ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that task-dance and event-score practices, through the negation of the medium-specific art object, proposed a new concept of the object: “the performative structure-object”. It focuses on Trisha Brown’s Accumulation, which evolved into the Accumulation Series including, among others, Primary Accumulation and Group Primary Accumulation. In March of 1962, dancer and choreographer Brown performed Trillium for the first time at the Maidman Playhouse in New York. In October 1971 she performed the solo Accumulation at the New York Gymnasium. As in Trillium, Brown’s interest in making Accumulation was primarily the putting together of movements into a serial structure, rather than a concern with the movements themselves. Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of the autonomous artwork complicates the Kantian transcendental subject much in the same way that the notion of the subject as structure does in Etienne Balibar. In a broad sense all task-dance and event-score practices from the early 1960s resonate with both of these critiques.
