Art, Craft, Technology

This course asks how cultural policy has produced institutional 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 initiatives 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.