How Things Still Matter

Bhrigupati Singh presides over a conversation between Martand Khosla’s 1: 2500 and Jessica Stockholder’s Stuff Matters.

- Bhrigupati Singh

It feels like democracy is transitioning into some other state. The countervailing forces have almost no remaining institutional anchor. For a moment let us not give this spiral here and elsewhere a name or a direction. We may not yet know how to a name a political value higher than democracy, brutally defined, with increasing degrees of brutality, as the rule of the majority. And what is the opposite of brutality? It is not fully clear. So let us think aloud across our respective domains. Is it still possible to think in a minor key? Thinking, we might say, is partly a luxury; call it an activity for those not yet beheaded. The head though is not the only organ of thought. Where else is thought crafted? Let us say that galleries are one among such spaces of craft, partly but not only beholden to their patrons, sharing with universities the relatively abstract task of bildung, a continuing education, what some philosophers call a sentimental education. What is currently occurring in such spaces, in the shaping of materials and sentiments?

In this essay, I want to consider a resonant thought process, in two art events that occurred roughly simultaneously in mid-2019, Martand Khosla’s 1: 2500 at Nature Morte (Delhi) and Jessica Stockholder’s Stuff