“Everything He Touched”: The Art of Melancholizing
Anchored in a luminous work, Bangalore-based Ravi Kumar Kashi’s Artist Book: Everything He Touched (2011-2012), this paper explores what I call the art of aparigraha that has emerged around the paltry possessions of Mahatma Gandhi enshrined especially in museums and memorials across the nation. Conceptually, I draw upon material culture studies to understand the modern and contemporary artist’s fascination with these mundane objects which come to be aestheticized on paper, canvas, and in installation works, as I also explore the productive potential of what Robert Burton many centuries ago named “melancholizing.”
Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies, and Chair of the Department of History at Duke University. Her most recent monograph is Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is working on a book on the shifting contours of educational philanthropy in colonial and modern India, and on a collaborative digital humanities project titled “No Parallel? The Fatherly Bodies of Gandhi and Mao.” A work of public scholarship titled Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience is forthcoming in 2020.
Anchored in a luminous work, Bangalore-based Ravi Kumar Kashi’s Artist Book: Everything He Touched (2011-2012), this paper explores what I call the art of aparigraha that has emerged around the paltry possessions of Mahatma Gandhi enshrined especially in museums and memorials across the nation. Conceptually, I draw upon material culture studies to understand the modern and contemporary artist’s fascination with these mundane objects which come to be aestheticized on paper, canvas, and in installation works, as I also explore the productive potential of what Robert Burton many centuries ago named “melancholizing.”
Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies, and Chair of the Department of History at Duke University. Her most recent monograph is Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is working on a book on the shifting contours of educational philanthropy in colonial and modern India, and on a collaborative digital humanities project titled “No Parallel? The Fatherly Bodies of Gandhi and Mao.” A work of public scholarship titled Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience is forthcoming in 2020.