This course will tackle canonical terms and concepts used in art history in a longue durée investigation, to unpack the echoes of these terms and their usage in the context of South Asian art history. Students get the opportunity to question (seemingly) general and shared vocabulary of terms, such as ‘fine art’, ‘crafts’, ‘decorative/ornamental’, ‘oriental’, ‘national’, ‘taste’, ‘imitation’, ‘Indianness’, ‘native/primitive’, ‘modernism’, etc. in case studies from the Indian subcontinent circa 1850-1930. When combined with works of art, these terms can act as lenses that allow one to reflect on how institutions have arrived at their authoritative usage in historically specific contexts.
On the one hand, the aim of the seminar is to provide an overview of the art, craft, and design styles with examples from today’s museum and archival collections, including Berlin’s. On the other hand, it is to question together the terminology and the layers of meanings that such terms have collected over the years with their repetitive occurrences in archival records, museum collections, markets, and art worlds, especially in the context of the subcontinent’s colonial history.
In addition to this, students will also get a chance to discuss the ‘burden of representation’ carried by these terms (and the contexts) that force some presumptions to fall out of rigid analytical frames and approaches of canonical art history. This course can be a starting point for students who would like to develop a nuanced understanding of what may seem like a universal diction of art history. Students will identify contexts and artworks that move away from the canon to reveal a different hierarchy of meanings, political structures, and multiple factors that inform art-making and aesthetics in a changing world.
This seminar is offered entirely in English.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Tanya Talwar