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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 461 conceptual scheme - his presuppositions about reality, the human condition, and social and personal relationships, as well as his presuppositions about what art is and what an exhibition space is supposed to do. By introducing into a specialized cognitive context singular objects that defy easy categorization, galleries and museums signal themselves to their audience as purveyors of heightened awareness through the objects and artifacts they display. Generated by a culture that values innovation for its own sake as well as for its ability to create its own market, these contemporary artifacts function primarily to provoke or stimulate in the viewer more flexible and inclusive conceptualizations of reality that can encompass them. In this sense, contemporary art offers a deliberate and paradigmatic experience of theoretical anomaly. It provides one the opportunity to reorganize one's favored theories, the self-conception with which they are intertwined, and therefore the conceptual structure of the self in order to accommodate it; and to test and develop one's capacity for cognitive discrimination in order to grasp it. Some works of art satisfy this desideratum better than others. Some choose instead to reaffirm traditional values, or the social and political status quo, or prevailing comfortable convictions and perceptions of human nature. But since Impressionism and perhaps before, but most explicitly since Duchamp, the most significant works of art in the Western tradition11 have taken seriously the challenge of heightened cognitive discrimination, i.e. the challenge to compel the viewer to see what she did not see before, and to add these anomalous, newly discovered properties of objects and events to her permanent cognitive repertoire. Many contemporary artists take seriously their responsibility to question and extend the limits of knowledge by offering anomalous objects, innovative in form, content, or both, as an antidote to provincial and conventional habits of thought. Minimal Art of the 1960s offers a particularly compelling example of this. For the first time in the history of Modernism, artists were taken seriously as critics and theorists of contemporary art. And what many Minimal artists explicitly averred in their writings was that no such theory was adequate to an understanding of the work; that the point of presenting geometrically, materially and formally reductive objects was to draw the viewer's attention away from extrinsic associations and toward the specificity and materiality of the particular object itself. In its aesthetic strategies, Minimalism repudiated the imposition of abstract theory - psychoanalytic, social, or aesthetic - as cognitively inadequate to a full comprehension of the work. Instead it By "the Western tradition" in art, I understand not only the Euroethnic canon itself, but also the contributions of colonized, marginalized, or non-Western cultures to it (as, for example, Tahitian art influenced Gauguin, Japanese art influenced Van Gogh, African art influenced Picasso, or American Jazz influenced Stuart Davis). 11 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
