Page 64 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Richard Wagner: The Artwork of the Future (Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft) (1849),
Published hard on the year of revolution (1848-1849) it was appropriately timed, it follows his other long essay of this year ‘Art and Revolution’. Wagner had been inspired by the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future 1843) and by his conviction of the style of future opera. In The Artwork of the Future, Wagner writes a draft of Wieland the Smith - intended to indicate the style of his intended music-drama. The main idea of his essay is the attempt to denigrate ‘base entertainment’, and to eulogise the kind of Volk Art he sees as the true art of the future - an art emanating from the people (expressing a common and collective need). He enumerates the three basic components of art: Music (or ’Tone’), Dance, and Poetry, and cites Classical Greek Theatre as an example of how they were perfectly integrated in the past.
He cites this (later he calls it the ‘gesamptkuntswerk’ - the ‘composite-artwork’. as the centre-point for all art, challenging architects to build a suitable venue for this communal, composite art. So, as a student at Art College in the late 1960s, I decided that because I was fascinated with art that seemed to integrate all the arts - I had seen seen the Living Theatre recently at the Roundhouse, Camden Town, and witnessed The 14-Hour Technical Dream at Alexandra Palace (1968) - attended the First International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, was planning a fringe degree multimedia light-show called ‘Krystal Klear in Warp Drive’ in a nod to Tom Wolfe. And my researches thus far had included Antonin Artaud: Theatre of Cruelty; Edward Gordon Craig on the theatre, and stuff on the Commedia dell’Arte, the Greek Theatre, and Georgian Pageants, and this is what I eventually did. And though by my present thinking, it was a lousy essay, the ideas have stayed with me all through a career spent in professional design and creative-direction, and in teaching and writing about the new media.
I still believe that many new media-artists are driven by the idea of the total art-work - Lazlo Moholy Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer was, Nam June Paik still is...