ABSTRACT
This chapter 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. It focuses on a discussion of the break with medium-specificity in North American art and details a critical reconstruction of two key artistic strategies of post-war art period in North America: firstly, the expansion of painting through the inclusion of the process of painting into the meaning of the artwork and secondly, the transformation of the musical score from a mimetic/identical to a non-mimetic/non-identical understanding of it. Aristotle’s broad understanding of practice as all actions related to what it means to be human provides a backdrop against which the art practices in the post-war era with their emphasis on action and doing can be seen. By focusing on the act of painting—dripping, squeezing and slashing paint on the canvas—Jackson Pollock emphasised the making of art as a temporal, environmental and experiential process.
