ABSTRACT
Reading much like taxonomy, the preoccupations with life about which Allan Kaprow suggests a foreshadowing of his assemblages, environments, and happenings that by 1965 had established him as a major international artist. The flattening about which Siegesmund refers accords with the reduction and disciplining of experimental impulses to easily conform with neoliberal, canonical impulses that define art, teaching, and learning according to a consumerist ethos that elevates utilitarian benefits and applications. What John Dewey suggests in the pluralistic characterization of instrumental experimentation comports with his earlier writings on democracy and education, and foreshadows his later turn to aesthetics. More importantly, such an instrumental understanding of experimentation relocates it from the artificial conditions of a laboratory into the natural, human, everyday world, where an intellectual multiplicity coexists and prevailing truths are learned and continually challenged. While Charles Sanders Peirce sought single, William James argued that conceptual truths emerge as a plurality from human interactions and social behaviours.
