Course Description
This course emphasises the relationship between art/craft, communicative strategies, body and objects. The course material is organized according to themes; each theme is discussed from multiple perspectives complemented by different scholarly approaches to analysing some of the key concerns in art historical literature. The readings and assignments are aimed at strengthening the skillset to present and write about art.
Students are required to read the assigned readings every week. Alongside, students may choose an area/topic related to their doctoral thesis, which will be developed through a hands-on/practical approach over the semester.
Course Content
Module 1
The Bridge: Seeing and Feeling
Michael Baxandall, “Language and Explanation,” and “The Historical Object,” in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 1-11, 12-40.
Mark Paterson, “Learning to See, Describing how to Feel: A ‘Felt’ Phenomenology,” in The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technology (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 15-35.
Module 2
Communication and Writing
Elizabeth Hill Boone, “When Art Is Writing and Writing, Art: Graphic Communication in Preconquest Mexico,” Studies in the History of Art 74 (2009): 56-71.
James Elkins, “The Conditions Under Which Global Art History is Studied,” and “Finding Terms ad Methods for Art History,” in The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021), 17-38 and 153-64.
Module 3
Skill, Knowledge and Communication
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pages: 17-70.
Glenn Adamson, “Skilled,” in Thinking Through Craft (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 69-102.
Pamela Smith, project: Making and Knowing (https://www.makingandknowing.org/)
Module 4
The Hand
David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Herbert Press, 1968).
K. G. Subramanyan, Do Hands Have a Chance? (Calcutta: Seagull, 2014).
Module 5
Communication, Community
David Howes, “Making Sense in Anthropology,” in Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1-59.
Sarah Pink, “Principles for Sensory Ethnography: Perception, Place, Knowing, Memory and Imagination,” in Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: Sage, 2012), 23-43.
Module 6
Art objects in Communication
Richard Davis, “Indian Art Objects as Loot,” The Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 1 (1993): 22-48.
Finbarr Barry Flood, “Cultural Cross Dressing,” in Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter” (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 61-87.
Natasha Eaton, “Introduction: A Painter Painting a Painter Painting,” in Mimesis Across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765-1860 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 1-17.
Module 7
Patterns
Wendy M. K. Shaw, “Seeing With the Ear,” and “Insufficient Image,” in What is 'Islamic' Art?: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 57-78, and 79-103.
Carol Bier, “Patterns in Time and Space: Technologies of Transfer and the Cultural Transmission of Mathematical Knowledge across the Indian Ocean,” Ars Orientalis 34 (2004): 172-94.
Module 8
Nationalism, Curation and Communication
Paul Greenough, “Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi,” in Consuming Modernity : Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 216-48.
Alice Tilche, “Tribal Art, Museums, and the Indian Nation,” and “Curating the Home, the Body, and the Landscape,” in Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022), 27-50, and 145-62.