Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score A Critique of Performance

In this study, Josefine Wikström challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikström focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory.

Content Acknowledgements Introduction: From a cultural to a critical concept of performance Performance, performativity and its disciples Marx’s epistemology: A critical methodology Post-mediality and a generic concept of performance Task-Dance and the Event-Score: Epistemological Problems Chapter 1. Practice: Performance a practice of relations Practice and a metaphysics of practice in Aristotle From action painting to performance art From musical modernism to performance in general Marx’s relational practice: Smith, Hegel and Feuerbach Performance, a practice of relations Chapter 2. Experience: Art as experience or an art to experience? 2.1. Dewey’s concept of experience: Unmediated interaction2.2. Art as experience: Ono and Forti2.3. Critical limits of Dewey’s experience: Kant versus Dewey Chapter 3. Object: Acts of negations of the medium-specific art object 3.1. The minimalist and the de-materialised object 3.2. From independent things to acts of the subject 3.2. Dance and event as object: Kant 3.3. Phenomenal objectivities in task-dance and event-score practices: Husserl Chapter 4. Abstraction: Task-dance’s abstract ontology 4.1. Rainer’s No-Manifesto and other negations 4.2. The social form of abstract labour: Marx 4.3. The autonomous artwork in Adorno 4.4. Division of labour, abstract time and the disciplined body. Chapter 5. Structure: The performative structure-object 5.1. Structural objects in task-dance and in structuralism: Trisha Brown’ Accumulation 5.2. The Performativity of the Cartesian I 5.3. Labour in general, art in general, performance in general Notes Bibliography Index of names Subject index Index of works

Josefine Wikström is Associate Professor of Dance Theory at Stockholm University of the Arts.