Abstract
In 1875, John Lockwood Kipling, the founding principal of the Mayo School
of Arts, Lahore, devised a curriculum for imparting craft training to artisans in
Punjab. He borrowed theoretical assumptions from German natural philosophy
which was already incorporated in the curriculum of design education in
nineteenth-century England. Strongly influenced by James Mill’s Utilitarian ideas
and German philosophy, English art administrators institutionalised the design
pedagogy under the auspices of the Department of Science and Art set up in South
Kensington, London. The department owned its establishment and achievements
to Henry Cole’s perseverance. Inclusion of philosophical assumptions about
nature, geometry, science and beauty in the curriculum led to the emergence of a
new category, designer, which was supposed to focus on design, utility and
marketability of industrial production. Artisan was supposed to assume this new
role of designer by acquiring proficiency in reproducing designs from nature along
with considering the demands in the market and by developing knowledge of
machine. In this way, handicrafts could be replaced with mechanical production of
commodities. The basic question of this article is how did capitalist interests
define value of objects? By considering this question from Marxist point of view, I
trace the genealogy of art instruction in colonial Lahore by studying the
development of design pedagogy in nineteenth-century England.
Hussain Ahmad Khan. (2015) Tracing the Genealogy of Art Instruction in Colonial Lahore: German Philosophy, Design Pedagogy and Nineteenth-Century England, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, Volume 52, Issue 2.
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