SEMINAR: THE NATURE OF LANDSCAPE
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09 Apr
30 Apr
2021
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Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory (ACT)
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Kajri Jain
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This series of four seminars on ‘The Nature of Landscape’ with Prof. Kajri Jain is aimed at those students interested in participating in an intensive, postgraduate, proactive classroom environment. Reading the assigned texts before each class, including looking up basic background on their authors, will be essential. Prof. Jain will introduce the materials and topics, but not lecture extensively. She will guide our discussion on the subject, helping us navigate and interrogate new ideas and images together.
What is a “landscape”? To address this question, as this seminar does, is to think about how this category emerged as part of European ideas about something called “nature” and its relationship to human subjectivity. Here landscape became a way of seeing as a way of knowing: in particular as a way of understanding land as property and as a resource, as well as a reflection of human emotions and a way of engaging questions of existence. In order to “provincialise” these ways of seeing/understanding – that is, to identify how they emerged within a very particular set of historical, geographical, cultural, political, and economic contexts that nonetheless came to claim universality – we will compare Western landscape painting traditions with visual forms from other traditions that might be seen as akin to landscapes. These include South and East Asian traditions, as well as Indigenous art from India, North America, and Australia; seminar participants are encouraged to bring their own specific interests to the table. Understanding the genealogies of “landscape” through scholarship in art history, anthropology, history, and geography will equip us for a more globally oriented and critical approach to those strands of modern and contemporary art concerned with the environment and our existence in the geological age recently dubbed the Anthropocene.
Very Limited seats are available. Hence to register, email: ACT Course Director alisha@jp-india.org and JPM Admin info@jp-india.org
Duration -
April 9, 16, 23, 30, 2021
Timing: 6:30 - 9:00 PM IST
Fees
Rs. 4,000
Registrations Closed
Kajri Jain
Kajri Jain is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on images at the intersections between art, religion, politics, and vernacular business cultures in modern and contemporary India; she also writes on contemporary art. Jain’s latest book Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021) traces the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in post-liberalization India; Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007) is about printed icons. Her current book project, tentatively titled Nature in the Time of the Gods, investigates vernacular ideas of nature in India’s public parks. This will complete a trilogy on public images in modern India. Jain’s work is interdisciplinary, appearing most recently in Art History, Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Third Text, Current Anthropology, The Immanent Frame, and numerous edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (forthcoming), How Secular is Art? On The Art of Art History in South Asia (Cambridge 2023), Concepts: A Travelogue (Bloomsbury 2023), The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st Century (Penguin 2022), and Capitalism and the Camera (Verso 2021).