Moderne kultur/Kunsthistorie: Art, Craft, Technology

Kursusindhold

This course asks how cultural policy has produced instititutional distinctions between categories of fine art, craft, and technology; and how these distinctions reflect and enforce hierarchies of race, gender, culture, geography, and class structured by colonialism and capitalism. Furthermore, how have artists and cultural workers renegotiated art-craft-technology distinctions to engage art as a tool for critical or oppositional cultural politics that challenge dominant social hierarchies, propose imaginative or utopian social visions, and intervene in the construction of everyday life?

 

To address these questions, this course will consider recent case studies in the relationship between art, craft, and technology that are shaped by longer histories of colonialism, capitalism, geopolitical rivalry, and nation-building. We will examine how historical cultural policies formed by these processes are reinforced or challenged in contemporary cultural production, whether in institutional practices or artistic modes of subversion.

 

The first part will look at how contemporary distinctions between art, craft, and technology are rooted in colonial cultural policy, and the ways that these distinctions have subsequently been challenged in anti-colonial movements, post-colonial state-building, and contemporary initiatives for decolonization. Focusing on the legacies of British colonialism in South Asia, we will investigate how art and design education interacted with colonial administration to divide Indian cultural production into separate categories of art and craft, giving rise to the modern conception of fine art as a specialized practice and mode of commodity production defined by its lack of direct utility and the limited autonomy of its producers. We will also see how cultural intiatives in decolonization have both challenged and affirmed art-craft-technology distinctions by examining case studies including contemporary art education and art-artisan collaborations in Pakistan.

 

The second part will consider how technological research and development shaped by geopolitical rivalries has informed cultural policy and cultural production. Beginning with histories of Cold War modernization initiatives and the military industrial complex in the US, we will consider how these processes produced collaborations between artists, scientists, universities, think tanks, and corporations. We will examine contemporary case studies shaped by the legacies of such Cold War initiatives, such as artistic interventions in surveillance technologies and the way that Silicon Valley culture of ‘disruptive innovation’ has refracted in artistic practices.

 

The third and final part will consider infrastructures of globalization as a site of both explicit and implicit cultural policy, and the way that it reorganizes the divisions between elite and mass forms of cultural production in postcolonial contexts. Our case studies will include the contemporary mass production and circulation of devotional images commonly printed in calendars in India, as well as the ways that the expansion of mass media infrastructures in India after 1990s liberalization enabled new forms of artistic production that have circulated in elite art markets.

 

Across the course, we will examine how our core case studies are shaped by different forms of cultural policy and enable and/or inhibit different kinds of cultural politics. We will also consider what kinds of methodological frameworks we can employ in their analysis, including both tools introduced in the course’s first module, such as ideas of governmentality and the public sphere; as well as concepts in postcolonial, decolonial, and technological discourses such as aesthesis and cosmotechnics.

 

The course will be taught fully in English and assignments must be submitted in Enlish.

Engelsk titel

Art, Craft, Technology

Uddannelse

Moderne Kultur og Kunsthistorie

This course will comprise a combination of lectures, seminars, and small group discussions focused on specific case studies. Students will be expected to complete weekly readings and prepare questions and comments on the assigned materials prior to each class. The final session will be dedicated to a full-day workshop where students can work with the theories and methods introduced across the course as a whole and prepare for their final assignment. Prior to the workshop, students must submit a written mandatory assignment, which constitutes an introduction, research question, theoretical and methodological framework to their exam assignments.

Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings” Social Text Online, July 15, 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/

 

Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018.

 

Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

 

Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

 

Hammad Nasar, ed., Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration. Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2005.

 

Nadeem Omar Tarar, The Colonial and National Formations of the National College of Arts, Lahore, circa 1870s to 1960s: De-scripting the Archive. London: Anthem Press, 2022.

 

Karin Zitzewitz, Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2022.

This course is one out of three cultural policy courses that constitute the second half of the cultural policy module (the first part is the mandatory course Cultural policy: Theory, method & analysis). Students therefore choose either this course, Kunstinstitutionens kulturpolitik: postneutralitet, mangfoldighed og dekolonisering, or Modkultur og kulturkrig fra ”Angry Arts” til Illiberal Arts.

Mundtlig
Individuel
Kollektiv
ECTS
15 ECTS
Prøveform
Skriftlig aflevering
Hjælpemidler
Alle hjælpemidler tilladt undtagen Generativ AI
Censurform
Ingen ekstern censur
Kriterier for bedømmelse
  • Kategori
  • Timer
  • Holdundervisning
  • 28
  • Forberedelse (anslået)
  • 140
  • Eksamen
  • 42
  • Total
  • 210

Kursusinformation

Undervisningssprog
Engelsk
Kursusnummer
HMKK03614U
ECTS
15 ECTS
Niveau
Kandidat
Varighed

1 semester

Placering
Efterår
Skemagruppe
Efterårssemesteret 2025
Kapacitet
27
Studienævn
Studienævnet for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab
Udbydende institut
  • Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab
Udbydende fakultet
  • Det Humanistiske Fakultet
Kursusansvarlig
  • Kylie Yvonne Gilchrist   (3-6f6b6d446c7971326f7932686f)
Underviser

Kylie Gilchrist

Gemt den 30-04-2025

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