Developmental Dilemmas
Three recent volumes on the economic, infrastructural, and international networks of modernism reveal the extent to which notions of development have shaped the trajectory of modernist art practice outside the Western world, and Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (2022) considers how efforts by the Turkish state to join the new global political economy in the 1950s prompted artists and art administrators to synthesize the language of economic development into artistic discourse and institutional infrastructure. Devika Singh’s International Departures: Art in India After Independence (2024) situates modernist artistic practice in India in the Nehruvian decades, wherein the state’s developmental aspirations led to major upheavals and connections across international networks. Karin Zitzewitz’s Infrastructure and Form: The Global Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008 (2022) examines an efflorescence of Indian contemporary art between economic liberalization in 1991 through the 2008 global financial crisis, marking shifts in the production, circulation, and discourse of art through a wide-ranging array of examples. Each of these texts move away from art history’s fixation with self-contained nationalist histories toward a more critical apprehension of how relations between the state and international non-state actors within international political economy shaped the trajectory of visual art. The review considers how the authors combine sociopolitical discourse and economic changes with formal examinations of specific artworks in their local, national, and international contexts and addresses the importance of institution-building and the processes of legitimization for these authors’ arguments.
ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 65-77.
doi:10.1162/artm_a_00386
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/2/65/122634/Developmental-Dilemmas
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