The Theory of Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis of Performance Art: The Issues of Intermedial Performance in the Context of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Media Archaeology (original) (raw)

Grzegorz Dziamski claims that a specific feature of the autobiographical trend of performance art was a clear effort to the creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, realized by one person. Its intermedial character consisted in a polymedia structure, which was revealed in the connecting film, photography, and video with elements of dance, singing, and recited poetry. Even further in the analysis of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an “artistic synthesis” goes Jürgen E. Müller, who writes about the intermedial characteristics of Romantic aesthetic concepts. This point of view made by Müller in the analysis of the Gesamtkunstwerk concept is one example of the historical development of the poetics of intermediality. To be the most mature of its proposal Müller considers Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the montage of attractions. This latter conclusion should not come as a surprise since Eisenstein refers in his writings to the works by Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk concept. One gets the impression that Wagner – by renewing the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – did more for the further development of art than for the music itself. Similarly, from the perspective of Odon Marquard’s philosophy, the Gesamtkunstwerk concept set in motion an intention leading to the leveling of boundaries between reality and art, which proved groundbreaking for art. Müller, on the other hand, places the idea of a “total work of art” (with the use of new technologies) in the perspective of liberating traditional media and arts from mutual divisions. The recalled Gesamtkunstwerk concepts build a theoretical context for the development of a stream of research, which is currently called “media archeology” (Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka), mainly for this reason because it searches for foreshadows of the “media” transformation in their cultural, social, and aesthetic contexts. The mentioned theorists search for relationships that would testify to the development of tendencies of the mutual intermingling of media and the replacement of one image-making technique by another with an analogous structure. Media archeology seems a particularly capacious and interesting research perspective for intermedial relationships. It should be noted that Huhtamo does not escape from aesthetic analyses, on the contrary, he makes bold comparisons and transpositions of media theory from this theoretical perspective. The erudition and perspicacity of the judgments made, but above all, the comprehensiveness of the subject matter making, that we can consider “media archaeology” as an aesthetic theory of intermediality. This theoretical perspective, proposed here, allows us to recognize new aspects of media archeology and performative practices from the point of view of intermedial relationships.