percepts.” Only in that form, she argued, can such ideas be grasped with
the full emotional immediacy of sensory experience. Written between
1965 and 1971, around the time when the cognitive revolution was just
getting underway, her essays on the nature of art often reveal a highly
nuanced understanding of the interplay of perception, cognition, and
emotion in the creation and experience of works of art.^13
II. Re-Examining the History of the “Avant-Garde”
in the Visual ArtsIn pursuing the question But is it art?in the realm of the visual arts,
where it is most often raised, it is instructive to retrace the history of the
twentieth-century “avant garde,” from the development of abstract paint-
ing in the early 1900s through the increasingly bizarre expressions of
postmodernism.
We should begin by asking, What impelled the pioneers of abstract
painting—Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich—to take the unprece-
dented step of abandoning mimesis in their work? And what did they
hope to accomplish? It is clear from their ample theoretical writings
(though not from their paintings) that they were led to this extreme
measure by a profound desire—inspired in large measure by various
occult beliefs—to escape from what they regarded as the excessive
materialism of their time. Kandinsky, for example, viewed his epoch as
a time “of tragic collision between matter and spirit,” and proclaimed
that before the “awakening soul” of man could complete its evolution, it
must be liberated from the “nightmare of materialism” still holding it in
thrall. By eschewing representation of recognizable objects in the visi-
ble world in favor of abstract compositions of form and color, he and his
fellow nonobjective painters hoped to give expression to a realm of pure
spirit.^14 Each in his own way earnestly strove to embody profound meta-
physical and spiritual values in his work and to engage the emotions, as
artists have always done. But both their view of reality (in particular, of
the relationship between spirit and matter) and the means they employed
to represent it were wholly inadequate, and antithetical to the essential
nature of art—which is to concretize, in readily graspable form, ideas
and feelings about the world, and about human experience and values, in
particular. As their theoretical treatises reveal, they unwittingly based
their work on mistaken conceptions of the relationship between mind
and matter, and between perception, cognition, and emotion. In actual-
ity, spirit is always embodied in matter, and human emotions are always
Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde: Art and Cognition 43