Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces the broad context of artistic practices in which task-dance and event-score developed. It argues that the development of a generic concept of art is best described as a shift towards practice, primarily in Karl Marx’s account of this term. The book considers the two main artistic methods that came out of John Cage’s radicalisation of musical score: the event-score and task-dance. It discusses the established discourses around the critique of the art object that are related to minimalism and conceptual art—“specific object” and “dematerialised object”—and argues that such a critique was explicit already in task-dance and event-score practices of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book also considers Yvonne Rainer’s No-Manifesto in juxtaposition to the role of negation in Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of autonomous art and to the notion of abstract labour in Marx’s mature work.