Piper philosophizes that in order for an art object to be properly critiqued it must be taken out of its typical setting and away from its usual implementation. “We are regularly blinded to the mystery of objects in daily life,” Piper says, “because we so often utilize them as tools or instruments for achieving our ends, or for satisfying our needs and desires. Under these conditions, the objects in question are not seen as self-subsistent entities in their own right." In other words, we need to view things not for what they can do for us in the everyday sense, but for what they actually are, separate from their daily setting and use—we need to put them in a light that “forces us to revise our assumptions about the external world and calls into question the expectations we bring to it.”
This brings up once again my favorite example of Duchamp's "Readymades," the most famous example of course being that of Fountain. Piper would see these as the epitome of art, for they are perfect examples of the artist simply choosing an everyday object (or objects) and "repositioning or joining, tilting and signing it...[a] process involv[ing] the least amount of interaction between artist and art... represent[ing] the most extreme form of minimalism up to that time." Duchamp takes objects of daily use out of their typical settings, pulls them from their typical implementations and places them in a setting where viewers are forced to reshape their usual ideas on that object, seeing it for precisely what it is not what it can do.
Information on Duchamp's "readymades"
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