|
"The
highest conjoint work of art is the drama: it can only be at hand
in all its possible fullness, when in it each separate branch of
art is at hand in its own utmost fullness. The true Drama is only
conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence
of every art towards the most most direct appeal to a common public."
– Richard Wagner
|
|
"And
so the arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper
use of this encroachment will rise
the art that is truly monumental."
–
Wassily Kandinsky
|
|
"The
social problems that characterize our time, as opposed to the political
ones, no longer allow a compartmentalized approach. We are approaching
the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into
rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant."
–
Dick Higgins
|
|
"The
new interface I will define is one in which the artist makes
active use of the inventiveness and skills of an engineer
to achieve his purpose The artist could not complete his intentions
without the help of an engineer. The artist incorporates the work
of the engineer in the painting or the sculpture or the performance."
–
Billy Klüver
|
| |
|
The
Gesamtelewerk proposes a resurgence of the optimism of previous
efforts to formalize the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art Work), to devise
an integrated medium which blends all
the arts and engages all the senses. Introducing telematics into
the equation suggests an art that in addition seeks a global embrace,
a collective vision to which the artwork,
artist and viewer aspire.
This
aspiration has gradually taking form as a matrix
of interaction in the wake of recent networked art: from
the satellite works of the 1970s to the experiments in collaborative
telematics of the 1980s to the emergence of Net art in the mid-1990s.
The latter is now advancing at a prodigious
rate, forcing the establishment artworld to take notice of a rapidly
developing new movement.
Will
Net artists revive the hopes of previous
avant-garde with the power to distribute their message instantaneously
and globally?
Does
the notion of a Gesamtelewerk suggest the possibilities for social
transformation resulting from forms of collective art that
engage audiences through involvement, inclusiveness and participation?
Can
the Gesamtelewerk serve to defragment cultural separatism, specialization,
and the isolationist tendencies within
our institutions, encouraging rather a cross-disciplinary
interaction between individuals in all fields and walks of
life?
"Where
do we go from here? Towards Theatre. That art more than music resembles
nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while
we are alive to use them."
– John Cage
|
|
|
|
"Out
of this technological complexity, we can sense the emergence of
a synthesis of the arts. The question of content must therefore
be addressed to what might be called the Gesamtdatenwerk – the
integrated data work – and its
capacity to engage the intellect, emotions, and sensibility of
the observer."
–
Roy Ascott
|
|
"What
would be truly surprising is that sound should not suggest color,
that colors should not be able to give the idea of a melody, and
that sound and color should be unfitting to translate ideas; things
have been expressed through a reciprocal analogy,
since the day when God uttered the world as a complex and indivisible
totality."
–Charles
Baudelaire
|
|
"The
concept of a total work of art was readily intelligible, yesterday,
at the period when specialization was at its height. With its ramifications
and its fragmenting action in very field, specialization had destroyed
all belief in the possibility of embracing the totality of all fields,
the wholeness of life."
– László
Moholy-Nagy
|
"What
we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk alongside and separate from
which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses
spontaneously forming itself into the all embracing Gesamtwerk
(life) which abolishes all isolation,
in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological
necessity and culminate in a universal necessity."
– László
Moholy-Nagy
|
| |
|
