Crafting a National Identity in an International Market: A Diplomatic Coup: The Golden Eye Exhibition, 1985

Crafting a National Identity in an International Market

26 February, 2025 -

A key moment in Indian design history: the Golden Eye exhibition was conceptualised in India and mounted at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York in 1985. This exhibition marked the beginning of two critical developments, the Indian government’s support for design and the designer–artisan alliance.

This exhibition was a link between the past, the present, and the future of design in India. It was mounted twenty years after the posthumous exhibition on Nehru, and was followed by a lull of twenty years in the design and craft industries, during which time the limited-edition furniture design market was in its nascent stage. In this exhibition, the featured designers were Western and the craftspeople Indian.

In the latter part of the Cold War, America viewed India as a dichotomous place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. ‘The U.S. sought to push India to continue its slow opening to global markets (and to move away from the Soviets).’(1) This brought about diplomatic exchanges between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan in 1982, the result of which set up the Festival of India. The Festival comprised 215 Indian-related events in the US.(2) It marked the beginning of America’s efforts to strengthen India’s move into the open markets. One of the most significant outcomes of the Festival was the Golden Eye exhibition as an initiative by the Indian Government to promote handicrafts, future economic exchange, and collaborative commercial entrepreneurship (Fig. 01).

This exhibition could not have been more timely, as the 1980s saw a return to craft in contemporary art circles, emphasising both process and material, as well as new museums of craft opening across the world, including North America and India. ‘It’s a perfect moment for India to cash in, to change existing prejudices about India in the western world and to signal a new era of Indo-American cooperation and exchange.’(3)

Eleven of the world’s leading designers and architects participated in this collaboration: Sir Hugh Casson, Frei Otto, Ettore Sottsass, Mario Bellini, Jack Lenor Larsen, Bernard Rudofsky, Mary McFadden, Charles Moore, Hans Hollein, Ivan Chermayeff, and Milton Glaser. Each used a chosen traditional Indian craft with an expert Indian master artisan to create exclusive handmade objects. It was a well-known fact that these elite designer participants were old India enthusiasts. The landscape of India in the 1980s, was a semi-industrial nation and ensconced within a largely pre-industrial social strata.

It is important to note that an international collaboration such as this exhibition presented the potential for Indian handicrafts to contribute to the development of international trade, trade that might go on to preserve these very crafts. ‘This innovative exhibition brought business to bear on cultural diplomacy and challenged the ostensible independence of art and museums from both economics and politics’.(4)

The designers produced ideas and designs using Indian crafts and skills but aimed at suiting Western tastes. ‘The Golden Eye designers were therefore tasked to bridge that old chestnut of a discontinuity: between the sensibility of industrial design and non-industrial modes of production.’(5) Some of the craftspeople were taken to New York, where they sat alongside the objects in the classic tradition of nineteenth-century world exhibitions
(Fig. 02).

Prototypes ranged from pieces of art, utility pieces, furniture and architectural components, fabrics, and several items of daily use. ‘All the Golden Eye objects strongly repudiate functionalist determination. What prevails instead is a hybrid array of motifs, techniques, materials, signatures and fancies.’(6) These objects showcased a reversal of Modernism because of their departure from function and being embodiments of the unusual and unplanned.

The objects were influenced by an eclectic mix of the past and the present. While there was a contemporary approach in Sottsass’ designing, Hugh Casson used a Victorian style. His objects were suggestive of the nineteenth century penchant for using patterns as infill panels between structural elements. The canopy bed (Fig. 03) is reminiscent of exhibitions mounted in British Empire times, when Indian craft was the highlight of the show. For 1985, this was opulent and ornate and possibly not an accurate reflection of India at the time. It was also far removed from the ‘international and industrial’ vision that the independent nation was aspiring towards.

‘These designers travelled to India to meet and work with their counterparts there, and then developed the designs in part with an eye to future collaboration and ongoing relationships with the manufacturers in India. However, after the exhibition, these objects were not manufactured for sale.’(7)

While Casson created an ornate object in keeping with the traditional use of craft in India, Mario Bellini contemporised craft by designing objects that had a more Western appeal (Fig. 04). It was the ideal fusion of this type, where Rajasthani marble carvers were used to produce a piece that would have fitted seamlessly into an exhibition of contemporary Italian design. Bellini’s second object for the show was also a bench. His use of craft was like that of Sottsass, a reworking of its traditional use.

The show made international news with newspapers reporting it widely and designers praising the collaboration of the East and the West, though some writers criticised it too. Singanapalli Balaram, a designer and teacher at the NID working on innovative design to help India at a grassroots level, described how Sottsass, Bellini, and other such celebrity designers were brought to India to work on traditional Indian crafts with master craftsmen to create exclusive objects. He suggested that unfortunately the project did not help the craftsmen or the craft situation in the country.(8)

Tariq Kathwari, one of the artisans who worked at the exhibition, asked why no Indian designers were included in the project - why India could not do this itself.(9) He thus acknowledges the quality of authentic and pure craft and notes its continual appropriation by foreign visionaries. This is a critical comment on the domination of Indian politics by others at a fundamental level, and further on the Western hegemony in cultural discourses.

The essence of this exhibition lay in its integration between the creativity of the designer and the competence of the artisan. The designers and the craftspeople who worked on this exhibition found a balance between the past and the present, as well as respect for the inheritors of that past, the artisans. It marked the beginning of the designer-artisan alliance, an alliance that the contemporary limited-edition Indian furniture design market has evolved to exemplify.

References
(1) Rebecca M. Brown, Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017, p.6.
(2) Ibid.
(3) S. K. Mishra, director-general of the Festivals of India, quoted in India Today (15 June 1985) in Arindam Datta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty : Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility. New York: Routledge, 2007, p.275.
(4) Brown, Displaying Time, p.15.
(5) Datta in Pavitt and Adamson, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, p.273.
(6) Arindam Datta in Pavitt and Adamson, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, p.273.
(7) Brown, Displaying Time, p.15.
(8) Singanapalli Balaram, Thinking Design. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010, pp.56-57.
(9) Brown, Displaying Time, p.88.