Flats colocates the aspirations and limitations of empirical psychology and aesthetic minimalism(s), where both use strategies of flattening and essentializing to construct facts or truths.

 

Solid colored shelves reflect strategies of flattening used across cognitive psychology studies to isolate and study "race," which is often imbued with naturalness, concreteness and stability.

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Minimalist art -- which emerged within about a decade of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology -- presented an object's "facts" -- color, form, size and material -- as a "radical" invitation to viewers to become self-aware in relation to art on its own terms. Yet while these objects were "self-evidently" unencumbered by symbolic, functional, or personally expressive agendas to the mostly white men who created them, the ability to make, see, and decode their "purity" required access to certain kinds of culture.

 

My aim in juxtaposing minimalism and psychology is not to condemn both, but to put their parallel aspirations and limitations in conversation, ultimately bringing in Donna Haraway's faith in science and the meditative, consciousness-expanding, embodying potential of the minimalist impulse.

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