Kat J. Park

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Critical Experiences: Project II

Total Work of Art or “Gesamtkunstwerk”

Project Overview

My original intent with this project was simply to research and understand more about this phrase that I had heard of, but not had a moment to dig into. I thought it was an interesting topic to pursue because of it’s connection to an architect I admire (Eliel Saarinen) and my vague understanding of the values of the term. However, as I delved into the research and learned more about its history and usage throughout history, I uncovered a fairly dense web of thoughts and ideologies concerning design and art as it relates to political and cultural systems throughout history. Some of it was really disappointing, and I had a moment of darkness where I felt a bit like design was a trick or an endless, meaningless trivial pursuit. The world felt both chaotic and overly dictated, and I felt a little gross at the idea of being another “designer” reaching for some kind of holy truth or solution to a chaotic and unbridled world. Maybe we should just accept the imperfect nature of everything, and the ugliness that comes with it. What is the point of trying to make something tangible or productize a feeling or a thought? What is the reason for defining a system when it becomes too large to digest? What a wasted effort!

Statement of Intention

My project is an attempt to render the experience I had researching this topic into a tangible form. There is a moment where it feels exciting, and like you’re going to discover or uncover something surprising that you really want. But then you discover within that something new, and again and again, and sometimes, it’s very annoying, and sometimes, its very disappointing, and your hope is at the end something fantastic is waiting for you, or there’s some sort of ultimate prize: what is the last thing you’ll make with all your new knowledge?

The final portion of the journey is not about the product though, I think the decision to have the final box be a continuation or an invitation to look back is meant to show some respect for the engagement of research and knowledge more than the final product. In the corniest of ways, “it’s the thought that counts.”

Research and Discovery Journey

My research/discovery involved a few different phases:

Eliel Saarinen and Cranbrook Educational Community

I grew up around the Cranbrook Educational Community, and it continues to be one of my favorite places to visit because of its beautiful architecture and natural campus. The campus is approximately 319 acres consisting of an Art Museum, Cranbrook campus, Kingswood campus, Science and Natural History museum, various staff buildings, Art Academy and studios, etc. surrounding approximately 40 acres of gardens.

Eliel Saarinen was a Finnish architect and city planner hired by publishing mogul George and Ellen Booth to design the school’s campus. He was given (almost) free reign and ample funding to bring his vision to life. Saarinen, along with his wife Loja and their son and various family friends all contributed to designing the campus, the buildings, the walkways, textiles, chairs, furnishings, lighting, uniforms, dishware, etc. of the entire school. This effort in itself was an embodiment of the ideals of “total work of art” in which the vision or overarching design schema would cover the entire project and provide a kind of synesthesia of emotion.

All of the design elements came from Saarinen’s vision of geometric shapes, almost symmetrical viewing points, recessed lighting, etc. There are motifs and designs spread throughout the entire campus, repeating in almost unexpected moments. For instance, the underside of the roofing of one building has a geometric pattern that shows up in the grass that grows between the bricks of a pathway.

During my visit to Cranbrook, I had the opportunity to interview Nina Blomfield, a visiting research fellow at Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research who provided more specific information about Saarinen and context about “total work of art” beyond. It was noted that Saarinen is often called an architect, but was also a city planner, which was where his desire to design macro and micro came from. The smaller aspects of the design, like the textiles, were done by his wife and a small team of family friends who made things like the furniture. He believed that being surrounded by beauty meant the students would be immersed in beauty and therefore more able to engage with their design education. Nature was very important to Saarinen which was where his design schema of “asymmetrical symmetry” came from (a tree from far away looks symmetrical, but upon closer inspection, is asymmetrical). The design system was not so much “planned” in its entirety as it was followed; there was a look and a feel that Cranbrook was, and the team worked tirelessly to follow it. It also helped that Saarinen had the almost complete financial backing from George Booth.

Most notably, Cranbrook as an example of “total work of art” was very late. The concept of total work of art is evident in various art movements throughout history including Baroque, Romantic, Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau, and re-emerged with Bauhaus. It’s original meaning included all types of art, including painting, music, architecture, literature or performance, the “total” in “gesamtkunstwerk” is indirectly translated to synthesis, comprehensive, or all encompassing.

Elitism, Access, and Education

Nina’s field of specialty is in material culture of domestic space and home decorating by middle class women, and we had an interesting conversation about interior design elitism and Pinterest. Saarinen’s work, Nina asserts, is definitely classed as “high” design, and while that level would be inaccessible to middle and lower class, there were still attempts to bring it into the every day household design. We started talking about William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, which rejected mass production in order to promote traditional English craftsmanship. Many ladies home journals would espouse notions of a beautifully designed home bringing moral and ethical “goodness” to the people inhabiting it, and encouraged homemakers to buy beauty for the good of their household.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. - William Morris

The pattern of uplifting an ideal way of life and a matching interior is nothing new, and the proliferation of “references” for people to follow is also a pattern that has repeated throughout history. The old home journals to produce drawings of ideal curtains, tableware, and arrangements of corners of the home for homemakers to follow, so the same sort of “design” would be happening at a lesser extent and quality everywhere. The digital age did not bring a difference in the way society consumes or designs things, it just increased the speed/rate/volume of content. My original critical question for this project was to explore what it meant for design to suddenly have access to this volume of content versus a total of work coming from a single source designer, but this question suddenly seemed less interesting.

Total Work of Art as a Concept

After my visit to Cranbrook, I started looking into the “total work of art” concept’s general history. I found that two sort of usages exist for the term: the first, is as a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms, so this could be applied to opera, film, media, etc. In the 19th century, it was referred to more for operas and performance than architecture (costumes, sets, lighting, music, dance, etc. in union).

An art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing somehow form a new world. -Carl Maria von Weber

In more modern usage is the one applied to architects, in which they hold responsibility for the design schema of a space than the building itself. The architects will often design details such as interiors, landscape, furniture, fittings, etc.

In order for the ornamentation to be interesting, it must depict objects that bring to mind poetic ideas that constitute motifs. The motifs draw on history, legends, icons, fables concerning man and his life, actions and passions. - Antoni Gaudi

Walter Gropius, a leader of the Bauhaus movement, embraced the idea of “total work of art” and reformed it to “Total Design” to modernize it.

Total design has two meanings: first, what might be called the implosion of design, the focusing of design inward on a single intense point; second, what might be called the explosion of design, the expansion of design out to touch every possible point in the world. In either case, the architect is in control, centralizing, orchestrating, dominating. Total design is a fantasy about control, about architecture as control. -Mark Wigley

Mark Wigley, Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP, wrote about “total design” in an article for the Harvard Design Magazine, in which he deftly examines the history and evolution of the term “total design” and explores its significance in current practice and education. The portion of his writing that stuck out to me was this statement":

These laws [of design] - the center of the training [of Bauhaus], the first thing to be learned after one walked through the door-were a series of totalizing claims about form. If design is the bridge between the immaterial world of ideas and the material world of objects, then a theory is required to control that relationship. A set of structural rules maintains the integrity of the bridge….Strong design presupposes strong theory. Design is, as it were, the appearance of theory….After all, theory is itself an art work, something designed.

I believe that this entire passage is claiming that design is a design of itself. From the intangible to the tangible, design is a set of rules or theories designed to give form to that path. The theory of design comes after a great design, because there is an effort to create it to teach it or understand it, or recreate it; the theory cannot exist without the thing. In this way, even those who seek to teach a different theory of design or reject the idea of “total design” participate in the design conversation itself by giving the theory a counter-form. Wigley presents Charles Jencks’ chart of architects and movements, which Jenck’s provided as a a method of rejecting the idea of “total design” by presenting all the evolutionary branches, he “designs” a single image of just that.

In this chart, I noted designers who had some relationship to the idea of total work of art, and noticed they all orbited the word “facist” as a design movement. I decided to investigate this, especially since I already knew from my general research into the term “total work of art” that Richard Wagner was a proponent of the concept. Richard Wagner’s writings are antisemitic in nature, Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner’s work, believing them to represent his vision of Germany, and parts of Wagner’s writing and works were used as Nazi propaganda, to the point where there is literature about how much Wagner influenced Nazi ideology.

In my research on Fascism and art, I found a journal article by Rainer Stollmann and Ronald L. Smith called “Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism” which examines fascism as a political movement and as a system of control, and how aesthetics were utilized to shape that control.

Art and literature of a fascist dictatorship originate in exaggerating, primitivizing, and brutalizing eclectically chosen tendencies, i.e., in selection and revaluation.

The “window-dressers of fascism” created “a public sphere, from which all decision-making processes were removed through the ‘Fuhrer-principle,’ and of which nothing remained but the mere ghostly shell, its grandiosely erected facade - they created this enduring political shell as a total work of art.”

In our short time together as a cohort, learning about designs and systems and tools as mediums for art and for connection, we’ve also learned a great deal about the oppression and exploitation of these systems, and the cost of the tools. This part of me research made me think even more deeply about the things we design and control. The first association people have with design is something about beauty and utility, all in a good direction, but there is design in oppression as well. The systems are not accidents, and it’s worth it to become aware of the design of it all.

Design in Context

This is a topic and an area of thought that will stay with me for a long time. I don’t equate the idea of “total work of art” with fascism, I believe it is important to appreciate things outside of the appropriation and twisting that occurs to them, but I don’t think I will think of “total work of art” in the same way after this project. The idea of total work of art is the idea that all things point to one design schema, and that vision inhabits all things in the space. It could be beautiful as a design concept, to be completely immersed in a physical manifestation of a vision, but at the same time, the natural progression seems to lead to total control.

Saarinen has a quote:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

If we continue to extrapolate that, from city to country to planet to universe, what are the bounds of the design and context? What is the design of a universe? What else beyond the universe? How can we design within a context for a context we don’t know? How do we design for a future we don’t know? We’ve learned about designing for the future, designing systems that do less harm, looking for “better solutions” through technology, etc. We spend a lot of time asking ourselves, is this well designed? I may be more interested in design that is “good.”

Evolving Thoughts

I am a swirling mixture of logic and navel gazing. I am not sure what my next steps or thoughts are, but I believe the critical notion here is to continue to ask questions, and to not become complacent in aesthetics or theory. I would like to continue to evolve my thoughts and continue the pursuit of knowledge, rather than the pursuit of product. The study of “total work of art” has been limited to physical objects in a space, but I am curious about its relationship to the digital and virtual space, where there are no “physical” bounding contexts, and many things to design are intangible.

Audience and User

My audience is lovers of art and design, and my users are artists and designers. I wanted people to have this experience of “discovery” but a delayed reaction. It’s a really obvious metaphor, but I liked the allusion to people tearing into presents to get to the gift and only slightly paying attention to the card or the wrapping paper. There’s a few different metaphors in there, not only of the pulling of a thread to opening of the box after box, but then the cards that have the wisdom, the end note saying “it’s the thought that counts,” the box within a box alluding to Saarinen’s “chair within a room…” quote, etc.

I originally wanted to wrap each gift in a different piece of research or in a different piece of design (i.e the final present would have been a chair, then the one before it a room, etc.) but it was very expensive to custom order single pieces so I went with a kind of tile of my topic.

Why a Box?

I had a really hard time figuring out how exactly to represent my research and my critical thought. It was actually about 90% of the battle to do the research and make an coherent sense of it at all, because most of the time it felt like I was just pulling on a thread. I was inspired by the “Metaphors” reading to just figure out what a good metaphor might be that I could demonstrate or perform as a way to walk people through the journey of discovery that my research took me down.

I thought about other potential ways of doing this, like an endless fortune teller or a never ending Rubik’s cube, but ultimately the box felt like something that I could accomplish in the time and could at least have a “fake” resolution to discuss.

References and Similar Projects

The box in the box was, to be honest, was a joke idea before it was a serious idea, so I have no real references for it. If I could do it again, an idea I found after committing to the box idea was the idea of collapsing books.

Bibliography

What Did I Learn?

I got one step closer to doing something kind of abstract and experiential. I am usually more informational and less “feelings” oriented, so this is a bit of a win for me. Being able to use a metaphor helped. I learned a lot through my research and actually have more questions than anything else. I would like to continue to fill in the gaps in my knowledge; the limited time I had to really dig through research makes me feel like the actual knowledge is somewhat sparse.

Challenges, Next Steps, Solicited Feedback

I’m not sure why I explored the fascism route, but it seemed like something I didn’t want to just ignore. It ended up being very thought provoking, but it was challenging to talk about or express at all. I felt that I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I am not sure what my next steps are, but I would love general feedback about how people express their thoughts in abstract or artistic forms like music, etc. I am really more of a informational illustrator.

Kat Park1 Comment