ARTH 31.02 Art and Industry: The Visual and Material Culture of South Asia, 1800 to present
This course examines the relationship between art and industry through the visual and material culture of South Asia from 1800 to the present. The first third of the course will focus on the colonial discourse of art and economy, and the fear that industrial production would destroy indigenous craft and design. This instigated a colonial system of education, and the creation of museums, that taught both the European ‘fine arts’ of painting and sculpture, and the Indian ‘applied arts’ of craft and design in practice and in objects. The second third of the course will attend to specific media as physical and intellectual conduits in the economy. We will discuss the explosive effect of the technologies of print and photography in colonial control and nationalist agitation. We will also examine the materiality of textiles, clay, wood, metal, plastic, paper, and food in their production, exhibition display, and cultural and political context. The last third of the course will focus on modern artists’ considerations of art and craft, the formation of national museums, and the contemporary art market. In parallel to the attention to visual and material objects, we will read selections from primary sources on art and industry, such as George C. Birdwood’s Industrial Arts of India (1880), The Journal of Indian Art and Industry, Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909), and K. G. Subrahmanyan’s Eclecticism (1992).