“It is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don’t want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions, because these are the things that give meaning to our lives…. If we want to understand the future, we must decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
21 grams is the weight of a human soul. Or so said Dr. Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Massachusetts, who in 1907 published the results of a study he conducted on six patients, measuring their mass just prior to and after death. While the loss of 21.3 grams in weight was documented in only one subject, MacDougall’s hypothesis gained traction outside the scientific community, eventually generating a host of movie and book titles while affirming for some the notion that an ephemeral idea—a belief in the unknown and unknowable—can be quantified, fixed, and felt. Sculpted 110 years later, Gehard Demetz’s 21 Grams presents a hybrid figure of a young boy merging with the elephantine form of the Hindu deity, Ganesh, god of good fortune, new beginnings, and the remover of obstacles. Here, however, the boy’s forehead is pierced through with a scepter-like rod; the divine presence is potentially both destroyer and protector. Demetz’s work consistently depicts children suffering from the psychological inheritance of the feelings, beliefs, and actions of their elders.
