Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India

摘要

Over twenty years ago, Dennis Doordan issued a call to arms, arguing that 'A history of design that fails to pay attention to the effects of time misses a crucial dimension of experience'.1 The objective of Doordan's project, and that of other scholarship on the relationship between time and design, has been to revise the claims of modern design writers who suggest that the present can be separated from the past, or that a linear, forward-moving model of time is the sole driver of our existence.2 In Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India, Rebecca M. Brown attends to and moves beyond this critique to focus our attention on the small, layered temporalities that occurred during the US Festival of India, 1985-1986. She focuses on temporality in the production and consumption of some of the exhibitions that contributed to the multi-sited mega-festival in which almost 800 India-related activities were held across the USA. In doing so, Brown demonstrates precisely how important time is to our understanding of the designed world, responding to Doordan's demands in fresh and convincing ways. Like the other festivals of India that took place around the world in the 1980s, the US event was designed to foster diplomatic and economic ties between India and the host country. However, as Brown suggests, paying close attention to small-scale temporalities permits us access to the fragmented, rich texture of such events, allowing us to view them anew.