Interart Representation in the Künstlerdrama. Word, Image, and Music in Contemporary Irish Plays
Interart Representation in the Künstlerdrama. Word, Image, and Music in Contemporary Irish Plays

Summary/Abstract: Theater as a “hidden magnet” (Kandinsky) and a “hypermedium that incorporates all arts and media” (Chapple), proves to be a most natural space where conventionally distinct medial forms of articulation can exist and operate together. It is particularly true of different forms of art in the Künstlerdrama. The paper interrogates, through three contemporary Irish plays, Frank McGuinness’ Innocence (1987), Thomas Kilroy’s The Shape of Metal (2003), and Brian Friel’s Performances (2003), which foreground a painter, a sculptor and a composer protagonist, respectively, how one form of art can interact with another without annihilating it, how borders between separate art forms are crossed, how each form of art, present in their own materiality, amplifies the voice of the other, and how meaning and signification is formed as the accumulative effect of word, image, and music.

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