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Disorders at the Borders

In Search of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the Paintings of Anselm Kiefer

by Matt Wates (Author)
©2021 Monographs X, 310 Pages
Series: German Visual Culture, Volume 9

Summary

Although Anselm Kiefer’s work is routinely compared with the Gesamtkunstwerk, the «total work of art» pioneered by Richard Wagner, Disorders at the Borders represents the first time this relationship has been thoroughly investigated. But it is a relationship that involves much more than just aesthetics. Furthermore, it is a highly ambivalent one. The Gesamtkunstwerk was an embodiment of a certain view of nationhood, and nationhood is a concept that Kiefer has spent much of his career rendering thoroughly problematic. But Wagner’s innovative, inclusive art form was intended above all as a counter to the individualism that the composer was far from alone in identifying as the besetting sin of modernity, and that was widely thought at the time to be most evident in America. It can thus be contextualized within the long German tradition of counter-Americanism – as, to a large extent, can Kiefer. For whilst he owes his spectacular success in no small degree to the positive reception of his work in America, he has throughout his career displayed a resistance to the artistic influence of that country. Moreover, he and Wagner take a mutual stance regarding a series of questions: can art be separated from society, or the individual arts from each other? Is painting purely visual, and music purely sonic? Do things, in short, ever really exist or operate in isolation? That they answer in the negative to all of these is what, ultimately, connects Kiefer with Wagner.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Plates
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 What Was the Gesamtkunstwerk?
  • Chapter 2 Anselm Kiefer, History Painter
  • Chapter 3 Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit: Synthesis, Purity and Synesthesia
  • Chapter 4 Homo Europaeus: Wagner, Kiefer and Counter-Americanism
  • Chapter 5 ‘The Whole Is the False’: The Gesamtkunstwerk, Kiefer and Theodor Adorno’s ‘Negative Dialectics’
  • Conclusion
  • Appendix: ‘Opera and Drama’
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Series index

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Introduction

On the one hand, art must be separated from 'life', from all that is not art, and, on the other hand, it must be able continually to exceed its limits better to go poaching in foreign countries – whether they are kitsch, popular art or craft. It will always come back metamorphosed and loaded with a shapeless burden, most often hideous; but this burden will enable it to renew itself, to become fluid through processes which belong to it, as if art were in possession of the universal solvent, the alkahest dear to the alchemists, who sought it in vain.

– Anselm Kiefer1

It is striking how quickly certain ideas are accepted at face value, circulated and before long are generally assumed, even though they may be inaccurate or simply wrong. Our readiness to accept them without question may be a function of the intellectual tendency – to which, as a species, we are no doubt somewhat susceptible – to take the path of least resistance. But once embedded in the strata of so-called ‘common knowledge’, they are often very difficult to shift.

The work of Anselm Kiefer (b1945) provides a case in point. For it seems to be common knowledge that Kiefer creates an updated form of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the nineteenth-century concept of a multidisciplinary artwork associated above all with the ‘music-dramas’ of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). At least, such is the conclusion to be drawn from the frequency with which the term appears in the Kiefer literature. Simon Schama is one ←1 | 2→of the numerous commentators to invoke the concept in Kiefer’s regard, comparing him – in the context of a discussion of his paintings – to ‘the orchestrator of a visual Gesamtkunstwerk’.2 Similarly, Dominique Baqué has remarked more recently that it is ‘difficult not to view [Kiefer’s] vast and richly complex oeuvre as a contemporary version of the Gesamtkunstwerk’.3 In the opinion of the art critic Jackie Wullschläger, his entire output belongs together ‘as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk’.4 And one could be forgiven for assuming that it is actually obligatory to classify as the latter his very large-scale installation at Barjac in southern France, so frequently has this been done – by Kathleen Soriano, Matthew Biro and even the anonymous author of Kiefer’s Wikipedia entry, to cite just three examples.5

Yet the Gesamtkunstwerk is a concept of considerable complexity, having an ancient precedent in classical antiquity as well as being inextricably bound up with various nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic discourses. It is surprising, therefore, that in the many instances of its deployment in connection with Kiefer an explanation is rarely supplied, beyond a cursory reference to an almost ubiquitous – but actually somewhat contentious – translation of the term as ‘total artwork’. Thus Schama uses it to suggest the way that Kiefer’s paintings seem to him to provide ‘a total experience, at once operatic, poetic, and epic’.6 Similarly, it is her view of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a form of totality that also leads Baqué to connect it with Kiefer’s work, which she appears to see as literally all-encompassing. ‘Art is everything,’ she says, ‘and everything is art; [Kiefer’s] work absorbs the totality of the world – its histories, cultures, myths, scientific systems ←2 | 3→and artistic practices.’7 Reviewing Walhalla, Kiefer’s 2016 show at the White Cube Gallery, Hettie Judah repeated the translation, describing the exhibition as ‘something close to a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art’.8 And it is once again the view of the concept as embodying a totalizing impulse that seems to inform the multiple references to it in accounts of Barjac, where the artist has created a complex of buildings on a two hundred acre site, consisting of greenhouses, barns, towers, subterranean rooms and passages, and even an underground temple in addition to what was previously his home and studio facilities, producing a kind of totality in the form of a total environment.9

As Olivier Schefer has shown, however, a more nuanced translation of the term than ‘total artwork’ would carry the sense of a gathering, or collection, of the arts, in the same way that the German term Gesamtausgabe refers to a set of an author’s collected works.10 Anke Finger and Danielle Follett note that ‘the German total has a different history from gesamt, stemming from the Latin totus meaning gänzlich, or “completely”’.11 A ‘gathered’ work, ←3 | 4→as they point out, ‘need not be synonymous with a closed or fixed totality’.12 And this alternative interpretation is something that should perhaps be drawn to the attention of those Kiefer scholars who subscribe to the totalizing interpretation of the concept, since a totality is in itself an extremely contentious idea, with its connotations of totalitarianism – with which the Gesamtkunstwerk has been explicitly connected, as for example, at the highly eclectic exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1983, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, which included paintings by Kiefer (and may thus represent the moment when the association of his work with the concept became institutionalized). Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Bazon Brock, who like so many others seems unwilling to untangle the concept from the notion of totality, posits a direct connection between ‘totalkunst und totalitarismus’.13 But along with all things Wagnerian, the concept had in any case long since been tainted – perhaps indelibly – due to the link between the composer’s music and the Third Reich. The philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has even suggested that the Gesamtkunstwerk provided the ‘political model of National Socialism’. He writes:

[A]‌s Dr Goebbels very well knew, the Gesamtkunstwerk is a political project, since it was the intention of the Festspiel of Bayreuth to be for Germany what the Greater Dionysia was for Athens and for Greece as a whole: the place where a people, gathered together in their State, provide themselves with a representation of what they are and what grounds them as such.14

The concept is well known also for its bitter indictment at the hands of the social critic (and prominent member of the Frankfurt School) ←4 | 5→Theodor Adorno, for whom it represented the purest ‘ideology’, that is, an attempt to obscure – and hence indirectly to affirm – the alienated nature of modernity.15 Adorno classifies the Gesamtkunstwerk as a ‘phantasmagoria’, the term Marx, and later Walter Benjamin, had used to describe commodity fetishism (itself based ultimately on the principal of concealment). By means of a unified artwork, it created the illusion of a social harmony that was entirely lacking from modern reality. In seeking ‘an aesthetic interchangeability’, Adorno claims, the Gesamtkunstwerk ‘presupposes the same radical alienation from anything natural that its attempt to establish itself as a unified “second nature” sets out to obscure’.16 Although at times Adorno’s condemnation strays into the territory of hyperbole, the damage inflicted on the concept’s subsequent reputation has been considerable.

The Gesamtkunstwerk label is thus very far from neutral, bringing with it some most unfortunate baggage. Authoritative commentators like Schama, however, are no doubt well aware of this. How then to explain the seemingly irresistible urge amongst these and other Kiefer scholars to connect him with a discredited – albeit misunderstood – art form, itself indissolubly linked to the darkest moment in modern history?

It is true, of course, that Kiefer himself to some degree invites this comparison by virtue of his frequent references to Wagnerian opera, as for example, in his series of paintings on the theme of Parsifal (1973), and in Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (Deutschlands Geisteshelden) (1973) (Plate 1), exhibited at the Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the composer’s is amongst a series of names inscribed on it.17 In these paintings and others there is also the unmistakable suggestion of a stage set or operatic ←5 | 6→mise-en-scène. But one nevertheless wonders whether the omnipresent connection with the Gesamtkunstwerk would so readily be made if Kiefer were not German. The suspicion arises of an unspoken assumption that there is something exclusively Germanic, a common thread of Germanness, that links the concept with Kiefer. And this may be a legacy of the attempt – to which Andreas Huyssen has called attention – to construct a recognizable identity for him as a specifically German artist.18 For national identity, as Huyssen comments, is like a ‘trademark’ in the commercialization of art.19 And Wagner’s concept, encapsulated in a suitably Germanic portmanteau, may be somewhat of a piece with ‘the use of profound allegory, the multiple references to Germanic myth, the play with the archetypal’ that Huyssen identifies in Kiefer’s work, all of which, he says, are ‘held to be typically German’.20 The connection that has been made with the Gesamtkunstwerk may thus be a function of his output being positioned in the art market as representing a posited German ‘essence’, with all of the problematic assumptions this entails.

In short, it seems that a thorough investigation of Kiefer’s relationship with the Gesamtkunstwerk is overdue. The need has arisen – and from within the Kiefer literature itself, wherein the trope so often appears – to investigate whether or not his work can be meaningfully connected with Wagner’s concept. And it is to theorize this relationship, articulating what – if anything – Kiefer’s practice can justifiably be said to have in common with the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the purpose of this book. This is the primary research question that it sets out to answer. We shall see, however, that whilst this commonality does exist, it ultimately transcends the realm of aesthetics to impinge upon a much larger issue, namely the intellectual trend towards the separation of aspects of reality that notable commentators have seen as the central – and thoroughly corrosive – tendency of modernity. What Wagner’s multidisciplinary artwork and Kiefer’s painting both represent is a reversal of this tendency. And it is above all this – the way that it relates ←6 | 7→to a fundamental question of epistemology – that makes a comparison of these things worthwhile, and justifies a book-length exploration.

The Gesamtkunstwerk is frequently cited as the forerunner of many of the interdisciplinary art forms of the twentieth century, including cinema, as Randall Packer notes.21 It has also been linked with installation art by virtue of the multisensory experience this provides.22 In assessing the relationship with it of Kiefer’s work, an obvious approach would therefore have been to consider his installations, as exemplified at Barjac. Taking my cue from Schama’s remark quoted earlier, I will instead base my investigation entirely on Kiefer’s painting. The latter is in any case his principal discipline, and it is here that the most illuminating comparison with Wagner can be made, most particularly in respect of the retrospective light that it sheds on modernism. Kiefer’s practice is often classified as exemplary of postmodernism by virtue of his use of intertextuality and other devices, but it will be an important secondary theme of my book that the connection between his work and Wagner’s concept can be used to re-evaluate certain aspects of modernism, and in some degree to collapse the distinction between the modern and the postmodern.23

This comparison in terms of Kiefer’s painting begs an obvious question, however. For the Gesamtkunstwerk was primarily a musical form (indeed, its importance in the history of aesthetics and its significance vis-à-vis modernism arise – as we shall see – from this fact). Implicit in comparing it with Kiefer’s painting is therefore the question whether or not the latter can reasonably be linked with music. In this respect, my investigation has a bearing on an aesthetic debate with a considerable pedigree. For the relationship of painting with the so-called ‘queen of the arts’ is an issue with which many commentators – including such notable painters as Wassily ←7 | 8→Kandinsky and Paul Klee – have been preoccupied.24 And it is probably superfluous to add that an account of this relationship as it appears in Kiefer’s work will require rather more than the observation, made earlier, that the artist frequently takes his subject matter from Wagnerian opera. Clearly, such an account must nevertheless be attempted.

Whilst not all critical reactions to it have been as extreme as Adorno’s, and whilst it set an important precedent for various modernist enterprises including the Vienna Secession and the Bauhaus, art historians have tended to place the Gesamtkunstwerk outside the mainstream of modern art. A hybrid art form thoroughly at odds with the modernist taste for purity, it has generally been seen as running counter to the central trajectory of modernism. Whereas the Gesamtkunstwerk envisaged artistic unity, the institutional reception of modernism has been ‘invested in the opposite practice of segregating the arts’, as Jed Rasula notes.25 At best, the Gesamtkunstwerk has occupied a marginal place in the story of modern art. As Juliet Koss comments, there has been a lingering presumption amongst art historians that ‘such a model of artistic interrelation falls beyond the parameters of modernism’.26 A major by-product of my investigation, however, will be to show that this presumption is misplaced. The Gesamtkunstwerk will turn out to be not modernism’s ‘other’, but its fellow traveller. In some degree, then, the effect of the book will be actively to promote the concept’s rehabilitation, and its restoration to its rightful place in modernism.

In assessing whether or not Kiefer’s painterly output represents an updated form of the concept, however, it should be noted that the issue as to whether such a thing as a contemporary version of it is even possible has already deeply divided critical opinion. The view of Matthew Wilson Smith, who has traced the history of the form from Wagner to cyberspace via Brecht, Riefenstahl and Warhol, is that the (so-called) total artwork ‘is still a potent aesthetic ideal, always intertwined with technology, continuing to blur distinctions between high and mass culture, artwork and ←8 | 9→commodity spectacle’.27 For David Roberts, however, the Gesamtkunstwerk is historically specific to the modern era.28 That of the postmodern has seen its demise, its lofty utopian ambitions – a product of nineteenth-century evolutionary optimism – jarringly out of place in the era of scepticism (in Roberts’s view, the notion of a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk would thus be a contradiction in terms). For other writers, its lifespan was even more circumscribed. Angela Merte, for example, has advocated reserving the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk solely to Wagner’s ‘music-dramas’.29 Rehearsing the familiar theme of totality, she suggests a different term, that of ‘Totalkunst [Total Art]’, for ‘concepts that represent an extension into the twentieth century of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk’.30 Erika Fischer-Lichte, on the other hand, seems prepared to countenance a Gesamtkunstwerk outside the confines of the nineteenth century, albeit only under the strictest Wagnerian terms.31

This question mark regarding the possibility of the concept’s reincarnation may represent another issue to which those who claim that Kiefer’s practice represents this possibility’s fulfilment should be alert. For the present, I will reserve judgement regarding it. Indeed, I will ultimately address it only indirectly, via my evaluation of the much-vaunted claim regarding Kiefer. It is hardly revealing too much, however, at this point to say that his painting has, at the very least, much of importance in common with it. And as hinted earlier, what this is – what is represented in both – is essentially an aspiration towards the dissolution of intellectual or discursive ←9 | 10→borders. Embodied in both Kiefer’s painterly practice and Wagner’s multidisciplinary artwork is a tendency to undermine the borders intended to keep certain aspects of reality firmly separate from each other. The sense of borderlessness that this evokes will be the central feature of my discussion, as well as being the source of the book’s title. I endorse Finger and Follett’s view that ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk should be understood above all as an aesthetic [that is, originating in the sphere of art] ambition to borderlessness’.32 Evoked by Kiefer’s assertion (cited above) that art must exceed ‘its limits’, it is principally this ambition, rather than the Gesamtkunstwerk as a specific model, that connects Kiefer with Wagner. And to repeat, the philosophical ramifications of this ambition are what constitute the ultimate significance of my enquiry.

This ambition, signified by Wagner’s concept and Kiefer’s painting alike, expresses itself in resistance to two forms of intellectual separation: that of art from society, and that of the individual arts from each other. These forms of separation represent two of the most powerful urges in modern aesthetic discourse. The first proceeds from the doctrine of the ‘autonomy’ of art, that is, the view that the latter should be strictly segregated from society, occupying a separate, exclusive sphere, and concerning itself solely with matters of taste and aesthetics. This is broadly similar to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art.33 It is the view, in essence, that the proper relationship of art and society is no relationship at all. That it gives rise to ←10 | 11→the concept of a border surrounding art is due to its attempt to delimit the scope of the latter to a certain domain of reality.

The urge to separate the individual arts, on the other hand, proceeds from the doctrine of artistic ‘purity’, that is, the view that each discipline needs to keep itself free from what is perceived as the contaminating effect of the others by confining itself to a specific and strictly delineated zone of competence, the border of which it transgresses at its peril (as in the case of the border separating art from society, then, the concept of borders between the arts arises from the attempt at limitation). According to certain highly influential commentators, the urge to purity in art is the defining impulse of modernism. It demands not only that the arts are kept physically apart, furthermore (that is to say, not used in combination), but also that they must be prevented from emulating what are seen as each other’s defining characteristics.

Wagner’s artwork and Kiefer’s painting stand for opposition to both of these forms of discursive separation. They represent in the first place the view that art and society are – at least in some degree – related, such that the former has a certain obligation to the latter, and in the second place a rejection of the doctrine of purity. Not only do both Wagner and Kiefer favour a combination of the arts over their being kept apart (a combination of the arts being absolutely essential to the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which various disciplines – chiefly music, poetry and dance – operated in cooperation with each other, and Kiefer likewise employing an eclectic mixture of disciplines in his practice, combining painting with photography, printmaking and even sculpture on some occasions), both also produce art that freely mixes the attributes of the disciplines involved, outraging the rules regarding keeping these distinct.

Thus the composer and the painter appear in the guise of a pair of military ‘sappers’, attempting from their respective historical standpoints to undermine the rigid conceptual borders erected by the doctrines of autonomy and purity in art. But their project is part of the legacy of Romanticism, and this in turn was indubitably a product of the Counter-Enlightenment, the largely Germanic movement – emerging in the late eighteenth century and resonating deep into the modern period – predicated on an opposition to the principles of the Enlightenment. Wagner ←11 | 12→and Kiefer therefore connect with the Counter-Enlightenment by virtue of their connection with Romanticism. And they have further links with the former. On the one hand, Counter-Enlightenment thinking was embodied from the outset in the Gesamtkunstwerk, insofar as the latter was founded on the principle of communitarianism at odds with the Enlightenment emphasis on individualism, and on the other both Wagner’s concept and Kiefer’s painting belong (as we shall see) to the tradition of German counter-Americanism, which descends in large part from the movement and seeks – as its name suggests – to resist the pervasive cultural and social influence of America.

It is the theme of negative German responses to the Enlightenment – of which the Counter-Enlightenment and counter-Americanism are both aspects – that serves to bind the entire book together. For the issues of artistic autonomy and purity also relate to this theme, not only because they are a feature of Romantic aesthetic discourse, but also because Adorno specifically introduced them into the debate concerning the adverse consequences of the Enlightenment for modernity, consequences that – in common with other important German thinkers including Heidegger – he associated with the Enlightenment mindset. Wagner and Kiefer are therefore implicated in this debate by virtue of their engagement with these issues. What characterizes the aforementioned mindset, according to Adorno and others, is furthermore a form of intellectual domination that depends on the division of reality into separate areas of mental jurisdiction and control. It is in the way that the challenge to intellectual separation embodied in both Wagner’s artwork and Kiefer’s painting represents a resistance to this mindset that the challenge relates to epistemology.

To sum up: the book sets out to interrogate the frequently invoked – but never adequately theorized – comparison of Kiefer’s artistic practice with the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. It is the complex and problematic nature of the latter that has created the need for this exercise. And the core argument of the book is that, whilst the application to Kiefer’s work of Wagner’s concept as a specific aesthetic model may or may not be warranted, a connection certainly exists between them in the form of the aspiration towards an art of borderlessness that is embodied in both, and that expresses itself in resistance to autonomous art on the one hand and ←12 | 13→artistic purity on the other. This aspiration can be seen, furthermore, as an attempt to counter modernity’s powerful urge to discursive separation, and as connected in this respect with an identifiably Germanic tradition.

Chapter 1 is devoted to an account of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself. Whilst Wagner did not invent the term, and seldom used it, he was as Finger and Follett note ‘the first comprehensive theorist’ of the concept, and it is therefore with him, and his paradigmatic formulation of the concept in the Zürich Papers, that it is chiefly associated.34 It should be pointed out that the term does not refer to ‘Wagnerian opera’; rather, for reasons that will become apparent, it refers to the purely theoretical model that emerges from the pages of the Zürich Papers. And since it is clearly essential to my project to establish a definition of the term, it is consequently to the latter that I have turned. The chapter identifies the concept’s three salient characteristics, namely its roots in the Counter-Enlightenment, its resolutely social orientation, and its constitution as a synthesis of the arts. I trace its emergence from a well-established Germanic discourse that was opposed to forms of society predicated on Enlightenment principles of individualism on the grounds that it was felt that these led to social alienation. Inspired by Herder, the early Romantics developed a model of society predicated instead on communitarian lines, in which a vital role would be assigned to art. This role was to provide social cohesion, accomplished by means of a united artwork, that is, a combination of the arts, symbolizing social unity and thus serving to reinforce it. It was this that provided the model for Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as adumbrated in the highfalutin, somewhat turgid prose of the Zürich Papers.

Details

Pages
X, 310
Year
2021
ISBN (PDF)
9781800791800
ISBN (ePUB)
9781800791817
ISBN (MOBI)
9781800791824
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781800791794
DOI
10.3726/b17957
Language
English
Publication date
2021 (August)
Keywords
aesthetics Gesamtkunstwerk Richard Wagner artistic autonomy and purity counter-Americanism Disorders at the Borders Matt Wates
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2021. X, 310 pp., 8 fig. col., 1 fig. b/w.

Biographical notes

Matt Wates (Author)

Matt Wates holds a PhD in History of Art from Bristol University, where he is currently a lecturer. He previously worked as a professional musician for thirty years and his research reflects his joint interest in music and the history of art.

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