Incomplete work no. 10: A sub-total work of art

Richard Wagner imagined the creation of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” in which all forms of art could be synthesized, each art developed to perfection and woven together perfectly. Wagner’s attempts to create such work were total failures. This was partly because, although he insisted that story and poetry be respected alongside music in his “total” operas, he also insisted on writing his own libretti, and he was a terrible writer. The result was striking music set to incoherent plots and wooden dialogue (the art of writing, alas, seems to be eternally disdained in spectacular theater). But there was perhaps another reason as well: the whole idea of the total work of art was flawed. Not totally flawed, but partially. Sub-totally.

Set design for Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen in 1876, by Josef Hoffman. Public domain.

A better artist, or a team of artists, could no doubt have done a better job than Wagner at bringing together the many arts and giving each its due. But even then the art work will never encompass all arts. There will always remain some other art that is relegated to the margins of the work, , or perhaps born in its margins, or born outside the work, reacting to it, and still waiting to be given its due. And maybe the most interesting thing in art is this process of discovering new arts, which requires being aware of the non-totality of every work that has ever already been made.

But the Gesamtkunstwerk has also been understood in a different sense. Wagner himself imagined art works that were internally total in the sense that they were complete and supposedly flawless wholes, but he still understood them as distinct works, separate from other works and separate from society. He never imagined they would actually contain every possible art, or that they would make art out of the artless parts of society. His art was still limited to art-as-it-already-is, art within the boundaries of Art as defined by the modern age, which separated Art from the uglier and less sublime rest of the world. This made Wagner’s total works very much incomplete, because his artworks were unable to reach outside themselves.

More radical artistic imaginations would later imagine creating works that expanded into all of society. Or they they imagined making all of society into a work of art. In the glades of England, the Arts and Crafts movement imagined a world where all work would transformed, becoming as creative as art. In Weimar, the Bauhaus school sought to redesign the minutia of everyday life, uniting form and function in a new kind of beauty. In Prague, poetists tried to bring imaginative aesthetic joy into every corner of life. In Paris, and soon all over the world, surrealists wanted to break down the boundaries beyond art, revolutionary practice, and the transformation of everyday life. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin wanted to compose a *Mysterium* that would incorporate all facets of human expression, would last as long as it took God to create the world, and would leave the world utterly transformed. Perhaps fortunately for the world, he never finished the piece.

Boris Groys considered that the avant-garde’s fantasies about making life into a work of art were finally realized when socialist realism was established in the Soviet Union and Stalin took on the role of the great artist-demiurge who could remake everything according to his grand vision. The trouble with Groys’s argument is that few avant-gardists, and perhaps only a few eccentric modernists like Scriabin, really had in mind a total work of art. I would call their vision sub-total. They imagined breaking art out of the strictures that kept paintings in frames, kept poetry on paper, kept music in concert halls, kept public art in statues, and so on. They wanted art to reach outward, to lay its claim on the world. But did they imagine that claim could be total, that any single work or artist or artistic movement could really single-handedly and single-mindedly reshape the world?

There’s something powerful in the vision that art isn’t finished where it starts. That the boundaries around an art work, or an artistic genre, or an “art” separate from other arts, are porous, and that the artistic impulse pours out from within every work into other works, from every art into the other arts and, from there, into the world.

I’d like to create a sub-total work of art that does this work of breaking out, that takes the totality of the world as its canvas, but which never aims to completely repaint the world, because it knows that there will always be more and more of the world that remains beyond the scope of one or another art.

For example, I might write a play about a few friends sitting at a bar. I would enlist other friends to write music for the play, which would be performed by a band at the bar. I would enlist other friends to paint the walls to make the set for the play. Another friend could redesign the interior. Maybe I’d even find an architect to rebuild the whole place. Then we’d sit down, have drinks, and start complaining about our lives, like always. But I’d leave the script of the play in front of my friends, in place of the menus, and when they pick up what they think is the menu, without realizing it they’d start reading their lines in the play. The band would start playing. The other people in the bar would become spectators in the play, but then we’d turn to them and have them read lines too. We might give them paint brushes and cardboard to help redesign the set. In Act Two, we’d already leave the bar; we’d go sing in the streets and write poetry on the city walls. Maybe in Act Three we’d storm the city hall and declare a revolution and let the city council members to figure out what happened. Or maybe we’d turn the council chamber into a court of popular law, where we’d challenge the councilors to defend their venal and misanthropic policies. Or maybe we’d go play a game of baseball. Ideally, in the council chamber. But I haven’t figure it out that far.

Maybe, instead, I’d announce the work is beginning, and I’d tell everyone to meet at a set location. There, I’d give each attendee an assignment. For example, to write a poem composed of all the words they read on signs as they walk away. Or to make a sketch of what the road might look like if it were freed from cars. Or simply to pay attention to the beauties of the world around, to make mental notes, to stop taking for granted what we have, and not to take lying down what we wish we didn’t have. Then we’d meet again and determine if life and the world have been remade like artworks. Or at least touched up a little like a dusty, fading work found in someone’s attic.

The point is, I’m tired of works of art that falsely claim to be total, self-sufficient and so grand you can’t imagine anything beyond them. But I’m also tired of works that are too small and are satisfied staying inside their covers and frames. If we’re adding up all the art work that’s been done, there’s always something more to add. But I’d like to record every subtotal in the art world’s balance sheet.