Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and Event-Score: A Critique of Performance
Josefine Wikström, Routledge, 2021
Reviewed by Dave Beech
Josefine Wikström’s book Task Dance and Event Score: A Critique of Performance is a very timely and compelling contribution to the understanding of labour in art theory. Specifically, the book’s insights are pertinent to current debates on the politics of art that are increasingly based on issues around the artist as worker, the social reproduction of art, the labour of art’s participants and the direct political activism of artists withdrawing their labour through boycotts. Wikström occupies a novel location in an overcrowded field, in large part because she views the transformation of artistic labour since the 1960s from the perspective of contemporary dance. This is important for two reasons. First, that dancers and choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown have been unjustly marginalised in debates on art’s ‘dematerialisation’ and ‘deskilling’, especially Rainer’s “workmanlike attitude to task performance”[1] and Brown’s “movements taken from real movements”.[2] Second, Wikström demonstrates the importance of the contribution of dancers and choreographers in the “break with medium-specificity” (p. 14) that is pivotal to the contemporary condition of art.
Key to Wikström’s understanding of the transition from medium-specificity to art in general is Thierry de Duve’s argument that art, since the institutionalisation of Duchamp in the 1960s, was no longer reducible to a medium-specific theory of the arts.[3] Or, more succinctly, art after Minimalism is ‘generic’. Minimal art opened the floodgates to diverse types of art (conceptual art, land art, performance art, institutional critique, appropriation and, more recently, socially engaged art). “Varied as they are”, de Duve explains, “all these movements have one thing in common: they pit themselves against painting, and sometimes against sculpture as well. What they have retained from the sixties is the authorization to produce generic art, that is, art that has severed its ties with the specific crafts and traditions of either painting or sculpture”.[4]
Ironically, writers such as de Duve, John Roberts and Peter Osborne have charted the transition from medium-specificity to art in general, by focusing narrowly on the transformation of painting and sculpture. Although these theoretical insights can often be applied to the changed condition of dance, photography, performance, poetry, film and so on, the key examples within the debate are Duchampian with secondary reference to the likes of Moholy-Nagy, Warhol, Beuys, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Joseph Kosuth. Roberts refers to “the radical disjunction at the heart of modern practice after the readymade”,[5] and Peter Osborne describes the contemporary condition of art as ‘post-Conceptual’, conceived as “not a traditional art-historical or art-critical concept at the level of medium, aesthetic form, style or movement”,[6] with a focus on similar artists such as Robert Smithson, Sol Lewitt, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Matta-Clark and Hans Haacke. Of the three writers, Osborne has the widest range of examples and even includes Alan Kaprow, who comes closest to Wikström’s core concerns. Taken together, however, the literature on the birth of contemporary art out of the ruins of modernism, including my critique of it in my book Art and Labour, is narrated as the negation of the medium-specificity of painting, or, without acknowledging the difference, as the negation of the medium-specificity of sculpture.
The inclusion of examples from dance, music and performance within this transition is not new. Liz Kotz has traced the historical rise of language in Conceptual art from the experimental score-based practices of Happenings and Fluxus. And Julia Robinson’s conception of the break with medium-specificity proceeds in a similar direction to Wikström (and quite different from de Duve, Roberts et al) in her essay on George Brecht. Robinson argues for a ‘third way’ which she says differs from the two standard routes out of modernism. This “third way, which is neither the commodified seriality of Pop nor the industrialized seriality of Minimalism”[7] is the Event score. What distinguishes this route from the two more familiar exits from modernism is that it “posits seriality without repetition”.[8] This is because it is based on the experimental scores and instructions of Cagean music and performance. “The conventional language of modern art – even basic terms such as ‘painting’, ‘sculpture’, and ‘composition’ – was rendered obsolete by the range of new approaches at the turn of the 1960s.”[9] For Robinson, this turn away from traditional art disciplines was symptomatic of wider concerns, “including that of registering the role of the viewer/perceiver, on the one hand, and the complex status of everyday objects, on the other.”[10] She makes a strong case for the historical reappraisal of the contribution of the Cagean legacy to the break with medium-specificity, especially within the supposed transition from painting and sculpture to Conceptualism, demonstrating that “The Event score is perhaps the first postwar case of a linguistic proposition offered in toto in the realm of art.”[11] As important as this is, Robinson’s aim is to add George Brecht to the canonical account, not to radically reformulate the terms of the given narrative in new terms that were put in motion by the students of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. This is the purpose of Wikström’s book.
Wikström’s book re-examines what is at stake in the transition to art in general. In Wikström’s corrective reading, dance not only went through its own transition against medium-specificity but also played a decisive role in the passage from painting (etc) to performance and the contemporary notion of artistic practices. Her two key terms, task-dance and event-score, come from an extended practice of dance and related practices within experimental music. ‘Task-dance’ is a term used to describe the use of lists and charts in the choreography of Yvonne Rainer from 1963 onwards, while ‘event-score’ was invented by George Brecht in John Cage’s Experimental Composition course in 1959.
Allan Kaprow, who invented the Happening at the same time that George Brecht invented the event-score, had argued in 1958 that Jackson Pollock’s ‘dance of dripping’[12] around his floor-based canvas led to the idea of the expanded category of painting and, ultimately, to performance art itself. This was certainly true for Kaprow and Brecht, who both embraced chance and randomness in their work because of Pollock. Despite this, Pollock is a red herring. First, as Wikström points out, this development was already anticipated by Surrealist techniques of “automatic actions” (p. 30) in the 1920s. And second, there is an important dimension missing if we trace the presence of dance in the dissolution of medium-specificity to a painter. Wikström’s interrogation into the role of dance in the history of contemporary art proposes a more fundamental challenge that includes a different conceptual framework with its own constellation of terms: practice, experience, object, abstraction and structure.
In the first of these, practice, Wikström refreshes the theoretical significance of the development of the concept of art as a practice. The ease with which artists, curators, critics and academics today talk about their ‘practice’ is traced back to the supersession of the specific skills and traditions of each individual discipline. “Performance practices, in fact, had a particularly central role in the shift from a medium-specific to a more generic concept of art. This happened through two main lineages or contexts through which two categories of performance emerged: “performance art” and “performance in general”, one primarily with its roots in action painting and the other deriving mainly from experiments in musical modernism” (p. 29). Hence, if Duchamp is the key figure for de Duve, John Roberts and others, Wikström, like Kotz and Robinson, turns to John Cage.
In the second, experience, she focuses on the shift from an older pictorial tradition with its ‘disembodied eye’, to the emphasis on experience in contemporary art, which signifies a shift towards the bodily, the participative and the performative. Dance also has a history of contemplative, aesthetic appreciation, but the significance of the shift, as Wikström points out, is that the emphasis on experience in art after Minimalism puts contemporary art on a terrain very familiar to dance. Experience helps to think through how “art, not defined through mediums, style or specific forms, … implies mediations of art that surpasses the material qualities of the art object and instead privileges relational and social forms” (p. 88).
Object, in this context, is the negation of the artwork, understood as “a medium-specific notion of the art object” (p. 92), which she describes as “physically tangible, hermeneutically sealed objects whose meaning lies in this physical object” (p. 102). This part of the study attempts to “show how the event-score and task-dance practices negated medium-specificity and, by doing so, constructed a new conception of the art object in a way previously unseen in a North American art context” (p. 93). Here, Wikström provides a credible alternative to both the discourse around the ‘specific objects’[13] and ‘objecthood’,[14] and Lucy Lippard’s theory of the “dematerialized art object” in Conceptual art. Wikström puts a stronger emphasis on Robert Morris and George Brecht than Donald Judd and extends the investigation to include Fluxus and related performance and dance practices.
Abstraction, here, does not refer to abstract art in the narrow sense but to the “withdrawal of dance from empirical reality” (p. 113). Or, rather, Wikström’s focus on the specific process of the “abstraction of the category of dance from empirical and social reality” (p. 114), allows her to overcome the limitations of the formal definition of abstract art and, at the same time, to locate the abstraction of art within a world organised around the ‘real abstractions’ of abstract labour and abstract time. Based squarely on Marx’s theory of abstract labour as “the social form through which all relations are mediated in fully developed capitalist societies” (p. 114), Wikström explores the relationship between task-dance practices of abstraction to the propensity for abstraction within the capitalist mode of production. She explains that the achievement of task-dance was “to negate ‘dance’ as a medium-specific discipline separable from painting, sculpture and music, and, through this process of negation, a new concept of dance was constructed. With task-dance, dance for the first time becomes abstract in its ontological condition and becomes what Adorno calls autonomous” (p. 128).
Finally, Wikström considers structure. Structure is contemporary art’s negation of composition. Abstract Expressionism had already replaced composition with a flow of subjective and improvisatory gestures within an ‘all over’ pictorial space. Composition becomes structure when the word composition is linked more firmly with experimental music composition than with the European tradition of composition in painting and sculpture from the Renaissance to early modernism. Chance operations, randomness and linguistic instructions for actions dissolve the paradigm of the artist composing a work of art visually. Structure is the application of a predetermined schema for the work that is subsequently executed without deviation. This radically alters the relation between the artwork’s components and the work as a whole. Wikström demonstrates this in a detailed analysis of Trisha Brown’s Accumulation from 1962 which Brown described as a “serial composition where I involved myself in one movement after another”.[15] This chapter argues that a post-medium-specific conception of the artwork as a “performative structure-object” (p. 135) is the basis for “the generalisation of the category ‘performance’ in art” (p. 135). This, it becomes clear, changes the social relations of art. Wikström therefore explores how this new concept of structure “enabled new notions of the subject and the object to emerge” (p. 133).
Throughout the book Wikström connects the vocabulary of contemporary art (practice, experience, object etc) to related philosophical traditions. Practice is extrapolated through the philosophical concept of praxis, especially in the early Marx; experience is articulated through Dewey’s pragmatic reconciliation of “subject/object, culture/nature, art/life, science/philosophy and body/mind” (p. 66), especially through the use of language; the changed concept of the art object is reflected on through a re-reading of Kant’s distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt and Husserl’s categories of ‘animate beings’, ‘objects of value’, ‘use-objects’ and ‘cultural formations’; abstraction is explored through Adorno’s concept of abstraction and the Marxist concept of abstract labour, especially as theorised by Moishe Postone; and structure turns to structuralism and post-structuralism, both in Balibar and Deleuze (especially his essay on the seven criteria for the “structural object” in which he “argues that each structure is organised serially” (p. 138)), to reframe Adorno’s dialectics of subject and object.
Wikström’s argument also returns frequently to Marxism. She does not revive the Western Marxist investigation into the commodification of art which focuses on art’s relations of distribution, but on art’s location within the capitalist mode of production, especially on questions of labour. Wikström always uses Marx and Marxist writers to introduce a clarification of art theory. For instance, she points out that deskilling is different in task-dance than it is in industry or in some perceptions of deskilling in painting and sculpture. In contrast with Adam Smith’s account of deskilling in manufacture, in which “non-specialised labour implies that the worker becomes de-skilled and makes monotonous and repetitive movements which reduce his or her capacities”, the simplification of movements in contemporary dance, she says, “frees the dancer from the strained, disciplined division of labour in modern dance and introduces new skills” (p. 125).
The book lacks a conclusion, which means Wikström does not afford herself the opportunity to summarise the argument or to evaluate the significance of the findings for debates on contemporary art that focus on painting or sculpture or photography. Could Wikström have said more in the conclusion about the difference between the technical division of labour in Adam Smith and the social division of labour in Marx? Also, feminists in the 1970s built on the Marxist rather than Smithian version of the division of labour by examining the social division of waged and unwaged labour, but this is not taken up in the analysis of task-dance and event-score. These issues have been given a lot of attention in recent years, and it would have been beneficial if Wikström had given a full theoretical treatment of a possible liaison of feminist theories of reproductive labour and Marxist theories of abstract labour in dance and generic art might require a book rather than a chapter. It would be particularly interesting to see what might result from a dialogue between Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier’s Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art and Wikström’s use of Adorno’s conception of autonomy here.
Another consequence of not having a bonclusion is that Wikström does not allow herself the space to ask more far-reaching questions about the politics and economics of a post-medium-specific conception of art. For instance, to what extent were the disciplines of painting, sculpture, music, dance, and poetry rooted historically in the old economic and social structures or Medieval and Renaissance guilds, and later Academies? And therefore, to what extent was the modernist metaphysics of medium-specificity based on the abstraction of a normative conception of disciplines from their original material conditions? Alternatively, it would have been interesting to read Wikström’s thoughts on the relationship between the choreographer and the dancer in comparison with the relationship between the Duchampian artist and the various workers who actually execute their works.
The great strength of Wikström’s book is that it provides a blueprint for challenging the narrative of the birth of contemporary art. While supplementing the standard account of the transition from the arts to art in general, Wikström challenges the character of the transition. Her emphasis on the transformation of dance rather than painting or sculpture gives a more vivid account of why the politics of contemporary art focuses more on issues around labour in contrast with the modernist emphasis on the commodification of the artwork itself. More importantly, she connects contemporary art with the politics of work on the basis of a Marxist critique of the idea that task-dance mimics the movements of labour. By arguing, instead, that task-dance is abstract, Wikström shifts the investigation into the relationship between task-dance and work by understanding the abstraction of task-dance through the abstract labour of the capitalist mode of production. Wikström argues that task-dance “materialised abstract labour and through its form, pointed at the truth of such abstract labour” (p. 128) because “their form is reflective of a society dominated by the division of labour” (p. 128).
Wikström’s book is an important contribution to the philosophy of contemporary art and to the history of art’s transition from medium-specificity to art in general. It not only sits alongside the writings of de Duve, John Roberts, Peter Osborne and others but is a powerful lens through which that literature can be seen afresh. She builds on an emergent art historical investigation into performance practice which she openly acknowledges. “If the first generation of October scholars engaged primarily with expanded practices of sculpture and painting in the mid-1960s and argued for their importance of a generic concept of art, the second generation have rightly focused on the centrality that performance practices, as derived from modernist theatre, musical composition and dance in the late 1940s and early 1950s, had for the critique of medium-specificity” (p.16). However, Wikström adds to this art-historical literature a bold new theoretical framework for contemporary art by teasing out the far-reaching implications of the dissolution of medium-specificity through Cagean instructions as distinct from a Duchampian nominalism.
Wikström’s book is also essential reading for the contemporary study of the relationship between art and labour. She does not respond to the tradition of the association of the artist with the worker from Arvatov to the Artist Placement Group, or on recent debates on the artist worker from Julia Bryan-Wilson to Dani Child. Instead, she pays close attention to art and the division of labour. One aspect of this is exemplified in the relationship between the choreographer and the dancer which became politicised in the 1960s. “Rainer and Halprin criticised Cunningham for still holding on to the role of the specialised dancer, a specifically trained body, and, therefore, a specific division of labour in the production of dance. By saying no to the virtuosity of the modern dancer, Rainer also negated the modern conception of dance, which relied on such an idea of the dancer” (p. 117).
More generally, she notes, art is “separated from industrial production” (p. 121) and is therefore not subjected to the industrial capitalist division of labour, despite the various ways in which modern and contemporary art might ‘resemble’ capitalist production. Wikström, here, hints at the more fundamental division of labour between intellectual and manual labour, but she chooses to build her argument around the specific case of dance. At the heart of her investigation into the significance of the division of labour for contemporary art is the disruption and dissolution of the traditional relationship between the choreographer and the dancer. Evidently, the technical and social division of labour in task-dance was not brought about by the real subsumption of the dancer’s labour under capital. This requires a sensitive unpicking of practices from relations because, while “task-dance partly emerged as a rejection to the idea that dance requires specialised and labour-intensive skills” (p. 124), “the method used to depart from such a division of labour … was—as the term for this sort of dance indicates—to employ techniques strongly associated with the division, mechanisation and de-skilling of labour in capitalism” (p. 124). The significance of the division of labour can be lost if the analysis focuses too narrowly on the deskilled tasks themselves rather than on the transformation of the relations of production implied by the substitution of dance with tasks.
Wikström’s focus on task-dance and event-score therefore serves two purposes. First, she rights the wrong of the exclusion of contribution of dance and performance in the history of the transition from the Fine Arts to art in general. Second, in contrast with theories of generic art and deskilling that take their examples from the Duchampian legacy tend to give stress to practices rather than relations, Wikström’s examples, which are taken from task-dance and event-score, give priority to the social relations of practices. This is because these practices were devised within and against the established relations between composer and musician or choreographer and dancer. In both instances, highly trained practitioners were asked to perform simple operations or basic repetitive tasks that could be performed easily by almost anyone without any training whatsoever. Is it wrong of me to wish, at this point, that the book would take a slight detour to consider the repetitive, simple actions of subcultural dances – heavy metal headbanging, punk pogo, etc? Wikström sticks to the philosophical high ground.
In a similar way, the use of language in Cagean practices differs from the Duchampian tradition more narrowly defined. Event-score and task-dance typically use instructions for action and therefore presupposes a social relationship, whereas Duchampian nominalism presupposes a relationship between an artist and an object in which language nominates things as artworks and also provides metaphorical meanings for them in the form of titles and commentary. It is true that the nominated object in Duchampian art implies a social relationship between the artist and the person or persons who manufactured the chosen product or products. This social relation changes from case to case, depending on whether the commodity is found, bought, or commissioned. However, these social relations are hardly mentioned within the Duchampian literature except when controversies arise about whether the act of selection constitutes ‘fair use’, a copyright infringement, loss of income, cultural appropriation or etc.
By contrast, “task-dance practices both critiqued and affirmed a specific division of labour, negated and produced a specific notion of time, and rejected and constructed a disciplined and undisciplined body simultaneously” (p. 124). However, while the tasks in task-dance are quite simple and require no special training or skill, when they are put together into an unnatural or unfamiliar sequence “they are difficult to perform. With no rhythm or transitions between each movement, the dancer needed skills to be able to do each movement with precision and without emphasis” (p. 125). So, while, in principle, the division of labour between dancer and non-dancer collapses insofar as the tasks required to execute the dance are common actions, this is not always realised in practice by key examples of task-dance. Moreover, it is not the case that task-dance eliminates the division of labour between the choreographer and the dancer. The distinct actions of issuing instructions and following them remains. Or, as Wikstrom puts it, “a strict division of labour was used in task-dance in order to get rid of a certain division of labour” (p. 125).
The purpose of task-dance’s challenge to the established or traditional division of labour within dance was not to abolish all social hierarchies but to transpose dance from a craft-based discipline or a medium-specific form of art into art full stop. This means thinking about the division of labour of dance historically. What Wikstrom calls “the negation of specific craft-based labour and the idea of a medium-specific art object” (p. 134) was not accomplished simply by negating certain specialist skills but by the structural abolition of a mode of production in which the division of labour between separate crafts that had been protected by laws and customs for centuries within the guild system. With the rise of capitalism, the guild dissolves or transmutes into a different kind of division. Some crafts become luxury production or hobbies, whereas others are included within the Fine Arts. It is during this period when the social basis for the division of handicraft is eroded that painting, sculpture, printmaking, dance, and music come to appear as disciplines or mediums rather than ‘arts’ in the classical sense. Finally, the transition from medium-specificity to art in general completes the historical process of breaking from the traditional division of labour by eradicating certain skills and certain kinds of training from those practices that come to be called ‘art’.
Another set of questions about the division of labour arise from this thumbnail sketch of historical transition. Although the break with medium-specificity typically reduces the need for specific kinds of training in the skills of a discipline, making it technically possible, in principle, for anyone to execute a work of art, it tends to widen the social division of labour between artists and everyone else. For instance, so long as painting, sculpture, dance, music and so on retained their medium-specific skills and training they also retained their proximity to craft, manufacture and manual work. However, with the advent of ‘generic art’ or art in general, a new social division of labour opens up between the artist, on the one hand, and artisan, technician and producer on the other. Wikström’s discussion of task-dance and event-score brings these issues to the fore in ways that are enlightening for the analysis of the employment of assistants and fabricators today, but the specific changes to the relationship between the choreographer and the dancer effectively shields many of these larger issues. Perhaps it is for this reason, also, that, despite her important emphasis on the division of labour, Wikström does not discuss class.
Is there an uneven and combined development of art in general? As well as old disciplines turning into art in general, new technologies (and in some cases new disciplines or mediums) arise – video, radio, telephone, the slide show, etc. Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci used video; George Brecht made works that used radios; and Moholy-Nagy made telephone paintings; and Dan Graham made slide projector works. There is also a combination of disciplines. As disciplines merge or lose their disciplining power altogether, they do not actually disappear. There is, in one sense, a lag. Disciplines remain in place, for instance, in art schools, in art history departments, in publishing, libraries and so on. But, more than this, disciplines remain powerful in the practices of museums, commercial galleries, collectors, and so on, but also in the communities of painters, sculptors and others who continue to support one another, organise together and advocate for their disciplines, especially in the face of both real and perceived threats to their existence and contemporary significance.
What Wikström demonstrates in this book is that tasks, like Rosalind Krauss’ agenda-setting interpretation of the grid in painting, not only cancels originality and blocks spontaneity but also introduces repetitive, reduced, and simplified movements that replace craft and virtuosity with iterative tasks that eliminate the traces of personality that are expressed through the hand. The grid is not merely geometric; it also signifies calculus and the mathematisation of nature and social science, including economics. The grid means measurement. The grid turns painting into a series of tasks. It is the task, not the grid that is the fundamental component of the transition from medium-specificity to art in general. Wikström has given the most sophisticated philosophical case so far for including the tasks in task-dance and event-score alongside the dream, the splash, the cut, the fold, the monochrome, the readymade, the choice, the accident, amateur photography, collage and montage, repetition, and the grid as the definitive techniques of modern and contemporary art. It is not their newness that makes them modern but their effortlessness, mechanisation, automation, and algorithms. They bridge the gap between the handmade and the machine-made.
References
Sally Banes 1980, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Trisha Brown 1978, “Trisha Brown: an Interview”, Contemporary Dance: An Anthology of lectures, interviews and essays with many of the most important contemporary American choreographers, scholars and critics, edited by Anne Livet, New York: Abbeville Press, republished in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds) 1996, The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, London: Routledge, pp.119-126
Thierry de Duve 1996, Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Michael Fried 1998, Art and Objecthood, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Donald Judd 1975, “Specific Objects”, Complete Writings: 1975-1986, Eindhoven: Van Abbe Museum, pp. 115-124
Allan Kaprow 1993, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press originally published Kaprow 1958, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News
Peter Osborne 2018, The Postconceptual Condition, London: Verso
John Roberts 2007, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, London: Verso
Julia Robinson 2009, “From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s”, October, 127, pp. 77-108
[1] Banes 1980, p. 44.
[2] Banes 1980, p. 79.
[3] Duve 1996, p. 335n.
[4] Duve 1996, p. 205.
[5] Roberts 2007, p. 2.
[6] Osborne 2018, p. 20.
[7] Robinson 2009, p. 91.
[8] Robinson 2009, p. 108.
[9] Robinson 2009, p. 108.
[10] Robinson 2009, p. 92.
[11] Robinson 2009, p. 108.
[12] Kaprow 1993, p. 3.
[13] Judd 1975, p. 116.
[14] Fried 1998, p. 152.
[15] Brown 1978, p. 123.
