Janet Malcolm and the Meaning of "Gesamkunstpatchwork"

Janet Malcolm (Illustration by Jillian Tamaki)

Janet Malcolm’s “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986) is an idiosyncratic profile of Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy. I recently reread it after I saw it listed in Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Eighties (newyorker.com, March 22, 2020). Of its many oddities – its preoccupation with interior décor, its oblique approach to its subject (Sischy doesn’t appear until about 7000 words in), its distaste for the art world in which Sischy circulates – the most piquant for me is the bravura analytical move at the end, revealing and attempting to resolve Malcolm’s “disappointment” with her subject.

Oh yes, and another oddity – that strange, ugly word “Gesamkunstpatchwork” in what is perhaps the piece’s most striking sentence:

She is the Ariel of the art world, darting hither and yon, seeming to alight everywhere at once, causing peculiar things to happen, seeing connections that others cannot see, and working as if under orders from some Prospero of postmodernism, for whose Gesamtkunstpatchwork of end-of-the-century consciousness she is diligently gathering material from every corner of the globe as well as from every cranny of the East Village. 

It’s a play on “Gesamkunstwerk,” which the dictionary defines as “total artwork, where painting, sculpture, and architecture are combined together in a single, unified, and harmonious ensemble.” Malcolm’s variation on it is a sarcastic pun, another indication of her distaste for the flashy, grungy art of eighties New York.