1900 week one

-- informed by interplay and reciprocity between different arts and what we might call fine arts ‘disciplinary cultures’. The nature, the validity of such contiguities is itself a most demanding question.

-- the integration of the disciplines of art, dance, theater , music, design architecture and new media arts in a way that facilitates a dialogue and collaboration between the art forms, questioning the solidity of the boundaries between them and what is at stake in both their maintenance and their disruption.

-- interdisciplinary work prepares students to develop an aesthetic perspective, to form criteria for arts evaluation, and to reflect critically on the role of the arts in their personal lives, in society and in other cultures..

-- In their western history, few genres have ever been, or sought to be, rigorously 'pure'. Drama, dance and the plastic means of scenic illusion have collaborated from their origins.

-- Indeed Aristotle is magisterially concerned with trying to get the balance between them right.

-- Opera is, by very definition, a hybrid form in which, until modern times, spoken dialogue or mime played an essential part.

-- The dialectic, in our history, between music and painting remains to be explored. We know of great painters who insisted on musical accompaniment for their sessions of portraiture

-- Numerous eminent painters have taken the musical moment for their motif (Giorgione, Vermeer, Braque, Picasso). Deep within post-Impressionist and abstract art lies the analogy to musical form. Scriabin seeks to match notes to colour. (Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer whose music bridged the Romantic era and the twentieth century. Although he lived only into his forties, he managed to write ten sonatas for piano, a piano concerto, three symphonies, two orchestral poems, and large number of short piano solo pieces.) In film, image and score, word and motion are necessarily knit.

-- the ideal, the executive essence of a festival of the arts, is, implicitly or explicitly, that of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Or ‘total work of art’

-- In 1849, Wagner introduced the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Artwork, in an essay called "The Artwork of the Future." It would be difficult to overstate the power of this idea, or its influence. Wagner's description of the Gesamtkunstwerk is one of the first attempts in modern art to establish a practical, theoretical system for the comprehensive integration of the arts.

-- Wagner sought the idealized union of all the arts through the "totalizing," or synthesizing, effect of music drama Ð the unification of music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft.

-- His drive to embrace the full range of human experience, and to reflect it in his operas, led him to give equal attention to every aspect of the final production. He was convinced that only through this integration could he attain the expressive powers he desired to transform music drama into a vehicle capable of affecting German culture.

-- one critic writes about Wagner “The magician in him, at once corrupt and messianic, gathered into his own hand every thread.” – we’ll explore the anxieties around the idea of the ‘total work of art’ and the relationship between this notion and other ideas – related to the movement called modernism , postmodernism and the a key concept of this course – interdisciplinarity… but we’ll just get a taste of it for now.

-- Every detail of scenic design, painting, movement, was to be integrated in the spectacle. Wagnerian operatic music is both, transcendentally, itself and a rapacious inventory of all other genres.

-- Wagner’s libretti belong to the history of literature (there are scenes in the text of the Meistersinger that can justly be qualified as Shakespearean).

Twentieth century artists have continued the effort to heighten the viewer's experience of art by integrating traditionally separate disciplines into single works.

-- Modern experience, many of these artists believed, could only be evoked through an art that contained within itself the complete range of perception.

-- "Old-fashioned" forms limited to words on a page, paint on a canvas, or music from an instrument, were considered inadequate for capturing the speed, energy and contradictions of contemporary life.

-- the futurists are a good example of people who held to these kinds of ideas and we’ll be discussing them in a few weeks

for all you film majors, though, here’s a teaser – In their 1916 manifesto "The Futurist Cinema," F.T. Marinetti and his revolutionary cohorts declared film to be the supreme art because it embraced all other art forms through the use of (then) new media technology. Only cinema, they claimed, had a "totalizing" effect on human consciousness.

Less than a decade after the futurists, in his 1924 essay describing the theater of the Bauhaus, "Theater, Circus, Variety," László Moholy-Nagy called for a theater of abstraction that shifted the emphasis away from the actor and the written text, and brought to the fore every other aspect of the theatrical experience.

- Moholy-Nagy declared that only the synthesis of the theater's essential formal components Ð space, composition, motion, sound, movement, and light Ð into an organic whole could give expression to the full range of human experience.

-- artists have also been interested in integrating all of the senses – an area of inquiry called ‘synesthesia’ – we’ll discuss this, too.

we’ll talk about some examples of interdisciplinary art next week, but one artists I’ll mention now whose work is a part of this intellectual and artistic heritage is john cage.

-- his performance work was a significant catalyst in the continuing breakdown of traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines after World War II.
-- as we’ll see next week, his work also weakened yet another traditional boundary, the divide between artwork and audience (can anyone name a famous german playwright who also pushed at this boundary? Brecht)

-- this kind of interdisciplinary performance work influenced a generation of artists who came of age in the late 1950s. ( Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins and Nam June Paik )

-- developed non-traditional performance techniques that challenged accepted notions of form, categorization, and composition,

-- leading to the emergence of genres such as the Happenings, electronic theater, performance art, and interactive installations.

In this climate, artists became increasingly interested in integrating technology into their work.

beginning of integration of the emerging fields of human-computer interactivity and cybernetics with artistic practice – basic the interdisciplinary fruit s of what have come to be understood as the distinct endeavours of engineering and art – you can even get an MFA now in virtual reality caves where practicing artists are paired with engineers

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