An Aesthetics of Production

“Chapter 3: An Aesthetics of Production” evaluates how the category of craft anchored the proposal of an anticolonial revision to the North Atlantic–centric art canon in the early iterations of the Bienal, subverting taxonomies that historically facilitated the exclusion of artists in other world regions from the spaces of artistic legitimization. The biennial conversions at place within this effort helped reformulate socialist aesthetics and show how, despite their shared efforts to group diverse artistic genealogies in regional art categories, not all early-boom biennials necessarily embraced neoliberal globalization, but some helped imagine an internationalism of the subaltern instead.