There, readers, there is the next milestone for you, in the History of Mankind! That universal Burning-up, as in hell-fire, of Human Shams. The oath of Twenty-five Million men, which has since become that of all men whatsoever, 'Rather than live longer under lies, we will die!' - that is the New Act in World-History… This is the truly celestial-infernal Event: the strangest we have seen for a thousand years.

- Thomas Carlyle¹

I. '…psychic history of modern Europe…'

'Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europäische Utopien seit 1800' (the first phrase is translated, variously, as 'The Inclination Towards a Synthesis of the Arts' or 'The Search for a Total Artwork'; the second as 'European Utopias since 1800') was installed at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1983. Organised by Harald Szeemann, the exhibition was the third instalment of a triptych of travelling shows, starting with 'Jungesellenmaschinen' ('Bachelor Machines') in 1975, and continuing with the different incarnations of 'Monte Verità' (named after the 'Hill of Truth' in Ascona, Switzerland) in 1978.

Together these exhibitions offered a kind of psychic history of modern Europe - an affectionate, if critical diagnosis of its deepest drives and impulses. Moreover, they are an ambivalent part of the articulation and critical establishment of, for the lack of better way to put it, a 'postmodern condition' in Europe. ² Szeemann's trio took on an ambitious multiple function in this moment: it was a kind of exorcism perhaps, an attempt to shed the habits and narratives of modernity; but it was also a morgue, where its corpses could be named and maladies discovered, as well as a fragile and loving archive of its