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THE TOTAL WORK OF ART IN EUROPEAN MODERNISM. By David Roberts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press / Cornell University Library, 2011; pp. 304.
THE AESTHETICS OF THE TOTAL ARTWORK ON BORDERS AND FRAGMENTS. Edited by Anke Finger and Danielle Follett. Rethinking Theory series. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011; pp. 480.
MODERNISM AFTER WAGNER. By Juliet Koss. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010; pp. 416.
In recent years, the concept of postmodernism and its related theories seem to have lost explanatory strength and value. Do we really live in a postmodern age? Or have we merely entered a new stage in the still ongoing process of modernization? Just as there is no agreement as to whether modernity began in Europe around 1500, with the emergence of secularism, rationalism, and capitalism, or whether its beginnings are to be dated much later, coinciding with processes of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth cen- tury, there is also no consensus regarding its end. The situation becomes even more com- plicated when we shift our attention from Europe and the Western world to cultures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where "multiple modernities" (Eisenstadt) coexist. Even if opinions still vary on the definition of modernity, there seems to be a shared view on modernism as applied to certain developments in the different arts of the Western world between 1890 and 1930. What, however, came after 1930, if we take modernism to have ended at that point? Was it not still modern, if not modernist, art? And if we include the various "-isms" of the historical avant-garde, we have to provide good reasons for why particular artistic developments are or are not subsumed under the concept of modernism. John Cage's performances, happenings, Fluxus, or the Viennese actionists serve as exam- ples here, since they clearly took recourse to the historical avant-garde, albeit changing it in the process. What are passed off as characteristic features of postmodernist art mostly apply just as well to the historical avant-garde. The question about modernism's, as well as modernity's, periodization thus remains open.
The three volumes under review address this question through a common focus, the no- tion of the Gesamthmstwerk (total work of art), even if they deal with it in different ways. Although...