Wagner attempted to answer the decisive question regarding the development of such a Total Work: he understood that in order to preserve the artistic act through the Total Work from dissolution into meaningless and empty technical virtuosity, and in order to excite in the audience an all-encompassing standard of effect, the audience itself had to assume a role in the concept of the Total Work. The audience had to be bound in a sense of community in the same way as the specialized artists had to unite for the Total Work. The community formed by audience participation in the Total Work could be achieved only if the audience, as well as the artists, were subjected to a compelling world-view. For this task, the Gesamtkunstwerker (Total Art Workers)and even Wagneroften referred to a fact that through neurophysiology has come into acceptance again, today. In contrast to the field of culture, the effects of specialization in the most advanced forms of life do not promote independence, but tend rather to enhance cooperative abilities. Highly developed forms of life with extreme specializations increase their adaptability, because individual and specialized functions can develop an infinite number of different partnerships. Wagner was correct in supposing that artistic specializations of particular disciplines (Gattungen) and media would not correspond to the actual processes of perception. Wagner was aware of what today is understood as synsthesia,5 namely the co-functioning of several perceptual organs and their functions even when only one perceptual organ is addressed. At his time, the most well known example of this phenomenon was the simultaneous activation of tone and
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color perception. Beethovens program music (A Gathering Storm) seemed to show that music could evoke complete picture-representations (Bildvorstellungen), or rather that it absolutely evoked them. These images were apparently accompanied, at the same time, by imprints, temperatures, smells, and tactile impressions generating something similar to an atmosphere and a mood. The ways in which individual perceptual organs cooperate and function are culturally reinforced. Their excludable unities are regarded as Topoi6 (summers afternoon, forest at night, early morning in the mountains, gray dawn, victorious heroic look). The so-called precarious set pieces of Wagnerian ideologyfrom anti-Semitism to the Resurrection through deathare particularly to be valued as Topoi. Such Topoi needed merely to be indicated in order to cause multiple perceptual sensations in the addressee. This stressed invocation of perceptual associations is something similar to an emotional formula (Pathosformel),7 whose complex integration Wagner termed a leitmotif. The artistic statement emphatically leads the addressee to his/her own sensory activity the closer pathetic formulas follow on each other. The fact that one today understands Wagner as the father of film scores (Filmmusik) lies in the fact that film scores are comprised almost exclusively of cumulative sequences of emotional formulas. Wagner integrated rather than added pathetic formulas into his musical structures. However, he attemptedand this is one of his crucial accomplishmentsto achieve this integration in a different way than his Italian colleagues. The latter integrated the pathetic formulas through the formation of melodies into superior Gestalt unities. Wagners leitmotif-technique led the formation of a continuum of pathetic formulas and their intertwining into what was perceived as a unified image by the public.
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Therefore, the transition from a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk to a Total Work of Art seems obvious. A 24 hour-long Wagnerian music drama implied a radical reduction of the distance between the action on the stage and the experience of the audience. In this way, the audience found itself immersed in a situation similar to a real experiment in time experience, although Wagner did not yet see this possibility. As the well-known dialogue between Parsifal and Gurnemarz confirms, Wagner insisted on the unity of the work, meaning the limitation and concrete restriction of the, in principle infinite, combination of emotional formulas. Parsifal says: Indeed, I barely walked, however I imagine myself quite far.8 To which Gurnemarz answers: You see, my son, time here becomes space.9 This is, on one level, an unsurpassably refined paralleling of the real event on the stage and its psychological processing into an experience of the world [Weltzussamenhanges]10 by the audience. A few steps on the stage could signify the experience of a large temporal distance. On another level, time here becomes space implies that, in principle, open and infinite experiential stimulations still depend on concrete spatial and temporal events on the stage. On a third level, the dialogue implies that each artistic work, even as Total Work, can only present us with the fiction of possibility in order to lock down something conceptually unstable, like narrative time experience. Totalitarianism attempts to realize all abstract functionslike narrationthat take place on the stage in a real arena. By contrast, Total Art departs from a specifically given arena of actionthe square meter of a canvas, a studio, a stage, or an experimental fieldin order to temporalize (verzeitlichen) this arena, i.e., to load it with historical and psychological content. The concept Total Work always attempts to counteract the drifting-apart of perceptual and reflective cultures.
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Total Works easily awake, nevertheless, the impression, or even the realized thought, of being an encompassing whole when they simultaneously stimulate all human faculties into sensuous and intellectual cognition in pursuit of: one Vision one all-encompassing Image one system of Thought As long as this process remains on the level of aesthetic appearances, there is nothing to object to. Whoever wants to transfer these processes (albeit with all the best and most humane intentions), outside theaters, music halls, universities and museums and into the everyday life of menin other words, whoever misunderstands Total Works as social and political instructionstransforms the hypothetically constructed connections into a Totality (Totalitt).11 It is then unavoidable to define, for example, the total State as Total Work. Totalitarianism arises from the desire to bind the utopias, visions, and systematic frameworks of the totality into the lived reality of men, while this lived reality is completely formed after this image of the whole. Whoever understands the Total Work in a literal sense (Wort-wortlich und Bild-Bildlich),12 and attempts accordingly to realize the utopias and systems of thought, will of necessity become totalitarian. Whoever finds speculations about totality to be only justified, has to become himself totalitarian, when these speculations are translated into the largest possible number of livesif he does not want anything other than to enforce these speculations against the limited and impoverished reality of conceivable human lives, in order to promote the happiness of mankind. Totalitarianism is almost always terror of virtue (Tugendterror).
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The third aspect of the concept Total Work, that we identify with the term TOTAL ART, is the here abstractly sketched relation between political utopias, the construction of philosophical systems and artistic visions on the one hand, as well as their complete realization as Totalitarianism on the other. Total art radicalizes the relationship between Fiction and Reality. Total Art demonstrates the consequences of literally transferring the ideas of Total Works (Wort und Bildglubig), into the lives of many, if not all, men. The means through which this radicalization is achieved is called Symptomverordnung.13 One tries to oppose the literal causes of Totalitarianism by taking them to dangerous extremes, until we become clearly aware of its cruel consequences. The Total Artist has proven himself affected to the point of self-destruction by these consequences. His work threatens to dissolve. For the Total Artist also transcends the sphere of the aesthetic appearances. However, unlike Totalitarianism, he does not attempt to subjugate others. Instead, he forces himself to mediate back myths into the context of his own life. The claim to reality of this mediation is similar to that of an experiment in the real (Realexperiment), which does not always guarantee the narrow restriction of the experimental field and a strict control of the means. These kinds of reality experiments are obviously the privileged form in which modern artists try to perform the mediation between speculation about Totality and submission to Totality. To which ideas of collectivity, wholeness, and totality could the terms Total Works (Total Work (of art)), Total Art (Totalkunst) and Totalitarianism (Totalitarismus) refer to today?
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Who are for them the bearers of the claim for uniformity, completeness and comprehensibility of worldviews and the contexts of life? According to the general way that ideas of overarching connections are understood today, one could use for the Total Works a model preferred by archeologists, which is apt for the visualization of a totality. Archeologists specifically are only confronted with fragments. The overarching connections to which these fragments could have belonged will be formulated by archeologists as hypothetical assumptions. Through these, one recognizes that the same fragments could have belonged to several different reconstructions of a historical living context. In fact, archeologists have developed very different reconstructions of worldviews and ways of life using the same historical fragments over the past hundred and fifty years. Archeologists who assumed they had found the only conclusive reconstruction even destroyed fragments in an attempt to make them fit definitively with their constructions. Contemporary archeologists, on the other hand, renounce this way of defining historical material in order to avoid damaging it in a totalitarian way through conservation. In this way the merely hypothetical and fictive character of the constructed overarching connections is accentuated. Nonetheless, one can only begin to do something with the historical fragments when one sees them in superior arrangements. Hypotheses and fictions, however, do not endow our historical understanding with a non-binding character, but rather increase the possibility of granting meaning to todays historical material. From our contemporary understanding of ecology, a type of totality could be demonstrated, one that has TOTAL ART at its foreground. Nature remains unable to be experienced as a comprehensive network of manifold of habitats
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that are at the same time related and, on the other hand, enclosed. Only the correlations of their smaller units can be experienced, especially through real experiments on restricted spaces and with restricted environments. The person performing the experiment is the constant in the experiment. The ideas of totality in TOTALITARIANISM can be seen today in the example of the comprehensive connections which form the basis of a federal railway timetable (Bundesbahnfahrplan). In this model, every single movement is measured in relation to all other movements. However, the type and the extent of such connections are prescribed as an abstract plan with the intention of rationalizing actual traffic movements with the plan. For the TOTAL WORK fixed vision, utopia, and systemconstruction (meaning the gestaltete work) bear the claim for a representation of a Totality. For TOTAL ART the SUBJECT of the reality experiment is the bearer of that claim. TOTALITARIANISM deliberately understands the LIVES (of the masses) as bearers of the claim for that Totality, because it is in the life of the masses that utopias aim to be realized.
POCKET-PANORAMA / TASCHENPANORAMA

A separate overview lists, in a loose way, examples for Total Works, Total Art actions and the totalitarian belief in plans (Planglubigkeit) that are included in the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk and in the catalogue. The range between the years 1800 and 1980 approximately delineates the historical framework. The 19th century is certainly the time when the development of concepts of Gesamtkunstwerke reached their peak. It is with
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Nietzsche, the Lebenphilosophen, and the first artist colonies, that Total ArtPraxis begins. After 1925, in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union, the most extreme attempts to date are undertaken in order to realize, through totalitarian means, the fictions of overarching connections in the everyday life of the masses. The overview has been conceived as a Panorama, in which visitors can establish their own visions, image associations and mental jumps. It is helpful to approach it with a horizontal look rather than a vertical one, since it is important for us to establish the different levels in the unfolding of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work) in all of them. As an exhibition, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk does not aim to be a Total Work (the Gesamtkunstwerk of Gesamtkunstwerke, The Total Work of Total Works, or the obsession of the culture mediator Harald Szeemann). Nor may the exhibition through totalitarian means overwhelm the visitor and give the impression of being a definite judgment about the meaning of the Total Work for the shaping of everyday life. In this way, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a demonstration of Total Art that is: attractive and distant, enticing (seductive) and yet withdrawn, revealing and cut off. Whoever today wants to experience a realized totalitarian Total Work should travel to the new Disneyland EPCOT Center or visit the centers of positivist liberal sciences (positiven wertfreien Wissenshaft), or go to the Parisian satellite cities. Whoever wants to experience a Total Work will be well-served by Wagner, the theoreticians of the Big Bang, or the organizers of all-night TV marathons. What is decisive in this exhibition is the THEMATIZATION of the concept Gesamtkunstwerk and not its REALIZATION.
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[Notes on] The Tendency Towards the Total Work Sharon Lerner

TRANSLATION OF THE TITLE AND KEY TERMS

The translation of the essays title (and the exhibition for that matter) presents us with a problem from the beginning. Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk could be translated in many different ways, such as The Search for the Total Work of Art, The Quest for the Total Art Work (which is the translation used by Julie Howell in the text that appeared in World Art Trends 1983/84. Copyright Jacques Legrand, Paris. Published 1984 by Harry N. Abrams, New York), or even The Tendency (Penchant) to the Synthesis of the Arts. As one can see the combinations are multiple and thus also the interpretations. Brocks text is presented as a proposal for the agreement regarding the multiple uses given to the term Gesamtkunstwerk and therefore it is important for us to state from the beginning what specific uses we are going to give to it. For Brock, Gesamtkunstwerk is an overarching concept, very much identified with the production of what he calls bergeordnete Zusammenhnge, which could be translated as overarching relationships, high level relationships, overarching connections, or superior orders. The idea behind the text is that the Gesamtkunstwerk is an abstract concept, a mental construction that has three specific ways of unfolding. The first one as a Gesamtkunstwerk per se ( la Wagner, mainly associated with more utopian constructions in the 19th century), which is translated/understood as Total Work. We are not going to use the extended term Total Work of Art, since Brock specifically mentions that these kind of
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constructions, in German, are not reserved only for the work of artists, but also for overarching relationships in other spheres, such as religion, politics, science. The second unfolding, namely Totalkunst, which is translated as Total Art, is reserved for certain art practices, particularly associated with modern artists in the 20th century. According to Brock, these artists push the limits between fiction and reality applying these abstract constructions of a higher order to their own lives, therefore applying some kind of violence against themselves, but not towards others. The third unfolding would be Totalitarismus, translated as Totalitarianism, which mainly implies the violent imposition of these ideas to the masses, i.e. National Socialism.

SAINT, GENIUS, AND LEADER

Although Brock does not acknowledge any kind of source here, it becomes evident that his historical reading of the development of history and the arts draws from a Hegelian posture. The tripartite division of the text, and his initial list of Saint, Genius, and Leader, as individuals who aim to be the bearers for ideas of Totality, resembles or adds a twist to the Hegelian division between the three stages of the historical development of the spirit, that is, Religion, Art, and Philosophy. This systematic endeavor for apprehending the truth of the spiritual, suggests that each stage has to be understood as part of a Totality. Brock not only draws a parallel with the Hegelian model, but alters it, for if we were to take this analogy as certain, the philosophy would be identified with the figure of the Leader (in the original German version the word Fhrer implies a whole range of controversial political and authoritarian connotations). What seems obvious, however, is that Brocks narrative is inflected by a logic of historical progress, which seems to be sketched out from the beginning of the essay.
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OBSESSIONS

The concept Gesamtkunstwerk is primarily characterized by the obsession, with which individuals seek to realize the image of a totality, the personal embodiment of totality, and a general submission under a totality.

I consider this to be one of the few moments in the text in which Brock hints at Szeemanns intentions for the Museum der Obsessionen. However, he does not seem to develop the same notions that Szeemann does. Brock avoids any kind of psychoanalytical reading throughout the text, so the notion of impulses or drives never enters the discussion. He merely identifies the will to obsessively develop a conceptual construction associated with a Gesamtkunstwerk. Instead of analyzing the nature of this drive he immediately jumps to underline the necessity of taking into account the degree in which these ideas seek to be implemented. At this point it seems as if Szeemann has a different take on the notion. The concept of Gesamtkunstwerk appears more related to the system that supports that drive, with a certain degree of systematic planning.

TOTALITY

In the second section of the essay, Brock states that:

Devoid of all references to the reality of life, the intellectual constructions, utopias and visions remain unsatisfying; on the other hand, without the need of totality, life decomposes into incoherent fragments. But the totalitarian realization of a coherent thought reduces itself to a litany of empty formulas.1

Here Brock advocates for the necessity of a totality in order to give some sense of order to the world. Any fragmentary character is rejected. It is interesting to think about this given that this text was written in 1983, precisely the same year in which Jean-Franois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition was being published for the first time in English. It is a time
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when all grand narratives are under attack and Lyotard calls for a war on totality. Brock seems to be aligned with a Frankfurt School Tradition, in the midst of the everlasting dispute between a French line of thinking and a German one. Frederic Jameson, in the foreword for The Postmodern Condition outlines it clearly, when he writes:
The two great myths disengaged by Lyotard and identified as the alternate justifications for institutional scientific research up to our own periodthat of the liberation of humanity and that of the speculative unity of knowledge (qua philosophical system)are also national myths and reproduce the very polemic in which Lyotards own book wishes to intervene. The firstpolitical, militant activistis of course the tradition of the French Revolution, a tradition for which philosophy is already politics and in which Lyotard must himself clearly be ranged. The second is of course the Germanic and Hegelian traditiona contemplative one, organized around the value of totality rather than that of commitment, and a tradition to which Lyotards philosophical adversary, Habermas, stillhowever distantlyremains affiliated.2

However, Jameson also states later on that these oppositions are not so clear, since there are many overlapping instances, such as the Marxist traditions behind some of them. Then again, returning to the subject of the exhibition, how should we understand this relative defense of totality in the context of the peak of postmodernist theories? One of the problems with grand narratives of totality that Lyotard sees is related to the idea of the other and its oblivion. Lyotard identifies a kind of violence that is not always so blunt as the direct imposition of an intellectual construction upon others, but the kind of violence that is generated negatively, inversely: through the forgetting of the other. The recognition of the unspeakable, which he identifies with the Kantian sublime takes the form of a rupture between the understanding and the imagination.
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In this sense, the Vorstellung (as representation and framing, enclosed) reduces its outside to nothingness. Totality does not acknowledge that otherness, therefore exercising a violence by default. It is also interesting to think about Harald Szeemann here. For the catalogue of the Bachelor Machines he commissioned Lyotard to write one of the essays. The Bachelors, are more identified with impulses and Pathos. In a way it seems as if both shows and both essays represented the extremes of an arch. The selection of writers for the catalogue essays could be considered equivalent to pieces in the exhibition. In a way, maybe Brocks text, with its inclusions of some kind of emotional formulas could be considered as one more eccentric addition to the list of thinkers/artists in the show?

TOTAL ART AND THE STRATEGY OF AFFIRMATION

The Total Artist has proven himself affected to the point of self-destruction by these consequences. His work threatens to dissolve. For the Total Artist also transcends the sphere of the aesthetic appearances. (see translation, p.84)

For Brock, Total Art implies a radicalization in the relationship between reality and fiction, transcending the sphere of mere aesthetic appearances, and, through a totalitarian move self-applying the overarching connections (or high level relationships) to the life of the Total artist. However, this is a controlled situation in which the violence is auto-applied and contained. It is related by Brock to real experiments ( la Kaprows happenings) and he identifies the privileged medium for that radicalization as Symptomverordnung (a term which could be translated as re arrangement of the symptoms, which method he compares with homeopathic medicine). With that term, Brock is specifically referring to ideas on affirmative
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practices (sketched since the early 60s). A good example is his analysis, in the second section, of Anselm Kiefers work. Brock first analyzes Kiefers Occupation series in the early 60s (which consisted in the performing of typical SS salutations while traveling through countries which had been occupied by the National Socialist army; there people recognized the gesture, took pictures, or attacked him). About these kinds of Total Art practices Brock writes:
It is of no use to prove to ones adversary that his assertions are false. One must compel the adversary to take his assertions seriously, beginning by admitting them, indeed, by adhering to them so that their pretensions may conquer others that are contrary. It is then that the consequences appear which threaten with annihilation even one who has just thought to impose those pretensions against all the others. Such a step to the edge of the abyss, to the center of hell, is the aim of the Yes-Revolution by means of the strategy of assertion. It is difficult to understand the effects of the strategy of positive thought on total art. Therefore: the manner in which a utopia or a myth as a position and their destruction is presented, may be implemented by a literal realization, as a negation. To impede totalitarian action it is necessary to deprive it of its project, meaning that the utopias and the myths should be saved and preserved as they are. How can we interpret the total art of Kiefer as the saving of myth and as the simultaneous limitation of totalitarian practice?3

He goes on to analyze Kiefers pictorial practice as following the same path, by means of performing a selfdestructive act by means of painting, and according to Brocks account of Kiefer:
By his allegations all artistic work repudiates the claims of the preceding work of being complete and finished. All confrontation of the artist with already existing works inevitably signifies mutilation, falsification and even the destruction of a previous work () 4
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Brocks Strategy of Affirmation, (also called strategy of assertion, negative affirmation, or the yes revolution) is described by him as 150% radicalized affirmation of whatever is aimed to be critiqued, therefore annulling its original premises by rendering them ridiculous. Inke Arns and Sylvia Sassa, in the spring issue of the magazine Maska (Ljubljana) in 2006, dedicated the editorial to the research of different strategies of subversive affirmation and they characterized them as:
() methods, strategies and practices of an artistic perspective of affirmation within totalitarian and democratic systems and socialist and capitalist economies, while taking the respective context into consideration.5

Although they hold that these practices were particularly important in Eastern Europe before 1989, they acknowledge Brocks seminal thesis on the subject and incorporate fragments of his texts. In Eastern Europe it became a practice of resistance to authoritarian political regimes, while nowadays, in our capitalist global world this practice:
use(s) the tactics of resistance through apparent affirmation ofand compliance withthe image and the corporate identity and strategies of their opponents.6

Some contemporary examples they mention include artist collectives such as bermorgen, 01.org, and the Yes Men, among many others. However, if we go one step back, we will see that Brocks analysis is already departing from an assumed radical division between fiction and reality, therefore annulling any fictional or phantasmagoric components that may already included in the notion of real reality. Here, it might be interesting to look at a passage from Slavoj Zizeks book Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Verso, 2002), where talking about processes of identification with the fantasy, the writer quotes Richard Boothby (who at the same time is quoting Lacan). He writes:
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To traverse the fantasy therefore, paradoxically, means fully identifying oneself with the fantasynamely, with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality; or, to quote a succinct formulation by Richard Boothby: Traversing the phantasy thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic reality, but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the phantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the phantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of phantasy that transcends imaging. 7

Curiously enough, Zizek uses the example of the group The Top List of the Surrealists, in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, to exemplify the possible ideological-political implications of this psychoanalytical reading. This is aligned with what Arns and Sassa in Maska magazine identified as a tradition of revolutionary affirmative practice in the East. However, on another level, this image of traversing the fantasy is particularly compelling for the reading of a work such as Hans-Jrgen Syberbergs Our Hitler: A Film From Germany. Although not immersed in real life in a strict sense of the word (meaning that it is still framed in the aesthetic realm through film), its length and subject matter offer themselves for a psychoanalytical reading of sorts. It is thus, the total and most undifferentiated immersion and identification with the ghosts of German past and Syberbergs own identification with its figureslet us just remember Jamesons suggestion that Syberberg proposes that we see Hitler as a filmmaker in his own right, indeed the greatest of the 20th century, the auteur of the most spectacular film of all time, World War IIwhich suggest an emancipation through (collective) expiation.8

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Ferdinand Cheval, Palais Idal 1912 Collection Palais Idal, photo: Emmanuel Georges.

Building Utopia: Thoreau, Cheval, Steiner Emily Gonzalez

In his 1973 study Architecture and Utopia, Italian architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri posits that architects design buildings in an attempt to create a shelter or set an example in a world of failed progress.1 This utopian dimension of architecture extends throughout its modern history: building designs offer images of a harmony (or utopia), which, in an act of bad conscience, is perennially deferred from entering social life, instead being expressed in ideal forms. For this reason, architecture had a special importance to the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800, first staged at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1983. Each work in the exhibition represented a totality and sense of utopia as seen by its creator; much of the exhibition presented photographs, designs, plans, and models of architecture, with the idea that each building was envisioned as a sacred space by its designer, and by extension that each iconic structure has come to embody this idea, iconically and historically, for subsequent generations of utopian builders. According to Krishan Kumar, Utopias practical use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet.2 Drawn from Szeemanns exhibitions, the buildings I present belowHenry David Thoreaus cabin at Walden Pond, Ferdinand Chevals Palais Idal, and Rudolf Steiners First Goetheanumoffer up architectural wish-images, of a sort: not structures for a world that is, but dreams of worlds that could be. Henry David Thoreau (18171862) built his cabin near Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near the end of March 1845,
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moving into it on July 4 of that year. The two years he spent there were chronicled in his memoir Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Walden is a call to live freely and simply, to reject the desire to accumulate goods, power, and wealth. The cabin was a single room of 10 x 15 feet with a single door, a fireplace, and two windows on either side. Thoreau built his temporary home out of boards and shingles recycled from a nearby shanty; timber, stones, and sand from the surrounding area; and other materials locally purchased. He was very proud to state that his house cost $28.12 1/2, the same as a years rent for such a place.3 In keeping with the simplicity of the house, the only furniture in Thoreaus cabin was a single bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs. He kept his home free of decoration because it was a distraction from the natural world surrounding him. The exterior of his cabin was equally devoid of ornamentation and carvings because ornament represented an expenditure of labor and energy without, in Thoreaus opinion, any actual result. Thoreaus sojourn at Walden was meant to be an experiment: a temporary retreat from the day-to-day work of his life as a surveyor. He spent his days outside as much as possible, observing nature or maintaining the garden or the cabin. Thoreau writes, In proportion as [Man] simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.4 Thoreau imagined a world in which everyone lived simply and made decisions based on their own sense of justice and deep contemplation, rather than the laws imposed by the government. Ferdinand Cheval (18361924) was a postman in the town of Hauterives in the south of France. During his rounds in 1878, he began collecting stones that he found interesting. A year later, he began to construct a Palais Idal (Ideal Palace) from these stones, completing the
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The House at Walden Pond, from the Frontispiece of Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Ticknor and Fields, Boston 1854 Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.

massive, improvised edifice in 1912. Drawing upon local methods for building houses, Cheval designed the palace himself and drew inspiration from exotic structures seen in magazines and almanacs.5 The palace in some sense served as a microcosm of a world defined by contact with remote locales. Though there is no evidence that he traveled outside of France during his lifetime, many details of the work seem to point outward, to a dream of an exotic universe beyond his provincial existence in the South of France. Tropical palm trees serve as cornices atop the palaces strange pseudogeological formation and niches are carved with miniature representations of foreign architecture, such as a Hindu temple, along its exterior. The structure also stood as monument to his rich and heroic inner life: Interior of An Imaginary Palace: The Pantheon of an Obscure Hero. The End of a Dream, Where Fantasy Becomes Reality, The Work of Giants, Remember: Will is Power, and Work of only one man.6 These inscriptions attest to the ardor of his labor. Though he
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certainly meant for others to see his masterwork (and indeed Cheval would become a Surrealist icon), he worried that visitors would ruin the private ideal through use: inscribed on the palace was the stern warning, Do not touch anything. In contrast to Thoreau, Cheval did not intend for others to follow his lifestyle. Though he craved the recognition of others, his faery palace was meant for him alone, as a final resting place.7 Located in Dornach, Switzerland, the Goetheanum was designed by the Austrian architect and social philosopher Rudolf Steiner (18611925). Based on the principles of Anthroposophy, a philosophy of spirit that argued spiritual truth could be reasoned through the scientific process, the Goetheanum (completed in 1919) was to be the site for the Anthroposophical Societys summer gatherings for music, theater, and lectures. The characteristic feature of the Goetheanum is its double dome composed of two rotundas of different sizes, which are meant to represent the union of spirit and matter that is central to Anthroposophy. Built from reinforced concrete, carved wood, and slatesan unique mixture of modern and pre-modern building techniquesSteiner nevertheless conceived of the Goetheanum as an organically unified building: The entire building is conceived out of the whole. Every single part is formed individually according to its own place, and it must of necessity be in just that place.8 Ornamentation was not layered on top of a basic, abstract structure, but flowed into the very form of the building, creating a singular mass of biomorphic curves and shapes. So too were the pathways of the building interwoven, so that guests might wander into one another and converse. Oddly, the building seems to have provoked a strong antipathy: On New Years Eve, 1923, the First Goetheanum was burned to the ground, in an act of arson. A second
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Goetheanum was constructed on the same site and this time built entirely of concrete, to ward off any new attacks. All three structures seem to speak to their own failures: Thoreau returned to Concord to publish his work and the cabin was eventually destroyed, though the book has inspired many replicas. (In the exhibition, Szeemann included a photograph of the site on which the cabin once stood.) Chevals palace was intended as his own mausoleum, but zoning prevented him from being able to use it as such and he was eventually buried in the towns cemetery. And the First Goetheanum stood for little more than two years. Despite their failure the buildings would each be influential: Thoreaus cabin became a charged emblem of individualism and the ideals of American left; the Palais Idal was a touchstone for the Surrealist avantgarde, and was in the 1960s marked for protection as a landmark by Andr Malraux, when he was the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. And Steiners second building still serves as the center of the Anthroposophical Society, with a full calendar of lectures and performances. But all stand in some radical distinction to the world of architecture that would follow them, in particular the minimal and geometrical modes being invented at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar as the rubble smoldered in Dornach; modern in its use of concrete and its rejection of nonfunctional ornamentation, the dreamy expressionism of the Second Goetheanum looks proudly out of place, even otherworldly, when compared to the cool, deluxe rationalism of the Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier, 1929), or the Villa Tugendhat (Mies Van Der Rohe, 1930). Those buildings, too, were dreams of a world to come, and imagined a better future; in the name of a more rational, internationalist universalism, they would become the modernist icons that the unhinged Palais Idal and funky Goetheanum never were.
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The New Tower of Babel, Metropolis (1927) Directed by Fritz Lang Friedrich-WilhelmMurnau-Foundation

Total Artwork and Early Cinema: Lang, Griffith, Lamb Jackie Im

As the inventor of the term Gesamtkunstwerk in his 1849 essay Art and Revolution, Richard Wagner held a central place in Harald Szeemans 1983 exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. The great composer appeared often enough in his own rightan 1882 portrait by Wilhelm Beckmann, his name scrawled across the surface of Anselm Kiefers 1973 painting Germanys Spiritual Heroes, a letter to Wagner by Jacques Offenbach, transcribed and appended by Marcel Broodthaersbut the exhibition also made a strong case for his influence over the broader cultural arena: dance, music, theater, architecture, design, painting, and more. Of all the media influenced by Wagner, cinema was perhaps the one most relegated to the margins of Szeemanns exhibition: German director Hans-Jrgen Syberberg presented photomontages, which included an image of Thomas Edisons editing studio; Das Kapital (197077), Joseph Beuys installation, incorporated two film projectors; Abel Gances 1927 silent film Napolon was presented offsite at Kino Corso in Zurich. The catalogue, however, included an essay by Dominik Keller that built upon these partial references. Titled Gesamtkunstwerk in Twentieth Century American Cinema, it surveyed great film sets and the opulent palace-theaters of the early 20th centuryan architecture of mass culture now nearly extinct. With Wagners ideas in mind, Jackie Im set about tracking down and writing about a few of Kellers key examples: Fritz Langs Metropolis (1926), D.W. Griffiths Intolerance (1916), and the movie palace designs of Thomas W. Lamb.JM
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METROPOLIS: THE SYNTHESIS OF GOTHIC MODERNISM

Amidst sleek, towering skyscrapers and crisscrossed freeways stands the new Tower of Babel. Domed and ornate, the Tower emerges out of the shadows of the urban skyline, columns and filigrees marking its difference from the streamlined aesthetics of the city. Fritz Langs Metropolis is an allegorical tale reflecting on the tensions between a gothic, spiritual, ritualistic age and a mechanized, modernist one. Lang uses the visual (set design, costumes, visual effects) to articulate these tensions in a common language for all to understand: the internationalism of filmic language, the director wrote in 1926, will become the strongest instrument available for mutual understanding of peoples, who otherwise have such difficulty understanding each other in all too many languages.1 The cinema offers a universal language, that is, and will enable the production of a total audience. Metropolis was written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and based on her novel of the same name. Set in a futuristic dystopia, the story centers on the tenuous relationship between city planners and the laborers who realize their plans.2 It follows Freder, the son of Joh Fredersen who runs the city, as he discovers the intolerable working conditions of the laborers and, by extension, the dehumanizing effects of technology. Freder meets a young woman, Maria, who leads him to underground slum cities and who calls for a Mediator between the pampered surface dwellers and the slaves below. The story also examines the rivalry between Joh Fredersen and the scientist Rotwang, the relationship itself standing for the battle between modern science and occultism, the science of the medieval ages.3 This so-called battle is emphasized in the architecture of the sets: the dark, gothic home of Rotwang and the glimmering, modern skyscraper residency of Fredersen.
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If Szeemanns exhibition largely displayed idealized images of utopias, then Metropolis presents the aftereffects of dystopiathe city as an infernal oligarchy.4 The film contains a scene in which Maria tells the story of the Tower of Babel, the biblical monument dedicated to the glory of man, which through its destruction ultimately united humanity through a single language.5 Just as with the city of Metropolis, the planners of the Tower of Babel conceived a great monument to man and God, yet relegated the work to vast numbers of slave laborers. Echoing Wagners description of Greek slavery: [I]n deep humiliation, two hundred million men, huddled in helpless confusion in the Roman empire, too soon found out thatwhen all men cannot be free alike and happy all men must suffer like slaves,6 the Metropolis planners have become exploiters, which misdeed causes both monument and their society to be destroyed. This Babylonian story reverberates throughout the filmthe city of Metropolis even contains a version of the ill-fated tower. This central motif structures the design aesthetic of the film. The new Tower serves as a control tower of sorts for the city, yet is removed from its depthsand from the forces that produce it. The panorama shots of the city which also contain the new Tower reveal a layering of scenic design. Drawing influences from the painting by Peter Brueghel (Tower of Babel, 1563) as well as from Art Deco, gothic and Babylonian architecture, and set against the streamlined modernist skyscrapers, the Tower creates a visual tension echoed in the many dyads throughout the film (Fredersen and Rotwang, the laborers and the leaders, Freder and Fredersen). The new Tower features a synthesis of various European designs. Expanding on the circular design imagined by Brueghels painting, the intricate dome echoes the Byzantine architecture of the Hagia Sophia; the points that extend under the dome recall the ribbed vaulting of
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Gothic architecture. What results is a building that is not unlike the Art Deco towers of the Chrysler Building in New York City, or City Hall in Buffalo, New York. Indeed Art Deco is often itself seen as a synthesis, incorporating touches of Neoclassicism, Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism, and Art Nouveau. Art Deco was a relatively new aesthetic when the film was shot and Lang used its close associations with the bourgeois class to his advantage, making the ornate and decorative Tower the base for the ruling class of Metropolis. Langs use of a layered design in the Tower as well as the laboratory of Rotwang, reveals a core of Gothic imagery that plays on the films overall theme of occultism versus modernity. In The Films of Fritz Lang, Tom Gunning describes this layering as gothic modernity, stating that, Metropolis is not simply a new modern city but a palimpsest whose layers contain traces of previous belief systems Lang makes it clear that these repressed layers are only slumbering and can be called back into life.7 The repressed layers are called back into life, in the films design, just as Marias retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel foreshadows the revolt by the laborers. Metropolis use of design synthesis, and embrace of German Expressionism, ties it to many works in Szeemans Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition such as Bruno Tauts contributions to the Glserne Kette (a chain letter sent among German Expressionist architects in 1919 and 1920). Tauts utopic designs, intending to inspire peace and contentment, echo the unifying aims of the Tower and indeed the impulse to rise above the squalor of the city is evident in both. The film stands as a dark allegory of the mechanization of man and exhibits the faults of a supposedly utopian cityall while utilizing a synthetic design aesthetic often used in modern (implicitly utopian) architecture.8 By turning that aesthetic on its head, the layered design serves as a critique of the very utopia it portrays.
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INTOLERANCE: EXOTICISM IN SCENIC DESIGN

Intolerance: Loves Struggle Through the Ages was directed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1916. Made in reaction to the widespread controversy over the racist content in Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance is a staggering work: nearly three-hours long, its four parallel story lines, set in four stages of history, revolve around the eponymous theme. It was the most expensive Hollywood film of its time, costing an estimated $2 million (approximately $40 million today) to produce, and requiring lavish costumes, enormous sets, and thousands of extras. The films four storylines span approximately 2,500 years: Babylonia (depicting the fall of Babylon due to religious intolerance); the Judean era (where Griffith recounts the crucifixion of Christ); the French Renaissance (where Griffith follows the failure of the Edict of Toleration, leading to the St. Bartholomews Day Massacre); and America in 1914 (here Griffith depicts labor unrest and moral Puritanism in California). Instead of developing each story separately, Griffith chose to show them at once, cutting between them and following moral and psychological threads between the four plots. As the story-lines progress, the cuts become more frequent, blending the emotions and narratives together to create a synthetic tale of intolerance.9 Rather than examining the film in its entirety, I will here focus on the best-known sequence in the film: Babylonia.10 The sets depicting Babylon were the largest ever constructed for a Hollywood film at the time. Those for the Gates of Babylon were life-size and built at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in Los Angeles. The scenes set in Babylon featured huge numbers of extras, filling the set with as many as 16,000 people. The design was initially attributed solely to Griffith,11 using a wide array of influences from Egyptian architecture to Mesopotamian paintings by John Martin.12
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The ornate look of the Babylon sets echoed the tendency towards a-historical appropriation of diversely historical architectural styles that was prevalent in the architecture of the period.13 Griffiths scrapbooking style of research pulled from various images available to him: paintings, architectural renderings, postcards and even his own conjectures, recalling the eclectic borrowings of Ferdinand Chevals Palais Idal.14 The gates echo some of the structures presented in John Martins paintings (the thick, stout, ribbed columns), while other structural elements are wildly extravagant and bear only a passing resemblance to the ancient architecture of the area (the elephant-topped columns or the winged griffins flanking the smaller doors). These touches show a schizophrenic exoticism, taking superficial motifs from various ancient and foreign cultures (usually Eastern) and synthesizing them to form a whole. It is nearly impossible to pinpoint exact art historical or architectural references made in the sets and it is hard to argue for the authenticity of the design. The almost superficial nature of lifting other cultural motifs can come across as pastiche. Indeed, Griffith did accumulate a vast array of different design emblems; yet despite their various origins, the sets manage counterintuitively to convey a coherent wholea total environment. That Griffith largely identified with playwright and theater producer David Belascos15 detailed environments, and sought to create a total experience that would transport filmgoers out of the theaters and into another world is proved further by his extremely considered usage of the Babylon sets. Griffith even went so far as to have shadows painted in column fluting to convey a certain time of day. Moreover no visible signs of production were permitted, echoing Wagners desire to hide the mechanisms of opera production: where ear and eye, as soul and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and perceived all, and saw all in spirit
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The Feast of Belshazzar, Intolerance (1916) aka Intolerance: Loves Struggle Through the Ages. Directed by D.W. Griffith Photofest

Fox Theatre auditorium view from the balcony, 1929, retouched by William S. Swain

and in body revealed; so that the imagination need no longer vex itself with the attempt to conjure up the image.16 The synthetic design of Babylon integrates disparate cultures and motifs, creating a total world. The sets for the other periods are less extravagant and in a way, more authentic to their respective ages; by comparison, the sets for Babylon synthesized exotic design to create a totalized world within the film, thus facilitating greater coherency.
THOMAS W. LAMB: RE-IMAGINING THE THEATER

The cinema palaces of the early 20th century used similar techniques of synthesized design. Often ornate and extravagant, these palaces were advertised to make the average citizen feel like royalty. One of the best-known movie palace architects was Thomas W. Lamb (18711942). Lamb designed hundreds of theatres in America and worldwide. Yet before we examine Lambs practice, it is important to know the history of exhibiting film. The earliest incarnation of showing film traces back to Thomas Edisons invention of the Kinetoscope, a device that allowed individuals to view film through a window. It wasnt until British electrician Robert W. Paul invented the film projector and gave its first public showing in 1895, that viewing film became a collective experience. Early screenings for audiences were organized by traveling exhibitors in storefront spaces, or as acts during vaudeville programs. The first films were often short, some under a minute long; yet the novelty of the moving image was enough to spark popularity and to inspire a business in motion picture houses. By 1907 there were around four thousand Nickelodeonssmall neighborhood movie theaterssoon followed by the formation of production companies, which held an increasingly greater stake in the manner of cinematic presentation. The origin of the movie palace is credited to the Mark Strand Theatre in New York. Opened in 1913, the theaters
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luxurious settings are credited for its success in drawing in the upper classes to watch films, with other theaters quickly following suit. Movie palaces gained momentum throughout the mid-1910s and continued to be constructed as late as the early 1960s. Born in Scotland, Lamb came to the United States in 1883 at the age of 12. Little is known about his architectural studies; his earliest known project was a small clubhouse at 79th Street and the East River in Manhattan, built in 1903. It was in 1910 that Lamb designed his first movie theater; commissioned by entrepreneur William Fox (and founder of the Fox Film Corporation), the City Theatre was built on 14th Street near 4th Avenue. Within a few years of its construction, Lamb was considered a specialist in theaters. Built in 1929, the Fox Theater in San Francisco is an emblematic example of Lambs later, more ornate, practice and exemplifies the movie palace tendency towards a synthesis of architectural design. Located in San Franciscos Civic Center, the theater was commissioned by Lambs longtime collaborator William Fox. The theater was intended to be a showcase for Fox films, as well as elaborate stage shows. In addition to the theater, original plans called for a luxury hotel, which was never built due to economic troubles. Originally to be called the Capitol, the project cost roughly $4.65 million and took up most of the triangular block of Market, Hayes, and Polk streets. The first three years of the Fox were arguably the shining moments of the palace. Later, bankruptcy proceedings against Fox West Coast forced the theater to shut down in 1932. The Fox San Francisco reopened in 1933 with sparse programming and hosting live entertainment from time to time. After efforts to persuade the city to acquire the theater failed, deterioration took hold and the Fox was torn down in 1963.
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The Fox San Francisco featured eclectic exoticism, borrowing design motifs from Art Deco, High Gothicism, and the Rococo, with touches of Mediterranean, Orientalist, and Egyptian Revival throughout. Like the new Tower of Babel in Metropolis and Babylon in Intolerance, Lamb utilized design aesthetics from a vast array of different periods and cultures. However, Lambs use of high ornamentation was not solely for aesthetic purposes. Rather it was to create a fantasy environment for moviegoers. As David Naylor states in his introduction to American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of Fantasy: for the housewife who attended a matinee or for the couple who watched an evening performance, the Movie Palace represented a spectacular vehicle capable of transporting them into a magical realm of make-believe.17 Indeed, the cacophony of ornamentation combined with the spectacle of the film,18 created an intense, doubled synthesis that dazzled viewers. Throughout his career as a movie palace designer, Lamb looked to opera houses for inspiration. Differing from the atmospheric theaters of the same period, Lambs hardtop19 theaters embraced the shape of the theater.20 Images of the interior of the Fox San Francisco recall the elaborate decoration of opera houses; the configuration of the seating is not unlike Wagners Festpielhaus in Bayreuth. Though Wagner called for an art viewing experience that prompted life-altering change (to the point even of revolution), Lambs design aimed simply to transport audiences in the name of entertainment. Yet the communal experience of being transported while experiencing art echoes Wagners sentiments about Greek tragedy:
This people, streaming in its thousands from the Stateassembly, from the Agora, from land, from sea, from camps, from distant partsfilled with its thirty thousand heads the amphitheatre [.] to read the riddle of their own actions, to fuse their own being and their own
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communion with that of their god; and thus in noblest, stillest peace to live again the life which a brief space of time before, they had lived in restless activity and accentuated individuality.21

Though the experience of watching movies in such a place does not necessarily encourage a communal sense of citizenship in this modern theater, it remains a total and shared experience.22 Thus cinema presents a new kind of sublimity, achieved through the communal experience of the crowd, as it watches something together.

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Room #1: In Midst of Passions and Obsessions Maria Elena Ortiz

Fourier wants to decipher the world in order to remake it (for how remake it without deciphering it?)Roland Barthes1

I. FOURIER AND SZEEMANN

Harald Szeemanns aesthetic is often described as a modern version of the cabinet of curiosities; by invoking those pre-modern collections, one describes that aspect of Szeemanns exhibition-making that aims to portray a fervent collecting and controlled chaos.2 Indeed, even when his exhibitions take on a traditional appearance, they can be anarchic in concept, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk being a prime case. On closer look, though, possible orders begin to flash into view. This essay pursues one such possible order, by way of an inspection of Gesamtkunstwerks difficult first roomwith the idea that beginnings matter; and that such an inspection might at least imply the order of the whole. The artifacts in Room 1 belong to Charles Fourier (1772 1837), Caspar David Friedrich (17741840), Karl Friedrich Schinkel (17811841), Philipp Otto Runge (17771810), Carl Gustav Carus (1789 1869), Eugne Delacroix (1798 1863), tienne-Louis Boulle (17281799), and Henry David Thoreau (18171862)painters, visionary architects, and, in Fourier and Thoreau, influential social thinkers. A first look suggests a base-line historical association amongst its artifacts; that they seem to predate Richard Wagners conception of the synthesis of the arts marks them as ancestors and precursors. Yet they share more than their period: all except oneBoullebelong to a generation that experienced the aftermath of the French and
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Philipp Otto Runge (17771810), Test prints of The Color Spheres 8 2/3 x 7 1/3. Aquatint and aquarell Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk Photo: Christoph Irrgang

American revolutions, and that found inspiration in the Romantic ideal. This essay speculates that Szeemann structured Room 1 on aspects of Fouriers thinking on the organization of groups, in particularor at least that an analysis based on those ideas might be of benefit. While in the end this remains a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated fact, it nevertheless suggests what a theory of social groups might have to contribute to a critique of exhibitions especially in the case of a curator himself so steeped in utopian theorizing.
II. PHALANSTRE & THE TABLE OF PROGRESS

Three artifacts in Room 1 depict explicitly Fouriers ideas. There is one document culled from the socialist thinkers futuristic tract, The Theory of the Four Movements and the General Destinies (published anonymously in Lyon in 1808).3 The Table of the Progress of the Social Movements was a document attached to this book. There are two representations of a Phalanstre, which is the architectural structure where Fouriers ideal community would live.4 One was drawing of a Phalanstre by an unknown artist. The other was another iteration of Fouriers theories: Ideal design for Robert Owen, New Harmony, (1824) Thomas Stedman Whitwells lithographic rendering of Owens utopian community which interpreted aspects of Fouriers phalange. This lithograph portrays the architectural plans for Owens utopian community, New Harmony. Inspired by Fourier, Owen founded New Harmony in Indiana, in 1895, to concretize his ideas, but his experiment ultimately failed. Articulated in the Table of Progress, Fouriers theory is an attempt to uncover a pattern and synthesis to the formation of human communities through placing prime importance on the group. Fourier believed in the existence of twelve innate passions in all beings, which could
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be divided into three types: the Five Senses, the Four Effective Passions (Friendship, Love, Ambition, and Parenthood) and the Distributive Passions (Cabalist, Butterfly or Alternating passion, and the Composite).5 These passions determine human behavior, [like] fundamental instinctual drives that [can] not be permanently altered or suppressed.6 The repression of a passion is what causes problems in society; true harmony is obtained only when one does not repress the passions. Fouriers concept of the passions was a drastic departure from the Enlightenment ideal of the Tabula Rasa, whichin positing that humans are born as blank slates to be inscribed by experiencesays little about innate impulses. Fourier, by contrast, attributes human acts not to reason and experience, but insteadin some ways, foreseeing Freuds later writingssees them as compelled by innate impulses or tendencies. Fourier devised his Phalanstre to house his ideal community. Although the architecture was his invention, the term is suggestive of the Greek word phalanx, which refers to where men were tightly linked together, forming a highly interdependent and impenetrable fighting unit.7 Fouriers ideal community is characterized by the lack of repression (desire reigned freely within its enclosure), but also a close interdependency. The Phalanstre was thus meant to be self-sufficient: composed of 80 families400 peopleit represented a productive and autonomous social unit, located in a rural setting a days journey away from a city. (In a quirky turn, Fourier considered the implementation of an admission fee for individuals curious to visit the community.) Radically, for the time, marriage, commerce, and philosophy were to be banned within its walls. However, Fourier was not interested in positing a classless society (in this way differing from Marx): There were to be three familiar classes in the Phalanstre: the rich,
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poor, and middle class. And as Jonathan Beecher, one of the first to translate Fouriers theories into English, makes clear, all the administrative decisions of the community were to be taken by a board composed of the most knowledgeable and richest individuals in the community. Nevertheless, everyone was to have access to libraries, studies, meeting rooms, education, arts, high quality of food and an apartment of his or her own, but those of the rich would be larger and quieter than those of the poor.8 And everyone would be free to follow his or her passions at will. The Phalanstre was conceived of as a massive structure: colossal in its outlines but adorned with a multitude of colonnades, domes, and peristyles.9 The building in this rendering is composed of three floors, two wings, and a central patio. Most of the communal activities were to be carried out on the first floor. The second and third floors comprised the living quarters, with the apartments on the third floor being bigger and housing the richer individuals. The central parterre area contained dining halls, libraries, and meeting rooms. One lateral wing was reserved for noisy activities such as carpentry and childrens play, and the other housed the caravansarya reception halland ballrooms.10 Fourier separated the space so that groups would do not be disrupted by the workings of other groups. Fourier also introduced street galleries into his imagined architecture, these being a raised and covered passageway that would be heated in winter and ventilated in the summer.11 The street galleries served to connect all the rooms in the Phalanstre so people could find easy access to all activities in the community. In The Table of the Progress of Social Movements, Fouriers theories extended to metaphysical theory, portraying a totalizing view of the universe. Where the Phalanstre pictured a three-dimensional space, The Table
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of the Progress of Social Movements was a diagram that revealed Fouriers history of human societies, which are driven, in this theory, not by great men, but by the organization of groups. Although Fourier believed that his time was a period of unhappiness, he also asserted that future periods would lead to harmonyas long as there were transformations in groups. This diagram portrays the periods in which societies experience periods of unhappiness, and portends future periods of happinessa progressive system dependent on the harmony of the passions. The Table of the Progress of Social Movements and the rendering of the Phalanstre represent two vital, complementary parts of Fouriers theory on the organization of groups. The Phalanstre is an architectonic expression of his ideas, while the diagram depicts his totalizing theory of history. Together these pieces portray an essential relationship between plan and idealthe exhibition depends, in some sense, on what they mean together. Rather than isolating the formal, architectural beauty of the Phalanstre from the conceptual dynamics of the utopian diagram, here their charged relationship is preserved, and put to work.
III. DECIPHERING THE HARMONIOUS GROUP

At the core of the Phalanstre and The Table of the Progress of Social Movements is the Passions ability to form harmonious groups; groups are the fundamental social unit, not the individual, [as] one of the great failures of the eighteen-century was its preoccupation with the faculties and powers of the individual.12 (Inasmuch as exhibitions in general depend on relationships, perhaps such a rejection is immanent in all exhibition forms.) For Fourier a harmonious group is a combination of seven to nine individuals united by sharing one or several common objects of affection.13 In Szeemans Room 1, the viewer encountered just such a group united by the passion of
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Herbert Gleason, Site of Thoreaus House At Walden Pond, 1897 Courtesy of the Thoreau Institute at Walden Pond

ambition, as expressed under the Romantic Ideal, and by their attempt to use architecture as an encompassing medium for their ideas. Fouriers harmonious groups work under three assumptions: people form groups based on a common interest; a hierarchical structure will emerge within the group; and every group has an alliance at its center that is larger than the opposing views. Indeed harmonious groups are characterized by proportional variations, which means that they are driven by the difference in their passions.14 Fourier described this possible hierarchy as constituted by a leader, two students, three experts, two beginners, and one ambiguous character. To explore experimentally this idea in the case of Room 1, Fourier naturally takes on the role of the leader; the ambiguous character is the neoclassical architect tienne Boulle, whose Cnotaphe Newton (1784)a design for a proposed tomb for Isaac Newtonpredates the Romantics, the French Revolution, and indeed the remit of the exhibition (which stipulates utopias since 1800). Considering that Szeemann framed Room 1 under the obsessions of the Romantic ideal, one can conclude the experts are those who fully embraced that notion: Caspar David Friedrich, Eugne Delacroix, and Philipp Otto Runge. Plenty has been written about Delacroix and Friedrich in these terms: Delacroix is known as the greatest of French Romantics, while Friedrich is widely venerated for his mastery of the subjectivity of landscape.15 Runge, too, despite his early death in 1810, could be considered the expert of light and color in this group. Indeed his color spheres (first advanced in a letter to Goethe, they were included in Szeemanns exhibition) would be instructive in the science of color throughout the 19th century. As he explained when referring to color the great light of the world disperses into a thousand colors; inasmuch as we strive to
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understand color, we understand light. If the light were not reflected, the truth would not be demonstrated and perceived in all things, and would therefore be no truth.16 As part of the hierarchy in harmonious group there is an alliance of two students. In Room 1, this alliance is composed of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Carl Gustav Carus. The reason why one might understand them as students is quite simple: each, in their own way, was a student of Friedrich. Schinkel is the great Neo-classical architect of Germany who, after a life-changing encounter with Friedrichs Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog (181718), embraced the longing for the past in his designs for Gothic Cathedrals; his later landscape painting showed a strong influence of Friedrichs imagery.17 Carus was a psychologist and amateur artist who became an actual student of Friedrich; he frequently emulated the poetic mood of Friedrichs smaller work with great charm.18 The beginner in Room 1 is Thoreau. Born in 1817 he was the youngest of the group, and he never developed his theories into the aesthetic realm.19 Indeed what appeared in the exhibition seemed oddly disconnected from Thoreaus actual production: Szeemann included the illustration that served as the cover of Walden (by illustrator Andrew Baker, rather than Thoreau himself) as well as an 1897 image of the site where the cabin was. These pictures portray the place that led Thoreau to develop his influential ideas on civil disobedience and the right of the individual, but also make clear the beginners essential inability to visualize his ideas on social reform. Compared to Fouriers magisterial Phalanstre, Thoreau appears a novice with a demolished cabin; by including him in this company, Szeemann is mischievously tweaking the young Americans nose. With Gesamtkunstwerk, is Szeemann drafting his Phalanstre? Szeemanns Museum of Obsessions does
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resemble somewhat Fouriers Passions. Or perhaps with Thoreau we have found the limits of Fouriers model, and the credibility of the Room 1 hypothesis; and indeed this structure doesnt seem to extend to other parts of the Kunsthaus Zrich. Nevertheless the harmonious group may be a useful tool in the study and critique of other exhibitions, implying as it does forms of dynamic order not based on simple similarity or difference (or feng shui). If this is a rather modest late achievement for the great utopian Fourierit is nevertheless a substantive one.

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From Wagner to Artaud Kristin Korolowicz

Theater was one of the preoccupations of Harald Szeemanns exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europasche Utopien Seit 1800. Richard Wagner was its central character, and his theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, a primary motif; the exhibition also included Carl Friedrich Thieles hallucinatory set designs for Mozarts opera The Magic Flute (1819), character designs by Oskar Schlemmer, and an unrealized model, produced by Charles Forberg Associates, of Walter Gropius Project for a Total Theaterintended for Erwin Piscator, the radical director of modern theater in Weimar Germany, it meant to destroy the traditional separation between performer and audience. The exhibition included as well the provocative French actor, poet, and theater director Antonin Artaud, in dual guises: he was presented acting as the Jacobin journalist Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gances epic film Napolon (1927), which was screened at Kino Corso in Zrich; and he was represented by a pencil, oil pastel, and watercolor sketch on paper, The Execration of the Father-Mother, which was produced in April 1946, as Artaud recovered from a psychotic break in a psychiatric clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine. Szeemanns framework of European Utopias placed this troubled sketch which seems to depict a hermaphroditic figure defiled by sexual mutilation, or expulsive defecationin a new, and counterintuitive, light. Just what does it mean to imagine this picture as a European utopia? How can we make this impossible leap? Below, Kristin Korolowicz sets about trying to figure out this puzzle. She does so by way of mapping out some consonances between Wagners own contradictory picture of social harmony (relying here on his 1849 essay Art and Revolution), and Artauds conception of a Theater of Cruelty. JM
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Bayreuth Festival Theater, Bayreuth, Germany, with the stage set from Parsifal, 1882; as reproduced for a 1912 postcard by Ramme & Ulrich, Bayreuth Richard Wagner Museum, Bayreuth

I. INTRODUCTION

Both Richard Wagner and Antonin Artaud were compelled by radical dreams of a better future, and attempted to realize their dreams, in their lifetimes, through a practice of Gesamtkunstwerkthe unification and synthesis of the various disciplines under the auspices of a radicalized and transformed Drama. Both hoped to create an artwork that could, against a fallen present, transform the relationship between art and public life. As imagined in their respective manifestosWagners Art and Revolution, published in pamphlet form in 1849, and Artauds book Theater and Its Double (1932)theater provided the vehicle and catalyst for revolutionary, universal change. Artaud absorbed, in various ways, the lessons of Wagners idea, but also made important innovations and departures. This essay examines some of those inheritances and differences by looking to their writings and to what was realized in their major theatrical productions. It looks also to those aspects of their writings which did not survive the transition from idea to practice, attending closely to whether the changes were aesthetic decisions or rather should be attributed to mere and practical limitations.
II. WAGNERS GESAMTKUNSTWERK IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Wagners essay Art and Revolution was a frenzied diatribe against commerce, the church, and the division of the arts, stressing in contrast the revolutionary, unifying capacity of the dramatic arts. Writing in exile after his involvement in the 1849 May Uprising in Dresden, he directed a fervent energy into describing arts potential transformative effect. Under the strong influence of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, he attacked Christianity for its establishment of hierarchies and unyielding denial of the human senses, alongside its prudish sexual mores
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and hypocritical advocacy of abstinence, which, if its logical consequences had been fulfilled, would have completely swept the human race from off the earth.1 He lashed out as well at a passive and amoral bourgeoisie, which he faulted for the blind consumption of art solely for its entertainment value. The division of the arts in his time, he wrote, mirrored the hierarchical, individualized, and fragmentary nature of a society dominated by the Church and commerce. To resist this circumstance, he proposed an expanded and supercharged form of theater, which would incorporate each of the individual arts in turn: architects would build the theater and stage; painters might provide the scenery and backdrops; poets would compose the operas libretto; choreography would orchestrate actors movements, and music might produce the narrative and emotional force. From this new unity was to come a social transformation beyond politics. In The Art-Work of the Future, Wagner contends the true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to the common public.2 That is, the collective efforts of the arts could galvanize a collective effort on the part of the public towards revolution. However, according to Wagner, his theater could only happen after the complete destruction of the preexisting modes of bourgeois theater, and the production, from the shabby and deluded masses, of a new audience. (In a chicken-or-egg paradox, this new audience is the precondition for the very theater that might bring such an audience into being.) In a letter to a friend in Dresden, 1851, Wagner describes his conundrum, as regards the Ring cycle:
I can only conceive of performing after the revolution: only the revolution can provide me with artists and the audience. Inevitably, the next revolution must bring an end to our whole theater business.With this production [The Ring
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cycle], I will convey the meaning of revolution in its noblest sense to the people of revolution. This audience will understand me; the current audience is unable to.3

But these preconditions for revolution did not appear on Wagners schedule; and so, despite his misgivings about introducing it to audiences who couldnt possibly comprehend it, he finally produced his Ring cycle in Bayreuth in 1876, at an opera house specially designed for it. The Ring cycle was to be the moment where Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk would find its platform; yet, though innovative, it was not the complete and violent rupture from previous modes of theater hed advertised. In fact, Wagners production continued, in many ways, the illusionism hed decried in theater of the late 18th and 19th century. Certainly the Bayreuth building was less ornate and more egalitarian, in its wedge-shaped seating arrangement, than most other opera houses; still, it quoted directly from the Baroque Margrave Opera House, which had been considered as a site for the Ring before the erection of the structure in Bayreuth.4 And indeed, Wagners alterations enhanced, rather than dispelled, the illusionary character of its preexisting models. The elimination of ornamentation and the double proscenium drew the audience to the central focal point of the stage; the ascending rows of seats prevented anyones view from obstruction, realizing a theater experience not only for those who could afford the best seats. These technical innovations to the Opera house strengthened the immersive quality of the performance and reinforced its fantastic effect. His improvements to the orchestra pit (what Wagner called the mystical abyss) further contributed to this illusionism, but also crucially separated the audience from the action of the stage. This spatial situation of the orchestra projected sound towards the stage, refracting it back to the audience in a unified, immense resonance. Instead of
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hearing the individual instruments, one heard an all encompassing and immersive sound, which stands in, perhaps, for Wagners emphasis on the audiences communal consciousness. The dark theateran innovation of Bayreuth later naturalized by cinemacontributes to the disembodiment of individuals for the sake of unity and central focus on the stage.5 Despite its proposed elimination of artistic hierarchies, music dominates Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk in this new circumstance: the momentum of the performance was dictated more by the composition melody than by the drama or actors. Music and the libretto govern over all other disciplines. Bayreuth also reproduced the monumentality that he loathed in the work of his predecessors. Although Wagner expressed in his earlier writings that his prime concern was the audience and affecting the public, in the actual production the audience became a prop in service of the Gesamtkunstwerk: Billowing musical leitmotifs supported the Rings composition, eliciting in the spectator an emotional upsurge as they were enveloped by a dramatic world of Germanic myth. It was an experience that encouraged the audience to divorce itself from daily reality and enter a Wagnerian dreamscapewhich realized an escapism incipient in the 1849 program, in tension with its image of a newly invigorated citizenry: the public, that representative of daily life, forgets the confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World.6 In Bayreuth, that is, the public becomes secondary, and theater an enchanted version of reality: a glorious fiction valorizing the German nation-state. As such, communal consciousness is transformed into escapist (and nationalistic) fantasy. Contrary to his aims to construct a necessarily difficult art form, which was to produce a new, revolutionary public, Wagners innovations integrated fairly smoothly into theatrical traditions and quickly became institutionalized;
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the very bourgeoisie he attacked in 1849 became his inevitable audience. The transition from his earlier writing to what he would later produce at Bayreuth demonstrates ideological shifts in Wagners practice, where eventually the idea of social transformation for a greater public lost its sense of urgency.
III. ARTAUDS SYNTHESIS: RADICALIZATION, REPUDIATION

In contrast, Antonin Artaud sought a theater that would assault the audience with its own existence, in all of its discomfort and joy. Artaud was connected in the 1920s with the Surrealist movement, only to be expelled for refusing to join the French Communist Party, as well as denounce theater as a bourgeois medium.7 For Artaud, as for Wagner, a revolution within the system of politics was small beer, and would hardly produce the more profound and universal effect he intended. He writes in 1933:
It is not a question of knowing what we want. If we are all prepared for war, plague, famine, and slaughter, we do not even need to say so, we have only to go on as we are. Go on behaving like snobs, flocking to hear some singer or other, some admirable performance which does not go beyond the realm of art.8

Like Wagner, Artaud sees an autonomous art as but one in a series of compartmentalized and fractured modes of thought, producing a violent passivity on the one hand and a violent disillusionment on the other. The synthetic form of theater, instead, revivesa kind of collective suggestion that brings order to the spirit, and through this inner order an outward peace that will be of benefit to all.9 Yet this outward peace is to be achieved, paradoxically, through cruelty: advanced in his first manifesto in 1932, the word connotes for Artaud not its conventional sense of pleasure in inflicting harm, but rather a difficult
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and direct experience with the violent tendencies of man, and a confrontation with the painful truth of his existence. Artaud insists:
[T]he theater cannot become itself againuntil it provides the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his fantasies, his utopian sense of life and things, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level that is not counterfeit and illusionary but internal.10

In this sense, the Theater of Cruelty directly invites a communal inventory of mans desires, not simply through allegories (as in Wagnerian drama), but through an immediate experience of them in real time. The Theater of Cruelty was to be a living experiencenot an image or representation of life, as it appears in the case of Wagner, but rather life itself, now made whole. Artauds outline for a pure theater argues for the elimination of all mediation between the performance and audience. He calls for direct communicationbetween the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, because the spectator, by being placed in the middle of the action, is enveloped by it and caught in the crossfire.11 This communication demands its special architecture: Artaud imagines an inversion of the traditional auditorium where the performers will instead surround the viewers; immersed and surrounded, the viewers senses will be shocked into vitality and action. Inspired by the physical character of sound in Balinese theater, which Artaud first witnessed in the Parisian Exposition Coloniale Internationale of 1931, Artaud sought to rid theater of its emphasis on speech, feeling that speech and text took primary importance in Western theater, and that all other elements were subject to them. Artauds reassessment of the Gesamtkunstwerk sought to create in theater a democratic synthesis of the arts, and
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required the demotion and demolition of language expelling the commanding voice of the author, who rules unjustly over the public conscience. Thus, in the Theater of Cruelty a synthesis of the arts would begin by a leveling of the disciplines that, according to Artaud utilizes movement, harmonies, and rhythms, but insofar as they can converge in a kind of central expression, without favoring any particular art.12 The Theater of Cruelty also proposed a new spatial logic for the auditorium: the actors would perform in tiered galleries surrounding the audience, negating the central focus of a main stage. Artaud furthermore aimed to integrate physical movement with spectacular light and sound effects, producing in the viewer physical sensations and emotions: hot and cold, anger and fear.13 These technical effects would become, in Artauds mind, part of a new affective symbology for theater. Artaud concludes his first manifesto with a declaration that his theater will restage classics, such as Shakespearebut only as put through the wringer of this new arrangement. In 1935, Artaud staged in Paris an adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Stendhals versions of the tragedy Les Cenci in which he starred as the lead, Count Cenci, heretic and murderer. Although the play put into motion some of the ideas from his manifesto and realized aspects of the new theatrical form he imagined, the result was a strange and disappointing compromise with reality. Desiring visibility and lacking the financial means to stage the elaborate production he imagined, Artaud sacrificed many elements of his ambitious plan. His first compromise was the architectural platform for his performance; he was consigned instead to the traditional architecture of Pariss Theatre des Folies-Wagram, which housed many popular cabaret performances of the 1930s. Another compromise came in the form of the plays wealthy Russian patron,
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who agreed to fund the performance under the condition that his daughter, an amateur actress called Lady Abdy, could play the lead role of Beatrice; she could barely speak French and wasnt up to her role. Other aspects were marginally more successful. Although but a muted fragment of Artauds full technical ambitions, Les Cenci was the occasion of the first theatrical use of the Ondes Martenot, a primitive electronic synthesizer, and the play furthermore marked one of the first uses of stereophonic sound. Placed strategically around the auditorium and buzzing with the sound of the Martenot, speakers created a roaring, synthetic sense-surround that to audiences of the time must have sounded quite aggressive and disorienting. The Paris public greeted Les Cenci with disgust, condescension, or (at best) morbid fascination. Critic Lucien Dubech described Artauds performance in the Parisian publication, Candide in May 1935:
...He exerted himself to seem demonic. He acts badly and is unintelligible. The text that, thank God, we never have to hear is underscored by appalling noises. M. Antonin Artaud is convinced that he is renovating dramatic art. Let us not be too harsh on him.14

Here Dubech mockingly gives Artaud credit for his courageous, but brutal, failure to revive what was perceived of at the time as a dying art form. Reviews generally expressed such feelings regarding Les Cenci; the difficulties of this production may have also saved it from assimilation into the fashions of the avant-garde. In other words, the movements of the avant-gardeinitially forming from a moment of dissentwere all too often adopted by the mainstream.15 Thus, Artaud (whether he intended to or not) maintained a difficult art form that resisted realization, which in turn kept it in the realm of dissent. Although attendance was high at first, it declined rapidly, and the production lasted only seventeen days becoming a huge
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commercial failure. According to Artauds assistant for the production Roger Blin,
Artaud hoped that the success or half success of Les Cenci (for him it was only a half-way point toward his real goal) would enable him to raise enough money to present his next production, the one he dreamt of, his scenario of The Conquest of Mexico.16

Artaud was aware that he could only produce a partial articulation of his ideas at this moment, but didnt expect such disinterest and misunderstanding from the public. The Futurists or the Surrealists might have relished such a reaction, but Artaud had (perhaps unrealistically) aimed for something more than avant-gardist terror and disruption. And so the rejection was doubly painful. Les Cenci was considered a failed experiment and he resolved to leave European theater altogether. Much of Wagner and Artauds impetus to revive their medium derived from the notion that a renewed theater could affect, and transform, the larger culture. Yet as the essay above outlines, both were forestalled in their efforts, by halfmeasures and compromises in the form of their work and, in Artauds case, an uncomprehending and more-or-less hostile public. They both made a profound impact on theater, of course; and that impact was felt elsewhere, rippling across disciplines, nations and modes of thought, influencing everything from music to continental philosophy. But measured by their own outsized ambitions, each might have considered the shortcomings of their project part of a failed revolution. However, even if one decides to call the plan for a total synthesis of the arts (and its aims to achieve a collective consciousness) a failure, it may also be, as Susan Sontag has suggested, a success in its state of failure. Although Sontag writes the following in reference to Artaud and literature, it applies equally to the trajectories Ive laid out above:
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Consciousness as given can never wholly constitute itself in art but must strain to transform its own boundaries and to alter the boundaries of art. Thus, any single work has a dual status. It is both a unique and specific and already enacted literary gesture, and a meta-literary declaration (often strident and sometimes ironic) about the insufficiency of literature with respect to an ideal condition of consciousness and art. Consciousness conceived of as a project creates a standard that inevitably condemns the work to be incomplete. On the model of the heroic consciousness that aims at nothing less than total self-appropriation, literature will aim at the total book. Measured against the idea of the total book, all writing, in practice, consists of fragments. Incompleteness becomes the reigning modality of art and thought, giving rise to anti-genreswork that is deliberately fragmentary or self-canceling, thought that undoes itself. But the successful overthrow of old standards does not require denying the failure of such art. As Cocteau says, the only the work which succeeds is that which fails.17

That is to say, that what is left unrealizedwhat failsin a synthesis of the arts holds open possibilities; the drive to produce new totalities is perpetuated, and renewed. Among other things, this is what Szeemanns exhibition demonstrates, by drawing a line from Wagner to early socialism, to a whole range of 20th century attempts to fuse art and life, from the Cabaret Voltaire and Constructivism, through De Stijl and the Bauhaus, to John Cages Water Music and Joseph Beuys social sculpture. Would relational aesthetics have been next in line? Total artwork begs new attention when social relations themselves have become aestheticized, through the introduction of social practice. As social space is reevaluated with a renewed vigor in the present, these ideas will continue to transform contemporary practiceif not yet contemporary life.

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Reading Du Bois, Reading Wagner Jacqueline Clay

The battle for Wagner is not over. Today, after the exhaustion of critical historicist and aestheticist paradigms, it is entering its decisive phase.1 I have endeavored to trace the ever-varying currents in his ideas in his own words.2

I. INTRODUCTION

The contemporary understanding of writer, composer, and theorist Richard Wagner could be said to fall into two caricatures, which each nevertheless depict a certain truth. The first is the romantic genius, whose ambitious productions bind him to the German state, heritage, and self-image. Another caricature merely turns virtues into vices, heroism into villainy, and understands Wagner through the lens of Adolf Hitlers adoration of his operas. In this light Wagner is a proto-fascist, anti-Semite, and direct ancestor to Hitler; and indeed Wagners works have an undeniable connection in certain arenasboth see the Jews as a negative influence; both decry the exploitation of the German folk; both buy into the cult of genius (with Wagners own genius as the primary evidence). Yet it is perhaps too easy to cast Wagner in one circle or the other. It is complicated territory that stretches between genius and archfiend, but in this troubled zone, one finds strange compatriots, unlikely affinities, and space for irreverent connections. Fissures and breaks may be exposed. The project of this essay is to consider Richard Wagner through W.E.B. Du Boisparticularly his narrative short
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story, Of the Coming of John, which was based on Wagners 1850 opera Lohengrin, first published in his watershed 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.3 Du Bois was an African-American writer, educator, racial theorist, and Pan-Africanist. In this essay, Du Bois serves as cipher for an abstract decontextualization. Through Du Bois, one can read Wagners work outside its traditional conditions; examining them alongside each other serves ones understanding of identity formation and subjectivity. There are several texts written about Du Bois, Germany and Wagner, some even by Du Bois.4 Many of them acknowledge the complexity of Du Bois positiona person of color in the Germany of Wilhelm II. Others reflect upon (or even criticize) Du Bois inability to anticipate the potential problems with German state building. But few consider the radicality of Du Bois disidentification, his resistance to, and ambivalence around, a blanket critique of Germany, or his reasons for making use of Lohengrin. Du Bois espouses a certain ambiguity that allows for multiple positions with selective and possibly conflicting readings. One can theorize what brought Du Bois to this tale; one can find structural truths in subjective claims. Through Du Bois, one can make new use of Wagners theories and practices. Embracing ambiguity and multiplicity, this essay will take the conflicted form of a critical narrative, reflecting the works in question, the complex process of research, and schisms within the total artist. This partial reading of Wagner is here understood both as fragmentary and biased. In allowing for multiple narrativesnot limited by racial, chronological or national alignmentsto emerge, this understanding of Wagners work extends Zizeks proposition that one should abstract [Wagner] fromhistorical trivia, one should decontextualize the work, tear it out from the context in which it was originally embedded.5
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Metropolitan Opera House, Interior 1895-96 The Metropolitan Opera Archives

II. WAGNER IN EXILE

Understanding Richard Wagner as an inconsistent or multiple subject is not just a matter of interpretation, but a historical fact. Wagner went through several intellectual phases throughout his seventy years. He found early success and support under the German Confederation, and during this period was appointed Kapellmeistermeaning musical director or bandleaderat the Dresden Opera. In 1849, Wagner participated in the May Revolution alongside Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. These insurrectionists proposed the establishment of a single, independent German state, argued for the removal of landed princes, and questioned the authority of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. Wagners level of involvement in this revolt was unclear. Bakunin described Wagner as a mere dreamer, and although I talked to him, even on politics, I never worked in common with him.6 Wagner definitely supported the establishment of a parliamentary German state, even as he worked in Friedrich Wilhelms court (as Master of Music/ Kapellmeister). In Germany and her Princes, an article from this time, Wagner described the process of revolution, whereer that mighty foot shall tread, there structures vainly planned to last for ages shall crumble into ruinsand psalms of joy from liberated humanity shall fill the air, still shaken with the din of battle.7 At the least, Wagner was deeply sympathetic to the insurgents and shared their passion for a completely realized German nation. This sympathy led to the state issuing a warrant for his arrest in connection with recent disturbances.8 Fleeing Dresden, Wagner spent 1849 to 1862 in exile, living mainly in German-speaking Switzerland, and Paris. Lohengrin embodied Wagners exile. Composed immediately before his expulsion, it premiered and was lauded in Germany but without Wagners direction. Its first staging
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was in Dresden. Of this performance the composer wrote, I should also have liked to be present. Still, I respect the discreet silence, which my high and mighty patrons so conscientiously maintain on the delicate subject of my return.9 Wagner quickly felt separation anxiety from his homeland. His time in exile was filled with petitions for repatriation and apologetic distancing from his former compatriots. Wagners relationship to this first production of Lohengrin is telling. While in Zurich, Wagner wrote to Crown Prince Albert of Saxony,
I have never been able to compose except in my own text both words and music are firmly rootedin the German language and the German spirit; hence my struggles, ever since my exile, to find a new home for myself on foreign soil have been without successI have not yet been able to produce my opera Lohengrin, written when I was still in Dresden.10

Wagner emphasized how this particular work embodied German-ness in music, words, language and spirit.11 He continued that his exile resulted in a placelessness that impeded his art. Lohengrins plot is based loosely on Wolfram von Eschenbachs epic poems. The story centers on protagonists Elsa and the unnamed knight, and their conflicts with antagonists Ortrud and Telramund, who accuse Elsa of killing her young brother Gottfried, the heir to the Duchy of Brabant. To resolve the matter, King Henry the Fowler proposes a duel between Telramund and whoever will fight in Elsas defense. She prays for the knight from her dreams (literally, not a figure of speech) and the unnamed knight eventually heeds her call, appearing in a vessel drawn by a swan (Gottfried under a spell cast by Ortrud). The unnamed knight fights Telramund but spares his life, and proposes marriage to Elsa making one request of his future wifeshe cannot ask his name. Ultimately, Elsa falls victim to Ortruds trickery and breaks
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Of the Coming of John, from W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. 1903 Public Domain

her promise. The knight reveals himself as Lohengrin, son of King Percival and Knight of the Holy Grail. With this knowledge, Lohengrin must return to the grail, but as he bids farewell, the swan reappears and miraculously turns into Elsas brother, Gottfried. Lohengrin departs and the broken-hearted Elsa dies of grief.
III. DU BOIS IN GERMANY

W.E.B. Du Bois was a Germanophile. While enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University, Du Bois spent two years studying in Berlin and Eisenach, and found his time in Germany stood in stark contrast to his experience in America. In his own recollections, Du Bois describes Germany as the land where I first met white folk who treated me as a human being.12 While in Eisenach, Du Bois stayed with a German (white) family, even courting their daughterin contrast, interracial dating was perilous in 1892 America. Much of Du Bois intellectual theorizing before and after this time was informed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Master-Slave dialectic13 and possibly Wagners concept of the Volk.14 Both of these influences can be mapped throughout Du Bois career but are most easily seen in his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Part anthropological study and part fiction, this is a foundational text for contemporary critical race theory. Among its various studies is the brief narrative, Of the Coming of John, in which Du Boiss use of the story of Lohengrin is evident, through similarities in the narrative arc and parallels between protagonists (the unnamed knight and the main characters of his story). Like Wagner, Du Bois was displaced: as the descendent of slaves (an unwilling displacement) and as a student in Germany (a voluntary displacement). Du Bois relationship to place, obligation, and sacrifice could have drawn
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him to Lohengrin. Although composed in Dresden, Wagners thirteen-year exile postponed his directing this work in Germany. In contrast, the unnamed knight willingly leaves his home and unwillingly returns. Du Bois returned to Harvard after his third request for a fellowship extension was denied. Upon his return to the United States, Du Bois surely related in some way to Wagners longing for Germany and his inability to be present for the production of Lohengrin while in exile. The protagonist of Of the Coming of John, is John Jones, an educated African American. He is the brother to an Elsa-like Jennie and serves as the unnamed knight, come to save his people.15 Jones foil is the white, privileged John Henderson. Former playmates, the Johns depart coastal Georgia for college, leaving behind communities eager for their return. While away they meet unexpectedly at a performance of Lohengrin, where Jones is asked to leave. Eventually, both return to their communities. Jones goes to work teaching at the local Black school. He is later removed (by Hendersons father, a judge) because he talks on the French Revolution, equality and such like.16 Frustrated, he goes on to have a series of alienating experiences within his Black community; his college education has changed his language and ideas creating distance between himself and his neighbors. Finally, Jones finds Henderson assaulting his sister Jennie. He strikes his former friend dead; the story ends with Jones lynching. In his essay Du Bois and Wagner: Race, Nation and Culture between the United Sates and Germany, historian Russell A. Berman sees the two Johns as an illustration of Du Bois fascination with the problem of a double consciousnessa white seeing and a black seeing.17 This reading can be extended: if the Johns are an illustration of double consciousness, they are also part of one dark
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bodytorn asunder.18 Moreover when considered in relation to Lohengrin, they are together a bent manifestation of the unnamed knight. They are black body and white knight in single form. Both are sacrificed and leave the stage creating an insular circle of death without the optimistic Gottfried figure. One could argue this pessimism is a general criticism of American race politics, but also a personal exercise, exhibiting Du Bois perception of German versus American racial experience. In his American retelling of Lohengrin, all the characters are connected and both Johns die, illustrating a trans-racial melding of people and their catalytic proximity. Of the Coming of John is situated strangely within The Souls Of Black Folk. Much of the book is anthropological, considering Southern black culture. Although located in the black South, Of the Coming makes use of Germanic mythology, in contrast with other chapters. Even more ambiguous is Du Bois critique within the text. The character John Jones strongly suspected the Germans of being thieves and rascals, despite his textbooks. In a possibly apologetic and reflexive moment, Du Bois questioned the German character, but paradoxically within a text that itself borrows from the German cultural project. A mere decade after his studies in Berlin, Du Bois was John Jones. He returned to his ancestral home to save his people.19 Even as he borrowed from and saluted the German culture, he questioned it through the character of John Jones. Although Du Bois found his time in Germany highly liberating, this Germany was also deeply anti-Semitic, legislating and promoting antipathy. In his article W.E.B. Du Bois Love Affair with Imperial Germany, Kenneth Barkin suggests that Du Bois did ponder the similarities and differences in the situations of German Jews and African Americansboth groups suffered from discrimination
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[but] any similarities were superficial and misleading.20 Barkin goes on to assert that German Jews were more economically enabled than African Americans. Du Bois writing in The Souls of Black Folk undermines this argued distance; in its opening chapters, Du Bois conflated the African-American experience, namely the African diaspora, with the Jewish diaspora. His account articulated the black American experience through Judaic phrases: forty years, promised land and Canaan. Although Du Bois did not explicitly identify with the contemporary German Jew, he did appropriate parts of the Jewish experience within Of the Coming of John. Du Bois illustrated his affinity for Wagnerian opera in an important narrative moment. Jones experience while watching Lohengrin is described as follows,
he sat in a half-daze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrins swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the ladys arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all? And if he had called, what right had he to call when a world like this lay open before men? Then the movement changed, and fuller, mightier harmony swelled away. He looked thoughtfully across the hall, and wondered why the beautiful gray-haired woman looked so listless, and what the little man could be whispering about.
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He would not like to be listless and idle, he thought, for he felt with the music the movement of power within him. If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard,aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the dark, drawn face of his mother. And his heart sank beneath the waters, even as the sea-sand sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with that last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into the sky. It left John so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, Will you step this way, please, sir?21

In the text Jones embodies Wagners ideal audience experience. Du Bois was fully aware of Wagners conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk as completely collective, a synthesis of the arts, stimulating all of ones senses. Jones is completely immersed in his experience; he is removed from the world outside and aspires to a great and unknown future. The beautiful hall and the costume of his fellow audience member overwhelm him. When Lohengrin begins the audience is hushed and Jones is transfixed: the music swept through every muscle of his frame and put it all a-tune. That this is brought to an abrupt and painful end when he is asked to leave, only underscores how intensely the performance itself was felt and experienced.
IV. SWAN SONG:

1. a song of great sweetness said to be sung by a dying swan 2. a farewell appearance or final act or pronouncement Du Bois story closes with the lynching of John Jones; possibly slipping into shock, in this moment the memory of Lohengrin returns to the characters mind.
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Then as the sheen of the starlight stole over him, he thought of the gilded ceiling of that vast concert hall, heard stealing toward him the faint sweet music of the swan. Hark! was it music, or the hurry and shouting of men? Yes, surely! Clear and high the faint sweet melody rose and fluttered like a living thing, so that the very earth trembled as with the tramp of horses and the murmur of angry men. He leaned back and smiled toward the sea, whence rose the strange melody, away from the dark shadows where lay the noise of horses galloping, galloping on. With effort he roused himself, bent forward, and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the Song of the Bride, Freudig gefhrt, ziehet dahin.22And the world whistled in his ears.23

The passage resolves the storys narrative and recalls Lohengrins final moments with Elsa (though the song Jones quotes is from the first act, and not the literal swan song of the opera). In the opera, this marks the end of their marriage brought on by Elsas insecurity. In Of the Coming of John, there is a spiritual and physical death. By the end of the narrative, he is fully disillusioned and completely alienatedhe longs to return to the vast concert hall, which for him symbolizes beauty and escape. Thus Jones embodies Du Bois longing for his German idyll, his romantic years of studyanother reflexive moment. The German lyrics being led joyfully, allude to Lohengrin, Jones, and Du Bois. Lohengrin departs to protect the Holy Grail. Jones, deeply troubled, must retreat spiritually and willingly surrenders to his fate. Du Bois too sacrificed: he could not remain forever in Germany, but his experiences there motivated him to work in the American South; The Souls of Black Folk is the manifestation of this. There is an additional (and rarely considered) performance in Of the Coming of John. Upon arriving home, Jones visits his family church and is asked to speak. He
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critiques the churchs denominational partisanshipits insistence on division between Baptist and Methodist. His admonition is ill received; the churchs pastor answers with an intense oratory. Du Bois writes,
He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into the words, with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed, and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where all the pent-up feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the air.24

Topically, this passage replicates subjects found throughout The Souls of Black Folk. It borrows the immersive and deeply emotive performance of Wagners Lohengrin, but unlike Jones experience in New York City it is completely collective and mutually performative. Du Bois continues, John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and denunciation. Jones cannot engage in this intense collective performance. Wagner was highly critical of Christianity and saw its abjection and hypocrisy as hindering contemporary art practice and life. Du Bois does not share Wagners critique: his sensitive presentation of both secular and religious performances illuminates his shared appreciation for both art forms.
V. DISIDENTIFICATION AND DU BOIS

a place where fragile connections can still be tried out and take sensual form25 Through Of the Coming of John, Du Bois performed a subtle and conflicted dialogue with his colored self and his love of Germany. Queer theorist Jose Esteban Muoz describes this taking of multiple positions, sometimes selfhating, as disidentification. He delineates these practices as being about creating an uneasiness in desire, which
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works to confound and subvert the social fabricbecause of the complexity of its intersectional nature.26 Muoz extends this idea further: disidentification is both a process of production and a mode of performance.27 Du Bois enjoyed his years in Bismarcks Germany. Even after two World Wars, Du Bois did not publically present a sweeping judgment of this time or nation-building. Moreover, in the shadow of the Holocaust, during which all colored, queer, and non-Germanic ethnic bodies were despised (an illustration of Germanys hostility towards all those like Du Bois), he did not retract his position. He allowed himself to occupy this contradictory site, this embodied space of disidentification. Du Bois voice is as much informed by this Germanic story as by genealogy, nationality, the canon, and so on. In his use of Wagners cultural project, one can deduce that the visionary Du Bois anticipated the radical potential of such a body reshaping and rehabilitating this work in his present complex social sphere (where oppression and domination of the colored and non-Germanic ethnic bodies were common enough). Moreover, if one begins to consider these borrowings as tactical, subjective and informed there can be increased clarity on how identity and subjectivity have always been formed. With The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois not only generates the foundational text for Black race formation, but also acts out the contradictions and complexity of identity as such. One might consider in this light the conjoined Johns unexpected meeting in the opera house: The young man recognized his dark boyhood playmate, and John knew that it was the Judges son. The white John started, lifted his hand, and then froze in his chair; the black John smiled lightly, then grimly, and followed the usher down the aisle.28 The seeing, lifting, smiling, and turning away, much like Du Bois repurposing of the story of Lohengrin,
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are biased and peculiar acts of disidentification. Yet, to follow Muozs theory, they also carve out a space for partiality, and allow for a new multiplicity of understandingsof Wagner as much as Du Boisvery different than the caricatures set out in my introduction. To be sure, such complexity is the unavoidable consequence of the confounding historical and geographical conditions in which the two men livedand which conditions their art aimed to reconcile. But I want to claim for this complexity something more. That is, I want to argue that it might serve as a productive space not just for people like Du Boispeople of color in a strange landbut for all those wrestling with identity formation: opening up territories beyond those of race, ethnicity, and place.

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Onlookers watch as a wrecking ball slams down in front of the Kunsthalle Bern steps to create Michael Heizers Berne Depression on March 19, 1969. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard Harald Szeemann Archive 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

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Pictures of ExhibitionsAn Interview with Balthasar Burkhard Arden Sherman

On March 18, 1969 a wrecking ball slammed down upon a patch of wet asphalt in front of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. Scraps of pale yellow paint chipped off the ball, revealing the rusted steel mass which just seconds before impacted the paved surface. The artist Michael Heizer, who orchestrated the act, stands between the museum and the wrecking ball facing the debris. Harald Szeemann, director of the Kunsthalle and curator of When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head, is at his side. The atmosphere is contemplative and serious, in contrast with the frenetic energy evidenced elsewhere in the famous exhibition. Just over seven thousand people attended When Attitudes Become Form during its Bern exhibitiona relatively small number, perhaps, considering its historical importance.1 As with many exhibitions, its impact was made not only by firsthand encounters in the exhibition space itself, but through various kinds of documentation and mediation; that is to say, what we know about When Attitudes Become Formalongside much of what we know of Szeemanns important exhibitions of the 1960s and early 70swe owe to the documentary work of Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard (b. 1944). Photographic documents of the kind Burkhard produced in those years therefore play a crucial role in the ongoing canonization of exhibitions as a form and object of study. A native Bernese, Burkhard took up photography through an apprenticeship with photographer Kurt Blum during the early 1960s. He was later hired as the Kunsthalle Berns first official photographer and worked directly with its
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director, Harald Szeemann.2 He would go on to record Szeemanns exhibitions from the position of employee and friend. According to Burkhard, his style aimed for a kind of straight photography, connected to early 20th-century American photographers Paul Strand, Walker Evans, and Alfred Stieglitz among others; in Burkhards case straight photography meant sharp focus, and avoiding visible alterations or technical manipulations. As Strand put forward in his classic 1917 essay, Photography and the New God, [pictorial] organization is evolved either by movement of the camera in relation to the objects themselves or through their actual arrangement.3 Such careful documentary practice gave a special weight to the energetic procedures that played out before the camera during the realization of When Attitudes Become Form: Richard Serra splashing lead, Szeemann and Joseph Beuys debating the installation, or a wrecking ball smashing a Bern pavement. Rather than mark the photographers activity or role, Burkhards rigorous and clear pictures place their emphasis on the value of process (in tune with the artists aims, and Szeemanns); so too did their classical picturing of scenes of exhibition, powerfully insist on those scenes as charged objects of historical study and importance in their own right. What follows is our interview, which took place on July 16, 2009 in Burkhards home and studio in Bern. Arden Sherman: I am interested in dissecting some of your early photographs with you. Maybe we can start with your pictures of When Attitudes Become Form (1969)? Balthasar Burkhard: I did a lot of documentation for the show. I was there the whole time when they installed. All the artists were present: Richard Serra, Mario Merz, Michael Heizer, and others. This was their first show in
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Harald Szeemann celebrating the last day of Documenta 5 seated upon a throne created by German artist Anatole Herzfeld. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard Harald Szeemann Archive 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

Harald Szeemann with artist Ingeborg Lscher at Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany 1972. The two met at the hundred-day event and would later marry. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard Harald Szeemann Archive 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

Europe. They were known in America but here they were not known at all. Richard Serra was young; all the others were just starting their careers. It was really a fabulous two weeks of installationan incredible time. When you look at this work today, for example when you go to Dia:Beacon, it seems so museological and clean. At the time of Attitudes, it was more fantastic and unpredictable. AS: It was quite inventive, how Szeemann packed all these artists into one room. Do you remember any of the artists having a problem being so close to one another? BB: There are about ten artists in this room and they all are shown together. Here is Bruce Nauman; this is Mario Merz; this is Barry Flanagan; and here is Alighiero Boetti. Ten artists packed into a small area, feeding off one another, working together. They were friendsnot like today when everybody wants to have a solo show. AS: In my research I found little trace of international press on Attitudes. I was surprised since it is now so well known. I know there was a lot of press in Swiss and German newspapers; can you say who was attending these exhibitions? BB: I think there were maybe seven thousand people at When Attitudes Become Form. The Kunsthalle Bern was internationally very famous in Europe: Szeemann brought the new American painters to Bern, and all important European painters showed at the Kunsthalle. Visitors from all over Switzerland and Europe came to see Szeemanns shows. You know the history of the Kunsthalle Bern is pretty far out: Lichtenstein and Warhol, they were here at the beginning of their careers. 12 Environments (July to September, 1968) was a popular show. Eleven thousand
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people attended; it included the first building Christo ever wrapped. Warhol was in that show as well. Max Bill (April to May, 1968) had three thousand, two hundred visitors; Roy Lichtenstein showed huge paintings and drew five thousand (Roy Lichtenstein, February-March 1968). For Science Fiction (July to September, 1967) there were seventeen thousand. Thats a lot for Bern. AS: Was the way you shot these photos influenced by the form of artwork? Be it land art or installation art rather than photographs of singular works? BB: I was more interested in straight photography: Walker Evans and Paul Strand. The first photo book that I bought was the original version of Robert Franks The Americans which came out in Paris. Looking at the Heizer picture, it now looks very bad to me. But it fit its moment and generation: everyone being up until six in the morning and then coming out to the Kunsthalle and making their work. It was a mentality of its moment. When I look at these artists now, they are creating work that is very precise; when you look at this its a totally different spirit. People of your generation look at the 60s and think its so great. But I think times today are maybe as great, too. Vida Rudis (Burkhards wife): I dont want to butt in, but I disagree: I think that this was a special time. There was a gestalt of people and ideas, and somebody there who was able to bring everybody together. This doesnt happen all the time. That is what makes these things special when they do occur. I am not saying that you can analyze them and recreate themprobably not, because it depends on all of these factors. But dont minimize it. BB: Hmm. I would put it differently and say that I learned
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a lot about art through Szeemann; we were very good friends and he taught me about art. This kind of work was all totally new and exceptional. I lived this art and this time, so these photographs show it. AS: You have framed the pictures within a larger historical moment. In particular theyre pivotal for understanding the practice of Harald Szeemann, which in turn plays an important part in the history of exhibitions. Can you say something about the famous picture of Szeemann, taken on the last day of Documenta 5? BB: I lived in Kassel for a while during the exhibition. Szeemann had an apartment and I installed my little darkroom and developed these pictures there. I lived on a mattress on his floor. So this was the last day; wed just walked through the exhibition. This work, a throne by Anatol, was outside. And since it was the last day, there was crowd that surrounded Harald Szeemann, because he was the famous curator and Secretary General. It is very theatrical: you know he was an actor and had the cabaret before he came to the Kunsthalle. It looks like a great historical photograph, yet it was just done as if you were hanging out with your friends and you snapped a photograph. Here is a picture of Ingeborg Lscher, Szeemanns wife; they met at Documenta. AS: Did she have work in the show? BB: Yes. This is actually the first photograph of them together. Often when he was off somewhere else, working, I was with Ingeborg; I met her the same day that Harald met her. I am still very close friends with their family; their daughter Una is like my goddaughter in a way. Actually, I am curating an exhibition of hers this fall. She does video and photo work.
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AS: What do your photographs of the archive say about Harald Szeemanns personality and practice? BB: I took them about a week after he died, for a German art magazineit was for a memorial issue. It was very strange for me to do it at that time. This factory was organized like his brain. After all the big exhibitions, he would go back there to his machine and work. Sometimes he would sleep there. He lived in a village nearbyLocarno is the closest town. His widow Ingeborg lives there now. He was a constant traveler, however. I remember he started to collect the luggage tags in my photograph while he was still in Bern. This is a huge pile. AS: There are all sorts of interesting trinkets on his shelf in the picture. BB: These are mostly little things from friends. And here is an advertisement from his grandfather, who invented the curling iron for hair. Szeemanns grandfather was a world-champion hairdresser. Really all these photographs were taken like if you were making a snapshot with your iPhone. I did them in a very quick manner, never preconceived; I just photographed what was in front of me. AS: Did Szeemann ever direct you to take a photograph a certain way? BB: No. It was a very silent communication and he expected me to do things my waywhich was his way. I did the photographs for one of his last shows, Money and Value The Last Taboo (Geld und WertDas letzte Tabu), which took place in the context of Expo 02, the Swiss National
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Harald Szeemans studio in Maggia, Switzerland, shot a week after his death in 2005. A sculpture made of the curators collected luggage tags hangs in the left foreground. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard Balthasar Burkhard Archive 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zrich

exhibition. He called me up and said, Could you do the cover for the catalogue? I said, For you, of course. And he said But you have to do it in color! And I replied, For you, I will do it in color. We knew each other for a very long time; it was all unspoken to a degree.

A Possible Pataphysical Course An Interview with Christian Bk Josephine Zarkovich

First developed by the Parisian playwright Alfred Jarry in 1893, pataphysics proposes to be the science of imaginary solutions.1 Whereas mainstream science forms its truths through building upon or breaking down empirical observation, pataphysics moves away from the world of the as is and into the world of as if.2 Much like JeanFranois Lyotards description of paralogya search for paradoxes and exceptions in current theories in order to break down a totalizing narrativeJarrys work assumes the language of science in order to undermine its rigid worldview.3 Harald Szeemann has been described as eager to speak at length about pataphysics to anyone who would listen.4 He first came across the concept while working on his doctorial thesis, writing later that, From the standpoint of pataphysics, it seemed to me that it made no difference whether I worked on my dissertation or spent my time more enjoyably reading Jarrys writings and the Cashiers du College de Pataphysique in the Bar de la Bourse.5 Jarrys influence on Szeemann went well beyond his dissertation, entering into several of Szeemanns landmark exhibitions, most notably Documenta 5: Questioning RealityPictorial Worlds Today (Kassel, 1972) and Bachelor Machines (Junggesellenmaschinen/Les machines clibataires, Kunsthalle Bern, 1975); he mounted an exhibition about Jarry himself at the Kunsthaus Zrich in 19845. Szeemann moreover described his own practice as an independent exhibition maker in explicitly pataphysical terms as a clear, self-organising, institutionalizing concept of self which provided the basis for pursuing a
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possible pataphysical coursein the form of a constantly self-renewing control circuit.6 Canadian poet Christian Bk is one of the foremost scholars on pataphysics. His book Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science was released in 2002 and is recognized as one of the most comprehensive references available on the subject. Curator Josephine Zarkovich recently spoke to Bk about his work and the relationship between pataphysics and renowned curator Harald Szeemann. The following conversation took place on April 21, 2009. Josephine Zarkovich: I am focusing on the exhibitions of Harald Szeemann and how they were influenced by pataphysics. Can you tell me how you first encountered pataphysics? Christian Bk: Good question. In the last chapter of my book Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, I discuss the legacy of Canadian pataphysics, as formulated by such Canadian poets as Christopher Dewdney, Steve McCaffery, and bpNichol. I encountered this work first when I was a student, and in part I worked backward from them in order to study the historical precedents. JZ: Were you immediately attracted to the subject of imaginary science, or did it take some time? CB: When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be scientist. Science was my best subject in school. Most teachers thought that I would end up becoming a mathematician or an engineer. Instead, I fooled everybody and became an avant-garde poet. I still have a lay interest in science, and I keep myself immersed in scientific literature, particularly in my areas of idiosyncratic interest. I certainly would
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have recognized myself in the pseudoscientific work of pataphysical poets. My first book of poetry, Crystallography, is primarily a pataphysical exercise. The work appears to be a scientific textbook about mineralogy, but in fact it is a very long conceit about the nature of language, suggesting that poems are a species of crystal. JZ: You use the term pseudoscience in the book. Could you define the term as it relates to pataphysics? CB: A pseudoscience is a way of thinking that partakes in the discourse of science but does not use the methods of science. I mean, science is defined entirely by a highly codified regimen of investigation: it operates through an investment in empirical evidence, the formation of hypotheses, and the use of controlled experiments to prove these hypotheses. Typically, a pataphysical argument is very careful and very rational, but its first principle is a complete irrationalisman axiom that seems nonsensical, but that, if presumed true, leads to all kinds of surprising conclusions. JZ: In response to Harald Szeemanns exhibitions, which sometimes have a similar intent, people have said his presentations risked devolving into mere cabinets of curiosities. You talk about the Museum of Jurassic Technology as a pataphysical example in your book, but it seems to risk a similar criticism. Where is the rigor in pataphysics if it is not using a scientific method? CB: Pataphysical rigor arises from the application of reason to a completely irrational hypothesis. We know folklorically, for example, that if you drop a cat, it always
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lands on its feet. We also know folklorically that if you drop a piece of buttered toast, the toast always falls butter-side down. These are just ironic bits of folk wisdom: they are not scientific facts. What if we were to pretend, however, that they were scientific facts, that they were axiomatically true? Well, pataphysics suggests that you could, in fact, build a perpetual motion machine by tying, to the back of a cat, a piece of toast with the butter side outand then dropping this object from a height. The object would spin forever in midair. A pataphysical argument, like this one, takes a set of nonsensical principles, but uses reason to argue from these principles to some kind of surprising conclusionone intended to do nothing more than generate ideas. JZ: Is the reasoning set up by each practitioner? CB: Sure, each of us lays the ground rules. Both pataphysics and science have a kind of speculative, experimental attitude to the world at large. Both forms of knowledge are about producing interesting problems and interesting anomalies. Both forms of knowledge are not really doing their jobs unless they are making innovative discoveries. When compared to science, pataphysics is really just a different way of concocting interesting concepts for consideration by the mind. JZ: Can you talk a little bit about the worlds of as is and as if? CB: The difference is almost as fundamental as the difference between reality and fictionbetween what is factual, or constitutive and what is virtual or speculative. Writers are usually participating in a milieu of the as if. They are wondering hypothetically what might happen if various
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scenarios were to prevail, and then these writers attempt to imagine what might in fact happen under these conditions. We imagine that science is like a project in which we translate the as if into the as is. We imagine a hypothesis. We create a set of experimental conditions and then we see whether or not we can extract from them any truth. In many respects people behave as though things are true when in fact they probably know that, in many respects, such things are not true. A table, for example, is composed mostly of space; only electrostatic forces and nuclear forces in the atoms grant the table the appearance of its substantivenessbut in many respects a table is nothing more than emptiness. It is, nevertheless, sitting in front of you, and it feels tangibly solid. We behave as though the table is solid, as if its composed of something substantive, when in fact it is a whole interplay of forces. I think that this kind of condition defines the relationship between the as if and the as is. The difference involves the way things really are as opposed to the way we pretend they areand often we cannot tell the difference between the two. JZ: Ive heard pataphysics described both as the science of imaginary solutions and the science of exceptions. Do you consider these definitions interchangeable? CB: Science is often dragooned into solving real problems: global warming, nuclear weapons, or the energy crisis. But we forget that in order to exploit a concept fully, we might have to invent a false problem, a kind of daydream, if you like. We might have to come up with an imaginary solution to a problem that does not yet actually exist, and the solution only takes place in the mind. I suppose that, in a certain sense, and at worst, such imaginary solutions
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risk becoming indistinguishable from ideology itselfsince we use ideology to provide an imaginary solution to the real problems of society. But in science, there are many cases where scientists have to play pretend. They have to give themselves a false problem and see what happens when they try to come up with an imaginary solution to it. In a certain sense, science is a world of speculation. The irony is that in the act of coming up with imaginary solutions, scientists might end up producing anomalous or exceptional ways of thinking. In my book I discuss different kinds of anomalies that arise in the world of science, and I suggest that, in a certain sense, the job of modern day science is to produce anomalies. In this respect pataphysics is very similar to science. Both somehow accentuate anomalies as a way of valorizing the phenomenon that we might otherwise eliminate from our study because it does not fit the model. JZ: Id like to talk a little about the idea of the Bachelor Machine. Harald Szeemann organized an exhibition around the idea, and you quote from his catalogue in your book Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. One of the primary concepts behind these machines is the principle of a closed circuit. Can you speak to how that closed system relates to pataphysics? CB: A Bachelor Machine is a device that refuses to make something useful happen in the real world. Such a device does not have a pragmatic function; instead, the machine is designed to produce ideas. It makes concepts. It instills in you a generative thought, and thus the machine makes you part of its own operation. You become one of the instrumental parts of the machinebecause you make it think.
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Marcel Duchamps machines, for example, do not look like they would work, but they generate ideas. They generate things like art criticism, for example. They change the way that people think about art. But they are not blueprints for devices that you can actually imagine building. In a certain sense, these machines are the daydreams of engineers: if an inventor were free to dream of a machine outside of the laws of physics, what kind of blueprint might they draw? JZ: Szeemann seems to have related to that concept. He appears to have pushed to close himself off from outside critique. He formed an agency of which he was the only member, inhabiting each of the multiple roles involved in deciding what he was to produce, which he called a pataphysical solution. CB: Sure, a pataphysical solution is just a way of saying ironically that youve created a false problem for yourself and that youve come up with a false solution. I can certainly imagine someone describing Szeemanns behavior as thoroughly pataphysical. JZ: So do you think that pataphysics is a solo endeavor? I know there are several networks working with this concept, such as the College of Pataphysics, but it appears that most of the work is being generated by individuals or small groups. CB: Pataphysics is almost never a solo endeavor. Look at capitalism or communism; these are imaginary solutions to real problems. There are not enough resources to be distributed equitably to everyone who wants them. How do you manage this problem? Does the king get them all? Does the person who takes the biggest risk get more than
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the person who refuses to take the risk? Does everyone get an equal share no matter what their contribution might be? Do only the most needy get the resources? Capitalism and communism are ways of solving these problems, but they are imaginary solutions because the problems continue to persist. A food bank, for example, is always supposed to be a temporary solution to the issue of povertybut in the real world, temporary solutions almost always become permanent solutions. The very thing that we had to make on the spot out of chewing gum and paper clipsthe Bachelor Machine that we had to McGuyver out of spare parts at handends up becoming the foundation of the device we actually use to address the problem. Look at the history of evolution. The fact that you have lungs capable of breathing air is, in a certain sense, a jury-rigged solution built on the back of a machine designed to keep a fish buoyant in water. The engine of natural selection has transferred a machine from one environmental context into another. If we were really trying to engineer a lung through intelligent design, surely we would try to engineer such a machine efficiently from the startbut, instead, our lungs are made from spare parts built on the backs of other devices through Darwinian selection, and over millennia this process has gradually engineered one of many potential solutions. Pataphysics is a condition, in which we find ourselves all of the time, and I think that Alfred Jarry is pointing to the political overtones of this idea in his 1896 play Ubu Roi. Jarry suggests that, people in power create imaginary solutions and then try to pass them off as real, all the while forgetting that such solutions are merely provisional. JZ: Would you say, then, that pataphysics is a way of accepting things that are not true?
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CB: Perhapsalthough I think that your great idea might be oversimplifying the ironies of pataphysics. Let me put the issue this way: what Nietzsche does seriously for the history of philosophy is analogous to what Jarry does humorously for the history of philosophy. When people ask me what is pataphysics?I always try to define it by saying that it attempts to make science recognize its own poetics, while at the same time its relieves poetry of its own poeticity in order to make poetry more scientific. I might suggest that pataphysics highlights this dialectical relationship between competing discourses about truth. JZ: Your epilogue ends with a quote from Jarry about how even pataphysicians will become Ubu Roi. What can you tell me about that persona? It seems as if there is both an attraction and repulsion surrounding it. CB: Ubu is probably best described by Jean Baudrillard, who uses him as a metaphor to describe the unrestrained model of growth that defines life at the dawn of the 21st century. Everything is growing to its utmost extreme everything from the production of goods to the production of terror, to even the production of truth. Everything is being produced to a hyperbolic, exorbitant degree. Every single aspect of human life is being pushed to its limits in every dimensionbe it cognition, sexuality, difference, etc. Ubu becomes a kind of horrific vision of this cancerous excess. Everything seems to be growing out of control, towards no particular end, all the while taking on an absurdist, if not monstrous, quality of dominance. Nobody knows how to counteract it. Baudrillard might say that we dont typically respond to this great evil with an even greater good. We dont try to counteract evil with something better. Instead we up the ante by responding to something bad with something
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even worse: an arms race of excesses. If you are in a battle with someone who is much faster than you, what can you possibly doexcept become even faster yourself. We find ourselves locked in a competition to become the fastest, the biggestto be the most deterrent, most terrifying character, to be the most powerful, the most wealthy, etc. All the things that constitute advantages are now being taken to extremes that have no foreseeable end and they no longer seem to have much of a purpose beyond this one-upmanship. I think that Jarry is imagining such a condition through the character of Ubu. Even something like the pursuit of truth is affected. There is no limit to our desire to know the truth, and yet, as we increase our knowledge of the truth, our ignorance likewise increases simultaneously. We can never wipe out ignorance, because it seems to grow in lockstep with everything that we continue to learn about reality.

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A Critical Timeline Courtney Dailey

The following timeline gathers selected information from 1945 to 1983: roughly the end of World War II to the year of the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800. It aims to situate Harald Szeemanns exhibition in time and place, amid social and historical events that contribute to its understanding and meaningto put forward the historical conditions in which Harald Szeemann undertook to collect these European Utopias since 1800. I have selected these events around four ideas: the rise of globalism through capitalist expansion; the narrative of the Cold War and the waning of mass utopia; the post-colonial struggles of many nations (in tension with a longing for a universal language); and the resulting shifts in cultural identities. Understanding his exhibitions as archives in transition, this timeline tries to bridge past and present with a similar logic, presenting several points of the exhibitions contact with history.

1945 IMF and World Bank are established

End of WWII, reconstruction begins

First meeting of United Nations US, Russia, and Britain divide a defeated Germany Arab League is founded to resist formation of Jewish state in Palestine South Korea wins liberation after 50 years of Japanese colonial rule India wins independence after 200 years of British colonial rule

1946 CIA established by American President Harry Truman

Anti-British demonstrations in Egypt, and India Jordan wins independence from Britain Syria gains independence from France Italy replaces monarchy with republic

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1947 Burma wins independence from Britain

Japan forms constitutional democracy

Arabs and Jews reject British proposal to split Palestine Marshall Plan distributes over $13 billion in aid from the US Truman Doctrine gives money to Greece and Turkey to resist Communist influence Mont Pelerin Society is founded in Switzerland: a group of classical liberals discuss the threat to freedom posed by expansionist governments of the day Transistor radio is invented

1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa

Committee for European Economic Cooperation founded Red Scare begins in the US; the phrase Cold War is coined North Korea establishes itself as a communist state, separate from South Korea Buckminster Fuller builds a Geodesic Dome, believes that technological utopia is possible by applying the principles of science to solve the problems of humanity The Big Bang Theory is published North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established

1949 George Orwell writes 1984; Le Corbusier pens Toward A New Architecture
COMECON is established, essentially the Soviet version of the Marshall Plan German Democratic Republic established; eight million Germans immigrate Vietnam wins independence from France Bertolt Brecht forms Berliner Ensemble Council of Europe is established USSR detonates first atomic bomb China begins the Korean War

1950 Democratic party wins in Turkey

UN rejects membership of China US crushes revolution for independence in Puerto Rico European Convention on Human Rights is signed in Rome Britain recognizes communist China; US withdraws all consular officials Theodor Adorno and others publish The Authoritarian Personality, an investigation into the fascist potential of right-wing Americans Atomic tests begin in the Nevada desert Swiss men vote against womens suffrage Marimekko, founded by Finnish Armi Ratia, begins Six hundred thousand people march for peace in Germany Backyard shelters to protect against bombs proliferate in the US Algerian National Liberation Front begins guerilla warfare against France Peace treaty formally ends WWII; Truman broadcasts the news on the first live coast-to-coast transmission. The Soviets refuse to sign.

1951

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1952 US signs military pacts with Peru, Cuba, and Ecuador

Ralph Ellison publishes Invisible Man

Demonstrations against Apartheid in South Africa US, Britain, and France reject proposal for an armed, reunified, neutral Germany John Cage writes Water Music, instructions for music with no particular order Popular uprising in Bolivia replaces feudalism with universal suffrage Egypt wins independence after 2,300 years of foreign domination Commercial air travel becomes more widespread DNA is discovered

1953 Thousands riot in East Berlin against Soviets

Josef Stalin dies; Nikita Khruschev becomes Secretary of Communist Party US and Britain organize a coup in Iran with Iranian military. Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic Women win the vote in Mexico Lacan begins his weekly public seminars in Paris (they continue for the next 27 years) H-Bomb Bravo test explodes at Bikini Atoll

1954 Communist Party in US is virtually outlawed by President Eisenhower

US, Britain, and France reject Russias proposal for membership in NATO CIA sponsors coup in Guatemala by rebels from Honduras, ousting the newly democratically elected government, beginning thirty years of military rule War between France and Vietnam ends by splitting North and South First documenta staged in Kassel, Germany

1955 Iraq, Britain, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan form Baghdad Pact to

check Soviet influence Bandung, Java: International meeting that founded the Nonaligned Movement: 29 Asian and African nations marked by hostility to superpowers. Szeemann starts to perform alone, rather than with an ensemble; adopted a one man style that reflected [his] ambition to realize a Gesamtkunstwerk. West German unions protest for a forty-hour workweek and higher wages. It becomes a sovereign state and joins NATO. US funds West German re-armament. East Germany is granted full sovereignty by USSR; talks to reunify fail. Morocco and Tunisia declare independence from France

1956 Egypt is declared an Islamic state. Women win right to vote.

France sends 400,000 soldiers to Algeria to contain anti-French rioting Suez Canal crisis in Egypt. UN sends its first peacekeeping force First transatlantic phone line is built Soviets take over Hungary

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1957 European Economic Community is founded for trade ease

First unmanned satellite, Sputnik, is launched by the USSR

Mao sends 300,000 intellectuals to jail or to the countryside Student strike in Venezuela against dictator leads to his downfall Situationist International formed in the Italian village of Cosio dArroscia Szeemann stages his first exhibition, Painter-Poets-Poet-Painters at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, in Switzerland Ghana wins independence from Britain Anti-American riots in Taiwan Battle of Algiers Yves Klein stages Manifestation of the Void in Paris

1958 Batista flees as Castro and rebels march into Havana

Guinea, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Ubanga-Shari all declare independence from France Nixon goes to Latin America and encounters violent anti-American demonstrations Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is published Happenings begin in New York City Structural Anthropology is written by Claude Lvi-Strauss Parker Brothers launches board game Risk

1959 European Free Trade Association begins with seven nations

Eurail Pass is introduced, allowing travel among thirteen countries Tibetans rise up against China; monks are forced into exile in India On his visit to US, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is annoyed when he isnt allowed to visit Disneyland, due to security issues. Instead he tours housing projects. Last Surrealist exhibition, called Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surralisme,or EROS, opens at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris Pan-Am offers regular flights around the world Cuban Revolution; Castro takes over Swiss women are granted the right to vote in municipal elections

1960 Mali, Senegal, Benin, Cameroon, and Madagascar win

independence from France Breathless, written by Franois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, is released Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast gain sovereignty from Britain Castro makes the longest speech in UN history: four and a half hours Anti-Castro rebel army is funded by Eisenhower; $46 million cost Partial blockade of West Germany by East Germans Czechoslovakia mobilizes against totalitarianism Secret famine in China; 30 million die

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1961

Szeemann begins as director at the Kunsthalle Bern; joins Collge de Pataphysique The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is written by Marshall McLuhan Papua New Guinea wins independence from the Netherlands; Sierra Leone, Qatar, and Kuwait gain independence from Britain; Kuwait is swiftly conquered by Iraq Berlin Wall is erected to stem tide of East Germans immigrating to West Paris police kill two hundred and ten Algerian demonstrators US severs relationship with Cuba, invades Bay of Pigs. Peace Corps is established; JFK is inaugurated USSR launches first man into space Marshall Plan ends Jansons History of Art is published

1962 First television satellite is launched

Artforum magazine is founded in San Francisco; moves to New York in 1967 Trinidad, Rwanda, Uganda, and Samoa win independence Nuclear bomb testing continues in US and USSR Agent Orange sprayed on Vietnam by US Cuban Missile Crisis European Union signs trade deal to keep markets open in former European colonies Martin Luther King writes Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and I Have a Dream Kenya wins independence; Senegal adopts a new constitution Telephone hotline is established between the US and USSR Yugoslavia proclaims itself a Socialist republic JFK is assassinated

1963

1964

Riots erupt across the US; Civil Rights and Student Movements reach a new intensity Germ and biological warfare is employed by US and Britain, all over the world US troops build in South Vietnam; begin to bomb North Vietnam South Africa is banned from the Olympics because of Apartheid Malawi, Malta, and Zambia gain independence from Britain Palestinian Liberation Organization is founded Hollywood movie The Sound of Music is released

1965 184,000 American troops in Vietnam; report is sent that US is losing

US invades Dominican Republic to stop a civil war; they stay for a year Gambia, Maldives, and Singapore win independence from Britain UN ceasefire ends Indo-Pakistani war over control of Kashmir Anti-war protesters march on Washington DC Watts Riots in Los Angeles Malcolm X is assassinated

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1966 Botswana and Lesotho win independence from Britain

Cultural Revolution begins in China

US sends troops to Guatemala to train counter-insurgents Anti-war demonstrations in Europe, US, Australia as Vietnam War continues Riots in US continue; Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland CA Robert Venturi writes Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Indira Gandhi (Nehrus daughter) is sworn in as Prime Minister of India Warhol begins year-long multimedia event series, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable

1967

In Systme de la mode, Roland Barthes writes that the institution determines the form of human knowledge Yemen wins independence, Grenada wins partial independence, Swaziland is allowed to self-govern; Association of Southeast Asian Nations is formed: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand President Johnson and Soviet Premier Kosygin hold two meetings in New Jersey Six Day War: Israel occupies the West Bank, Sinai, and the Gaza Strip Largest offensive of Vietnam War begins Che Guevara is killed in Bolivia Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is approved by the United Nations

1968 Prague Spring: Reformist government takes over in

Czechoslovakia, is crushed months later by Soviet intervention Pirate radio broadcasts across Europe Student protests in France end with a national general strike. Additional uprisings all over: Warsaw, Mexico City, New York, and more Thirty-two nations boycott the Olympics because of South Africas participation; Black Power salute is raised on the medal podium East German voters approve a socialist constitution by a 94.5% margin Tet Offensive is launched in Vietnam, a major setback for the US Martin Luther King is assassinated Szeemann opens When Attitudes Become Form and leaves Bern shortly afterward Six European countries meet in The Hague to revive plans for the European integration process, including the goal of monetary union US troops in Vietnam peak at 543,000; 33,000 have been killed already Armed clashes on the border of the USSR and China John Lennon and Yoko Onos Bed In in Amsterdam Apollo puts a man on the moon Military coup in Sudan

1969

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1970 Riots continue in US

Kent State murders

Rote Armee Fraktion founded in West Germany, an armed resistance to government Nuclear testing continues, worldwide Robert Smithson builds Spiral Jetty in Utah Earth Day begins as a way to thrust environmentalism onto the US national agenda China joins UN General Assembly; Taiwan is ousted US and Southern Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia Gil Scott-Heron writes The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Willy Brandt wins Nobel Peace Prize for beginning German reunification Canada is declared bilingual and multicultural by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau Two US platoons in Vietnam refuse orders to advance Bangladesh wins independence from Pakistan Switzerland allows women to vote federally Szeemann opens Happenings & Fluxus at Klnischer Kunstverein Idi Amin leads military coup in Uganda Communists shell Phnom Penh, Cambodia 1000 prisoners seize control at Attica prison National Public Radio begins broadcasting in US Capitalisme et Schizophrnie 1. LAnti-dipe is written by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Nixon visits China; US and China establish full diplomatic relationship as a result Szeemann organizes documenta 5: Questioning reality: Image worlds today, in Kassel, Germany, as a one-hundred-day event Watergate scandal erupts in US Leftist military coup in Ecuador 17-year war in Sudan ends by splitting North and South Nixon bombs N.Vietnam heavily as last ground troops leave Marcos places Philippines under martial law for the next 14 years 11 members of Israeli Olympic team are killed in Munich by terrorists Idi Amin exiles all Asians from Uganda; many go to Britain. Uganda falls into economic chaos after removing a big part of middle class

1971

1972

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1973 US broadcasts Watergate hearing

Postwar economic boom ends

Sixty-nine day siege at Wounded Knee Nixon meets with Brezhnev at White House Cease Fire: In what amounts to a Southern surrender, US troops leave Vietnam US backs coup to oust Salvador Allende in Chile; Augusto Pinochet comes to power Bahamas wins independence after three-hundred years of British colonial rule Thousands of Thai protesters demonstrate against military dictators Development of the Ethernet: computer networking from machine to machine Nixon resigns

1974 Turkey invades Cyprus

End of OPEC oil embargo against the US IRA is outlawed in Britain following twenty-two deaths World Trade Center opens as the tallest building in the world South Africa is suspended from UN General Assembly due to Apartheid Beuys stages I Like America and America Likes Me in New York City Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and J. Paul Getty Museum open Szeemanns Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us opens in Bern First consumer computers available as kits, with major assembly required EEC adopts trade agreement with Israel

1975 Rhodes scholarships are offered to women for the first time

Cape Verde Islands win independence after five-hundred years of Portuguese rule Szeemann opens Bachelor Machines at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland Asian countries sign preferential trade agreement (ESCAP) Helsinki Accords are drafted by 35 nations, dealing with European security, and human rights G7 meets in San Juan, PR Roots by Alex Haley is published Right-wing military coup in Thailand North and South Vietnam are officially unified October, a philosophical journal of art criticism, is founded by two writers who leave Artforum White police kill two black teenagers in Soweto Britain requests $3.9 million IMF loan Military coup in Argentina Mao dies

1976

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1977 Military coup in Pakistan

Nuclear tests continue

Vietnam becomes part of UN Soviets adopt constitutional article 72, granting republics the right to secede US launches Voyager 2 satellite, unmanned, with 12 copper record containing greetings in many languages, samples of music, nature sounds Pictures exhibition opens at Artists Space, NY UN begins arms embargo against South Africa First general election in Spain since 1936 Afghanistan establishes democratic state Military coups in Bolivia, Honduras, Yemen Israel invades Lebanon with 22,000 troops to attack PLO bases Iran and Afghanistan in political crises; US and USSR intervene Amazon Pact is created, coordinating joint development of Amazon Basin Szeemann stages Monte Verit at its first venue, in Ascona, Switzerland Hitler: A Film From Germany is released; directed by Hans-Jrgen Syberberg China and Japan sign trade pact First test tube baby is born Nuclear tests continue

1978

1979

Soviets invade Afghanistan Democracy restored in Ecuador First democratic parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe Iranian hostages held in Tehran by students protesting US sheltering of the Shah European Monetary System begins, linking currencies of EEC members for stability Iranian revolution: Khomeni seizes power, and Iran becomes an Islamic republic Israel and Egypt sign peace deal; Egypt suspended from the Arab League Carter gives speech describing the crisis of confidence in America Russian dancers and athletes seek asylum in Western countries Jean-Franois Lyotard publishes The Postmodern Condition Democracy is restored in Peru

1980 Iraq attacks Iran, beginning eight years of war

Solidarity in Poland rises up against totalitarianism Soviets announce partial withdrawal from Afghanistan Szeemann originates APERTO at Venice Biennial for younger artists Uprising in Gwangju, Korea crushed by police; two thousand are killed USA boycotts Olympics in Moscow because of Soviet presence in Afghanistan Coup in Liberia by US-backed Sergeant Doc; he becomes a brutal dictator

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1981

The French National Assembly votes to abolish the death penalty American Hostages in Iran are freed on day of Reagans inauguration Serras sculpture Tilted Arc is installed at the Federal Building in Manhattan Andrew Lloyd Webbers musical Cats begins its 21-year run in London Japan bails out the US economy by loading up on 30-year government bonds; US stock market begins 16-month decline of 23% Szeemann begins working at Kusthaus Zurich Nuclear tests continue EPCOT Center opens at Disney World

1982 FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group, bombs Wall Street

Israel bombs Beirut; US and France send peacekeeping military forces One million anti-nuclear protesters gather in Central Park in New York City John Cage writes James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet.

1983

Harald Szeemanns exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk opens in Zurich Michael Jacksons album Thriller stays the #1 album for 37 weeks Police rout Solidarity supporters in Warsaw; government ends months of martial law US President Reagan calls USSR an Evil Empire

History is one lens for evaluating the power and resonance of Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Though the events described above were significant in the development of its audience (and therefore the meaning of the exhibition), it is equally important for readers with an historical perspective to allow for the influence of Szeemanns personality, which undoubtedly had a determinate effect in shaping the exhibition.
BEGINNING IN 1945

After the end of World War II, Europe began a rebuilding effort that had as much to do with emotional security as it did with physical and economic restructuring. The horrors of the Holocaust made understanding daily life,
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as it once had been, almost impossible. Europeans distrusted nationalism but wanted unity and found it in a marketplace propped up by American prosperity. Economic integration allowed the hope of security, and post-war Europe began to replace collective political thought with collective economic strategies. Since salvation was not to be found in technological progress alone (as evidenced by the two World Wars, where more and more deaths occurred thanks to innovations in weaponry), and could not be understood as inherently good, new economic structures like capitalism (and to a lesser extent, communism) were seen to be positive options. Free trade and free markets (the rise of neo-liberalism) became the ways that countries, particularly in Europe, allied with one another. Some had the hope that this postmodern multiplicity would be revolutionary, making a world where there is room for many worlds.1 As Fredric Jameson argued in Periodizing the 60s, this was a moment in which cultural relationships became economic, and differences figured as economic and political in the first half of the century turned into so many forms of culture.2 Rather than seeing this final liquidation of grand narratives as democratic or freeing, Jameson (and others) saw it as a way to create historical amnesia. Calling back some historical events, this timeline serves as a reminder of both particular incidents and general currents that can point to ideas within the exhibition.
DER HANG ZUM GESAMTKUNSTWERK: SZEEMANNS IDEAS

Following Hans Ulrich Obrists reading of it as an archeology of knowledge, Szeemanns exhibition offered to the artists and thinkers of 1983 and beyond, other ways of picturing their future, in tension with those offered by a capitalist postmodernism.3 As in many of his exhibitions, Szeemann collected works that span multiple genres and
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contexts, bringing them into productive, if somewhat inchoate, relationships. It is in this spirit that I compiled my timeline, looking for common and contradictory activities that might establish a better understanding of what it might have been like to see the exhibition in Zurich (or at its other venues: Berlin, Dusseldorf, or Vienna) at the time. In his catalogue essay, Szeemann stated that Wagners concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk lay in the realm of universal, humanistic fables, outside of national boundaries.4 It is important to note that after WWII, nationalism fell out of favor with most Europeans because it was believed to lead to the horrors of the Holocaust; neoliberal policies and the rise of the European Community (later the European Union) offered a less frightening though still large and secure group to which to belong. With postmodernisms expansive and fragmented qualities, a belief in something universal became almost impossible; Szeemann offered these visions of totality not because they are superior to the pluralistic ideas of art in the early 1980s (which he clearly supported and exhibited) but because they had fallen from view in his present. He collected fifty-two artists who demonstrated that this impulse toward totality is a part of human nature, according to Szeemann; he found his examples within Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. The works included encompassed a worldview beyond the particularities of composition, form, and staging. He claimed that the activity of collecting these projects was both pragmatic and speculative, and therefore urgent.5 The exhibition staked a claim that utopian thought can be seen through time and place, emerging through history, regardless of location or culture. It was a hopeful exhibition, despite the reality that many of the utopian proposals were disasters when realized. Though the threat of totalitarianism loomed behind the exhibition, perhaps his view was like Hannah Arendts,
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who framed totalitarianism as a regime that breaks up and takes over society, bit by bit: The greatest danger of recognizing totalitarianism as the curse of the century would be an obsession with it to the extent of becoming blind to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved.6 If history is made of constant breaks and reassemblies, according to Lyotard, then these totalities shown in the exhibition attempted to retain this revolutionary potential for wholeness.7

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Notes
Julian Myers, Totality: 1 Thomas Carlyle, quoted by Richard Wagner at the A Guided Tour

beginning of his essay Art and Revolution in Richard Wagners Prose Works, Volume 1: The Art-Work of the Future (trans. William Ashton Ellis), London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Kbner & Co., Ltd., 1895, 23. Available at Wagner Library: http://users.belgacom .net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartrev. htm (last accessed on 30 October 2008). 2 Indeed Jean-Franois Lyotard, whose La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (1979) popularised the term, contributed an essay to the catalogue of Jungesellenmaschinen. See J.-F. Lyotard, O lon considre certaines parois comme les lments potentiellement clbataires de quelques machines simples, in Harald Szeemann and Johannes Gachnang (eds.), Jungesellenmaschinen/Les Machines clibataires (exh. cat.), (Venice: Alfieri, 1975), 98109.

3 Peter Rumpf, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, Bauwelt, no.13, 1983. Fragment translated in Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer (eds.), Harald Szeemann with by through because towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions 19572005, (Zrich, Vienna and New York: Edition Voldemeer and Springer, 2007), 433. 4 I owe this observation in part to Walead Beshty, who argued for the repressed influence of Jugendstil on Tatlins monument in Whose Monuments? A panel discussion with Walead Beshty, Julian Myers, Jene Misraje, and Erlea Maneros, at FOCA, Los Angeles, 11 September 2008. 5 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, (New York and London: Verso, 2005), 39. 6 Volker Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002, p.148. From there it is only a small step, Welter continues, to becoming a staunch supporter of a blood-andsoil ideology that later nurtured German National Socialism. 7 Brigid Doherty, Berlin, in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (exh. cat.), (Washington: The National Gallery of Art), 2006, p.97. Doherty quotes historian Hanne Bergius who writes that The Great Plasto-DioDada-Drama demonstrates the revaluation of architecture from Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) to Gesamt-zerstrwerk (total work of destruction). Thanks to Tara McDowell for the reference. 8 Harald Szeemann, Marcel Broodthaers, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800, (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Sauerlnder, 1983), 427.

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9 [T]he experiment cannot fail to prove the certain means of renovating the moral and religious principles of the world, by showing whence arise the various opinions, manners, vices and virtues of mankind, and how the best or the worst of them may, with mathematical precision, be taught to the rising generation. Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813), as quoted by Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), 90. 10 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Philosophy of the Future (1843), translated by Zawar Hanfi, 1972. Available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/ feuerbach/works/ future/index.htm; Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, first published by Friedrich Engels as an appendix to his Ludwig Feuerbach in 1888. Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm (last accessed on 17 November 2008). In this one sense, Wagner might have agreed with Marxs famous injunction: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. 11 Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution (trans. William Ashton Ellis, 1895), Richard Wagners Prose Works Volume 1: The Art-Work of the Future, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Kbner & Co., Ltd.,). Available at http://users.belgacom.net/ wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartrev.htm (last accessed on 30 October 2008). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 The exhibition traveled to three more venues in 1983 and early 1984: Stdtische Kunsthalle and Kunstverein fr die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Dsseldorf from May to July 1983; Museum Moderner Kunst/Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Vienna from September to November 1983; and Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, from December 1983 to February 1984. 15 Sections of Wilsons opera debuted in 1984 in Minneapolis, Cologne and Rotterdam, but the opera has yet to be performed in its entirety. 16 Wagner, The Artwork of the Future, as quoted in Harald Szeemann, Richard Wagner, in H. Szeeman (ed.), Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, op. cit., 166. 17 Slavoj Zizek, Foreword: Why Is Wagner Worth Saving?, In Search of Wagner (trans. Rodney Livingstone), (New York and London: Verso, 2005), p.ix. 18 Bazon Brock, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, in H. Szeeman (ed.), Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, op. cit., 249. 19 Ibid., 30. 20 Hans-Joachim Mller, Harald Szeemann: Exhibition-Maker, (OstfildernRuit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 778.

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21 H. Szeemann, Vorbereitungen, in Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, op. cit., 16. As translated in H.-J. Mller, Harald Szeemann, op. cit., 78. 22 Ibid., 79. 23 H. Szeemann, Vorbereitungen, op. cit., 16. 24 Let social transformation be the New World; God is love. 25 T. Carlyle, op. cit., 23. 26 Florence Derieux, Introduction, in F. Derieux (ed.), Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, (Zrich: JRP/Ringier, 2007), 8. 27 Fredric Jameson, In the Destructive Element Immerse: Hans-Jrgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution, October, vol.17, Summer 1981, 99. My sentences redirect sentences Jameson wrote about Syberberg to refer to Szeemann. 28 [Une] conscience de soi sorganisant et sinstitutionnalisant elle-mme, fournissant le fondement dun possible cheminement pataphysiquesous la forme dun cercle de rgles se renouvelant sans cesse. Originally published in H. Szeemann and J. Gachnang (eds.), Jungesellenmachinen, op. cit., p.11; reprinted and translated in T. Bezzola and R. Kurzmeyer (eds.), Harald Szeemann with by through because towards despite, op. cit., 280. 29 Ibid. 30 Peter Osborne, at Its About Time panel discussion at Frieze Art Fair, London, 17 October 2008. 31 F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, op. cit., pp.45; Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (trans. Richard Miller), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971), 23. 32 H. Szeemann, Vorbereitungen, op. cit., 19.
Harald Szeemann, Grandfather: an exhibition and an invitation for subscription [S. Lerner, Trans., Joanna Szupinska, ed.]

1 The ambiguous cargo here implies human trade; during WWI the captain apparently helped Armenians escape from Turkey, but those who perished during the voyage had to be sacrificed to the open waters. 2 Rifleman cards are decks of playing cards that celebrate military life through variously depicted scenes that can include images such as celebratory army parades, ladies displaying banners, or jokers holding targets. 1 Harald Szeemann, Leaflet for the exhibition, in Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, Catalogue of all Exhibitions 1957-2005, ed. Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer, (Wien, New York: Springer, 2007), 388. 2 Ibid., 388.

Joanna Szupinska, Grandfather, A History Like Ours

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3 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Harald Szeemann 19332005: Remembering the life and work of one of the most influential and imaginative curators of the last century, Frieze, May 2005 (issue 91), 80. 4 Roman Kurzmeyer, Der Knstlerkurator: Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Harald Szeemann, Neue Zrcher Zeitung, June 11, 2003, in Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, 698. 5 Daniel Birnbaum, When attitude becomes form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann, Artforum, Summer 2005, 346. 6 Harald Szeemann, Leaflet for the exhibition, 388. 7 Despite settling in Germanic Bern, Istvan adopted a French first name; he may have taken the name Etienne during his extended travels, which included Paris, before his decision to settle in Switzerland. 8 See Mikls Molnr (translated by Anna Magyar), A Concise History of Hungary, (Cambridge: University Press, 1996). 9 The total population of Disd numbered below 8,000 in 2007, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di%C3%B3sd), accessed April 2009. 10 Waves of Austro-Hungarian Immigration, Immigration Library, (Minneapolis: The Advocates of Human Rights), (www.energyofanation.org), accessed April 2009. 11 Harald Szeemann, Leaflet for the exhibition, 386. 12 Denise Efionayi, Josef Martin Niederberger, Philippe Wanner, Switzerland Faces Common European Challenges, Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies, Neuchatel, February 2005. 13 Harald Szeemann, Leaflet for the exhibition, 3878. 14 Harald Szeemann, introduction, GrossvaterEin Pionier wie wir, in Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, 380. 15 Harald Szeemann, introduction, Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, 18. 16 Goulash, or gulys, is a traditional Hungarian herdsmans stew. As in the dish that is made of many ingredients, Goulash Economy refers to a domestic policy based on mixed ideology, including limited free market elements. 17 See Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: Janos Kadar, Communism and Hungary, (I.B. Tauris), 2006. 18 Harald Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen (catalogue), 1975, quoted in Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, 280. 19 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Mind Over Matter: Hans-Ulrich Obrist Talks with Harald Szeemann, Artforum, November 1996, 112. 20 Denise Efionayi, Josef Martin Niederberger, Philippe Wanner, Switzerland Faces Common European Challenges, Swiss Forum for

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Migration and Population Studies, Neuchatel, February 2005. 21 Hal Foster, The Artist as Ethnographer, The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 173. 22 Ibid., 175.
Katie Hood Morgan, Live Arte Povera

1 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Marxs Mole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), n.p.

in Your Head: Attitudes of is Dead!: Globalisation and Communication

2 George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 38. 3 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera: Themes and Movements (New York: Phaidon, 2005), 222. 4 Richard Flood and Frances Morris, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 19621972, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 57. 5 Christov-Bakargiev, 194. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 22038. 9 Richard Lumley, Spaces of Arte Povera, in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 57. 10 Christov-Bakargiev, 198. 11 Harald Szeemann, About the Exhibition, in Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite, ed. Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer (New York: Springer Wien, 2007), 225. 12 Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer, eds. Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite (New York: Springer Wien, 2007), 2579. 13 Christov-Bakargiev, 116. 14 Ibid. 16. 15 Hans Haacke, Untitled Statement (1969), in Stiles and Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 874.
Nicole Cromartie, How To 1 Monte Verit, Move Forward: On Rudolf Laban at Monte Verit

, http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/3109681, (May 2009).

2 Isa Partsch-Bergsohn and Harold Bergsohn, The Makers of Modern

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Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss, (Hightstown: Princeton Book Company, 2003), 8. 3 Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences, (Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), 15. 4 Szeemann, Harald. Monte Verit: antropologia locale come contributo alla riscoperta di una topografia sacrale modern. (Milano: Electa, 1978), 30. 5 Ibid. 6 DNB Milestones, http://www.dancenotation.org/DNB/index.html, May 2009 7 Isa Partsch-Bergsohn and Harold Bergsohn, The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss, (Hightstown: Princeton Book Company, 2003), 14.
Sharon Lerner, Coming to Terms: 1 Harald Szeemann, ed. Der Hang zum Bazon Brocks Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk

Gesamtkunstwerk: Europische Utopien seit 1800, (Frankfurt: Verlag Sauerlander, 1983).

2 Although he begins the second arc of the essay talking about other works by Kiefer including the series of actions entitled Occupations (1969). 3 It is important to mention here that a part of Section B has been edited, translated into English by Julie Howell, and published in: Jacques Legrand, ed, World Art Trends 1983 /84, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), quoted at: www.brock.uni-wuppertal.de/Schrifte/English/Totalart.htmlca.edu, accessed July 2009. 4 This part is particularly obvious at the end of Section B, where he finishes the text making a direct allusion to the Holy Trinity and comparing it to the three unfoldings of the concept Gesamtkunstwerk. The last paragraph of the essay reads: The materialized work becomes the dissuasive and exhortative gesture which must limit itself to self-disavowal at the risk of becoming a destructive force. The Father is the thought, the Son its realization in the conditions of human life, and the Holy Ghost Creator their reciprocal relation. Thought and action, intuition and concept, the sign and the signified in relation, as a unity. But the relation would be useless if they were identicalone and the same thing. What they are will appear if we have the courage, as subjects, to bear their non-identity. That which we do houses the symbol of our will. The glance into the void is not emptyit rests on empty thrones. Ibid. 5 Bazon Brock, Aesthetics as Mediation (1997), translated from the German by Margret Berki, quoted at: http:// www.brock.uniwuppertal.de/Schrifte/English/Mediatio.html, accessed July 2009.

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6 Some examples of this can be seen in his use of words like verzeitlichen, translatable as to temporalize, which might refer to Heidegger. Another example is his use of Selbstaufhebung. It remains unclear if the word is intended in a colloquial sense, which would imply something similar to auto-suspension, or in the three folded Hegelian sense of suppression, suspension, and conservation. 7 Examples of this could be the words Symptomverordnung, or even Strategy of Affirmation. 8 All this information has been collected from Bazon Brocks webpage, at http://blog.bazonbrock.de/, accessed July 2009. 9 Bazon Brock, The German-ness of German Design, (lecture at the Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado, USA. June 4th, 1996), quoted at: http://www.brock.uni-wuppertal.de/Schrifte/English/Gedesign.html, accessed July 2009. 10 Bazon Brock, Art by Command?, (1991), quoted at: http:www.brock.uniwuppertal.de/Schrifte/English/Acommand.html, accessed July 2009. 11 Sigrid Ruby, Changing Transatlantic Perspectives in the Visual Arts. 1945-1968:, In: Detlef Junker, The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War: A Handbook,(Cambridge University Press, 2004), 478. 12 Lucia Pesapane Interview to Jean-Christoph Ammann, Francois Burkhardt, Johannes Cladders and Bazon Brock, Florence Derieux,ed, Harald Szeemann. Individual Methodology (Zurich: JPG/Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2007), 135.
Bazon Brock, The Tendency Towards the Total Work

1 Wirkungsfeld der Naturgesetze can be translated as field of natural laws, field of application of natural laws, or even field of activity of the natural laws. The word Wirkung, which will appear also in the context of Wagner means effect and adds the idea of action. 2 Das Zur-Sprache-bringen des Ganzes is the original version in German. It was translated as bringing-into-language rather than as to enunciate, because it has a hermeneutic connotation. To bring [experience] into language is not to change it into something else, but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself. Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. In: Nos, Vol. 9, No. 1. Symposium Papers to be Read at the Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 2426, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1975), 85102. 3 Postulate: I. Something asked for or demanded. 1. A demand, a request; spec. something stipulated as a condition of agreement. Cf. sense 4. Now rare. Source: Oxford English dictionary, quoted at: http://0-dictionary.oed. com.library.cca.edu:80/cgi/entry/50185250?query_type=word&query-

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word=postulate&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&result_place= 1&search_id=vJfj-CaDrm7-90&hilite=50185250 4 Suppression, suspension and conservation. (See footnote 3). 5 Synaesthesia 1. Psychol. a. A sensation in one part of the body produced by a stimulus applied to another part. b. Agreement of the feelings or emotions of different individuals, as a stage in the development of sympathy. c. Production, from a sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind: see quot. 1903./ 2. Lit. The use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds; the production of synsthetic effect in writing or an instance of this.// 3. Linguistics. a. The expression of more than one kind of sense-impression in the same word. b. The transfer of the meaning of a word from one kind of sensory experience to another. c. The relationship between speech sounds and the sensory experiences that they represent. Source: Oxford English Dictionary, quoted at: http://0-dictionary.oed.com.library.cca.edu:80/cgi/entry/ 50245207?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=synaesthesia&first=1& max_to_show=10 6 Topoi. A traditional motif or theme (in a literary composition); a rhetorical commonplace, a literary convention or formula. Source: Oxford English Dictionary, quoted at: http://0-dictionary.oed.com.library.cca.edu:80/ cgi/entry/50254566/50254566spg1?single=1&query_type=misspelling&q ueryword=topoi&first=1&max_to_show=10&hilite=50254566spg1 7 Pathosformel: Aby Warburg thought that specific historical periods were characterized by coherent clusters of perceptions and feelings, as in, for example, Renaissance classicism. The expression of these perceptions and feelings demanded a certain consistency of formal approach. Warburg thought he could identify principles of configuration which he called pathosformelwhich might be translated loosely as forms or formulas of emotional stylerunning through many different arts and giving expression to a wide variety of cultural preoccupations, ranging from folklore to religion. See also iconology, topos., quoted at: http://people.ok.ubc.ca/creative/ glossary/p_list.html 8 Zwar schritt ich kaum, doch waehn ich mich schon weit. 9 Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. 10 Another possible translation is context of the world. 11 This is the only moment in the original German text where the word Totalitt is introduced, thus the brackets. For all the other uses of Totality in the translation, they mainly refer to the notion of das Ganze. It could have been translated as wholeness, but other texts by Brock translated it as Totality, and we tried to maintain coherence with them.

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12 Word for word and picture for picture. 13 Symptomverordnung or the rearrangement of the symptoms is a term previously used by Brock in other writings, in particular while speaking about the Strategy of Affirmation. See Bazon Brock, Radikalisierung der Differenz: Strategie der Affirmation, In: Band VI. sthetik gegen erzwungene Unmittelbarkeit. Die Gottsucherbande Schriften (19781986), (Cologne: Dumont, 1986).
Sharon Lerner, 1 Bazon Brock, The Quest for the Total Art Work, Jacques Notes Legrand, ed, World Art Trends 1983 /84, (New York: Harry

N. Abrams, 1984), translation by Julie Howell, quoted at: www.brock.uni-wuppertal.de/Schrifte/English/Totalart.html, accessed July 2009. 2 Frederic Jameson, foreword to Jean Franois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), ix. 3 Op. cit., Bazon Brock, The Quest for the Total Art Work, translation by Julie Howell. 4 Ibid. 5 Inke Arns and Sassa, Sylvia. Maska (Ljubljana: Spring 2006), quoted at: http://www.maska.si/en/publications/, accessed July 2009. 6 Op. cit. 7 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, (London: Verso, 2002), 178. 8 Frederic Jameson, In the Destructive Element Immerse: Hans-Jrgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution, October, Vol. 17, The New Talkies (MIT Press, 1981), 106. 1 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Thoreau, Cheval, Technology, 1988), 48.
Emily Gonzalez Building Utopia: Steiner

2 Krishan Kumar, Utopianism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3.

3 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 45. 4 Ibid, 303. 5 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1981), 229. 6 Ibid, 229. 7 Ibid, 229331. 8 Rudolf Steiner in David Adams, Rudolf Steiners First Goetheanum as an Illustration of Organic Functionalism, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 51, no. 2, June 1982: 189.

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Jackie Im, Total Artwork 1 Fritz Lang, The Future of the Feature Film in and Early Cinema: Lang, Germany, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds Griffith, Lamb Anton Kaes Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 624. 2 Though von Harbou wrote in her novel that, this book is not of today or of the future. It tells of no place. Thea von Harbou, Metropolis, (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2003), iii. 3 Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 178. 4 These include, among others: Charles Fouriers plans for the Phalanstre, the model of Vladimir Tatlins monumental tower, and the otherworldly architecture renderings of tienne-Louis Boulle. 5 Marias version differs slightly from the Biblical telling from the book of Genesis, encompassing as it does a more detailed account of the destruction of the tower, and the story acts as an echo to the overall plot of the film. 6 Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution, in Richard Wagners Prose Works: Volume 1 The Art-Work of the Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1895), 51. 7 Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000),65. 8 Literally so, with the robotic version of the saintly Maria. 9 Wikipedia contributors, Intolerance (Film), Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intolerance_ (film)&old \id=307224386 (accessed May 15, 2009). 10 An image of the Gates of Babylon is featured in the catalog of Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. 11 It was later discovered that Walter L. Hall (credited as scenic artist) had a hand in the set design on the film, though it remains unclear to what extent. 12 In the period in which Martin began his painting, there was very little knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian architecture, allowing him to take considerable liberties. In an accompanying engraving, Martin conjectured that it was the custom of Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Egypt and of India, to bring from these parts to Babylon all the architects, the men of science and handicrafts, by whom the palace and the external parts of the Temple of Bel were built; therefore, I suppose the united talents of Indian, Egyptian and Babylonian architects were employed to produce these buildings. Juan Antonio Ramirez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywoods Golden Age, trans. John F. Moffitt (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 117. 13 Ibid., 114

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14 Ferdinand Cheval used images found in magazines, books, and postcards to model his Palais Idal. A model of the palace was included in Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. 15 David Belasco (18531931) was known for his detailed theater sets, emphasizing naturalism and realismin particular, operational kitchens on set so actors could actually prepare food on stage. 16 Wagner, Art and Revolution, op. cit., 33. 17 David Naylor, American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of Fantasy, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981), 8. 18 Imagine watching the Gates of Babylon in the Fox Theater, San Francisco. It would present a doubling of design synthesis. 19 An industry term, hardtop refers to theaters that did not feature atmospheric dcor, such as painted skies on the domes or simulated courtyards. 20 Atmospheric theaters, specialized in by designer John Eberson, typically conveyed the impression of sitting in an outdoor courtyard. Around the theater, the faade featured simulated exotic flora and fauna and lantern machines were lit to project clouds and constellations onto the ceiling. 21 Wagner, Art and Revolution, op. cit., 34. 22 As Wagner states in Art and Revolution: the noblest part of his own nature united with the noblest characteristics of the whole nation, ibid., 34.
Maria Elena Ortiz, 1 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, (New York: Hill Room #1: In Midst and Wang, 1976). of Passions and Obsessions

2 David Levi Strauss, The Bias of the World Curating after Szeemann & Hopps, Art Lies, no. 59, (Fall 2008), 36.

3 Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and his world, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 4 Phalange. Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. <http://www.britannica. com/ EBchecked/ topic/454966/phalange> (accessed Oct. 25th 2009.) 5 This idea of ruling passions was common to many of the thinkers of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes, Racine, and Molire. 6 Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and his world, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 220. 7 Steven Kries, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier (1) The History Guide Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History no.21 (2006) http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/Lecture21a.html (accessed May 2, 2009). 8 Beecher, op. cit., 247. 9 Ibid., 243.

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10 In the Encyclopedia Britannica, caravansary is defined as a public building that would accommodate merchants and travelers in trade routes in North Africa, Middle East, and North Africa. Caravansary http://www.britannica.com/ EBchecked/topic/94611/ caravansary (accessed May 3, 2009). 11 Beecher, op.cit., 244. 12 Ibid., 232. 13 Ibid., 233. 14 A term devised by Fourier to describe the dynamics of harmonious groups. Fouriers theories are embedded with metaphors of movement that refer to a notion of progress. The proportional variations are crafted with the movement of the passions. The passions have an intrinsic quality of movement. The movement is allowed by the Laws of Attraction. This quality of movement is fundamental to his theories, because it is the movement of the passions that allows for transitions in the social order. With the phalange, Fourier is ultimately advocating for a certain cultural transition in his society. 15 William Vaughn, Friedrich, (London: Phaidon, 2004). 16 Brad Prager, Light and Dark: The Painting of Philipp Otto Runge in Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism, (Rochester: Camden House, 2007), 12360. 17 William Vaughn, Friedrich, (London: Phaidon, 2004), 337. 18 /Vaughn, ibid., 216. 19 With this statement I am not disregarding writing as an aesthetic form. I am just talking about the visualization of an aesthetic practice.
Kristin Korolowicz, 1 Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution in Richard From Wagner to Artaud

Wagners Prose Works, Volume 1: The Art-Work of the Future (trans. William Ashton Ellis), (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Kbner & Co., Ltd., 1895), 60.

2 Ibid., The Artwork of the Future, 184. 3 Richard Wagner, Smtliche Briefe, vol. III 460. Quoted in Andreas Huyssen, Monumental Seduction, New German Critique, no. 69 (1996): 196, http://www.jstor.com 4 Beat Wyss and Denise Bratton, Ragnark of Illusion: Richard Wagners Mystical Abyss; at Bayreuth, October, vol. 54 (1990): 73. 5 I mention this disembodiment of individuals in the darkened theater, not to support in full Adornos critique of the reification of the audience, but rather to posit how it enhances Wagners illusionism. 6 Richard Wagner, Art-Work of the Future, Richard Wagners Prose Works Volume I: The Art-Work of the Future, (New York: Broude Brothers, 1892), 185.

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7 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn, (New York: Anchor, 1976), 118. 8 Antonin Artaud, An End to Masterpieces (1933), Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 255. 9 Antonin Artaud, About A Lost Play (1934), trans. Ruby Cohn, The Tulane Drama Review, vol.8, no.2 (1963): 41. 10 Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (1932), Richards, op.cit., 244. 11 Ibid., 248. 12 Ibid., 243. 13 Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (1932), Richards, op. cit., 246. 14 Lucien Dubech, Les Cenci: Aux Folies-Wagram, Candide, May 23, 1935. Quoted in Antonin Artaud in Les Cenci, trans. Victoria Nes Kirby, Nancy E. Nes, and Aileen Robbins, The Drama Review: TDR, vol.16, no.2, 1972, 140. 15 Sontag, op. cit., 127. 16 Ibid., 110. 17 Ibid.
Jacqueline Clay, Reading Du Bois, Reading Wagner

1 Slavoj Zizek, In Search of Wagner, translated by Rodney Livingstone, (New York: Verso, 2005), xxvi. 2 Woldemar Lippert, Wagner in Exile: 184962, (London: George G. Harrap & Co. LTD, 1930), 8.

3 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). 4 Russell A. Berman Du Bois and Wagner: Race, Nation and Culture between the United States and Germany The German Quarterly, Vol. 70, No 2 (Spring 1997), 12335; Kenneth Barkin W.E.B. Du Bois Love Affair with Imperial Germany German Studies Review Vol. 28, No 2 (2005); Kenneth BarkinAn Introduction to Du Bois Manuscripts on Germany Central European History Vol. 31, No 3 (1998), 15570; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Present Condition of German Politics, The Socialism of German Socialists, Early German Institutions as given by Tacitus in The Germania and The Family Harvard Notes Du Bois Papers, Reels 87, frames 31, 15663; Lawrence Kramer Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) 61, 62. 5 Zizek, op. cit., xxvi-xxvii. 6 Lippert, op. cit., 191 (Bajunin court testimony, taken from the notes). 7 Ibid., 19. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Ibid., 75. 10 Ibid., 85.

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11 This emphasis on words and language can also be seen in Du Bois use of dialect throughout The Souls of Black Folk. 12 William Ingersoll, The Reminiscences of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York City: Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 1963) 1147. 13 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) (Original German edition 1807), in particular the section on Lordship and Bondage, 10438. 14 For example, see Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution, trans. William Ashton Ellis,1895, Richard Wagners Prose Works Volume 1: The Art-Work of the Future, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Kbner & Co., Ltd., 1892). Available at http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartrev.htm (accessed January 31, 2010). 15 Du Bois, op. cit., 171. 16 Ibid., 173. 17 Berman, op. cit., 12335. 18 Du Bois, op. cit., 171. 19 This is more suggestive then literal. Du Bois was raised in a small community in Great Barrington, Massachusetts but after his studies at Harvard and in Germany, Du Bois returned to the American South to teach at historically African American Atlanta University. 20 Barkin, op. cit., 287. 21 Du Bois, op. cit., 167. 22 Joyfully led, draw near, the first line of Lohengrins Bridal Chorus. 23 Du Bois, op. cit., 175. 24 Ibid., 171. 25 Harald Szeemann, Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, op. cit., 16. As translated in Hans-Joachim Muller, Harald Szeemann, op. cit., 78. 26 Jose Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 3031. 27 Muoz, op. cit., 25. 28 Du Bois, op. cit., 168.
Arden Sherman, Pictures of 1 Tobia Bezzola, Roman Kurzmeyer, ed., Harald ExhibitionsAn Interview with Balthasar Burkhard

Szeemannwith by through because towards despite, Catalogue of all Exhibitions 1957-2005, (Springer, New York, 2007), 227

2 Florence Derieux, ed., Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, (Zurich: JRP|Ringier and Kustverlag AG, 2007), 237.

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3 Paul Strand, Photography and the New God, in Allen Trachtenberg, ed. Classic Essays on Photography, (New Haven, CT: Leetes Island Books, 1980), 141.
Josephine Zarkovich, A Possible Pataphysical

1 Jill Fell, Alfred Jarry: An Imagination In Revolt, (New York: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005), p.66.

CourseAn Interview with 2 This is expanded in Christian Bks excellent book Christian Bk Pataphysics The Poetics of an Imaginary Science

(Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2001) 3 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 145. These conclusions are also reached in part through Christian Bk, op. cit. 4 Norman Rosenthal, Harald Szeemann: Curator who made the exhibition into an art form, The Independent, (London), 2 March 2005. 5 Tobia Bezzola,. Harald Szeemannwith by through because towards despite:, (New York: Springer, 2007), 208. 6 Ibid.
Courtney Dailey, Utopia A Critical Timeline

1 Subcommandante Marcos, EZLN, quoted in (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): introduction.

and Gesamtkunstwerk Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed.

2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 86. 3 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Harald Szeemann 1933-2005, Frieze, Issue 91, May 2005. 4 Harald Szeemann, Der Hang sum Gesamtkunstwerk (catalogue), (Frankfurt: Verlag Sauerlnder, 1983) 169. 5 Ibid. 6 Hannah Arendt, Essays In Understanding 19301954, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 2712. 7 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 5360.

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Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts

Providing an international perspective with professional development at its core, the two-year graduate program in contemporary curating encourages independent thinking and group collaboration, preparing students for careers in museums and galleries, public art commissioning and project management. For further information on the program visit www.cca.edu/curatorialpractice and the program website at http://curatorial-practice.blogs.cca.edu/

FACULTY
Chair Leigh Markopoulos Core Faculty 20089 Ren de Guzman, Senior Curator, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland Jens Hoffmann, Director, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Steven Leiber, private art and art book dealer, San Francisco Marina McDougall, independent curator and writer, San Francisco Julio Csar Morales, artist and curator, San Francisco Julian Myers, Assistant Pofessor, MA Program in Curatorial Practice. Art historian and critic, San Francisco Renny Pritikin, Director, Nelson Gallery, Davis Jan Van Woensel, independent curator, art critic, lecturer, and writer, New York Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

CURATORIAL PRACTICE STUDENTS 20089

Jaime Austin, Tanner Borskey, Robin Carlson, Chris Fitzpatrick, Tamara Loewenstein, Mirjana Milosavljevic-Cook, Matthew Post, Sally Szwed, Xiaoyu Weng Jacqueline Clay, Nicole Cromartie, Courtney Dailey, Emily Gonzalez, Jacqueline Im, Kristin Korolowicz, Sharon Lerner, Katie Morgan, Maria Ortiz, Arden Sherman, Joanna Szupinska, Josephine Zarkovich Benoit Antille, Michele Fiedler, Erin Fletcher, Liz Glass, Amanda Hunt, David Kasprzak, Susannah Magers, Charles Moffett

200

Leigh Markopoulos
Totality: A Guided Tour

As if

Julian Myers

Grandfather: an exhibition and an invitation for subscription

Harald Szeemann [S. Lerner, Trans., Joanna Szupinska, ed.]

Grandfather, A History Like Ours

Joanna Szupinska

Live in Your Head: Attitudes of Arte Povera

Katie Hood Morgan Nicole Cromartie Sharon Lerner

How To Move Forward: On Rudolf Laban at Monte Verit Coming to Terms: Bazon Brocks Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk The Tendency Towards the Total Work

Bazon Brock [S. Lerner, Trans.] Sharon Lerner

Notes on The Tendency Towards the Total Work Building Utopia: Thoreau, Cheval, Steiner

Emily Gonzalez Jackie Im

Total Artwork and Early Cinema: Lang, Griffith, Lamb Room #1: In Midst of Passions and Obsessions

Maria Elena Ortiz Kristin Korolowicz Jacqueline Clay Arden Sherman

From Wagner to Artaud Reading Du Bois, Reading Wagner Pictures of ExhibitionsAn Interview with Balthasar Burkhard A Possible Pataphysical CourseAn Interview with Christian Bk

Josephine Zarkovich Courtney Dailey

Notes Colophon

Utopia and GesamtkunstwerkA Critical Timeline