Notes from class

The Saturday class of the weekend intensive discussing Wittgenstein was informative and interesting. I was particularly struck by how some of my fellow class participants enacted a 10-minute challenge to respond to his notion of grammatical disruption in their art. The phrase given us to work with was: Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is.

Marie, whose focus is dance, demonstrated with the aid of a photo of her office hallway and furniture from another room the possibility of framing the stage setting differently from what audiences may typically expect, as a means of disrupting and therefore heightening the attention and curiosity of her audience.

Tine presented a fascinating photo of a dinner table with chairs in a dining-room with large glass windows. The disruption was subtle and could easily have been missed. Though there were the usual amount of chairs, no one was seated, and there was one wine glass and one dish, both turned upside down. That of course raises the question, why only one of each item, since the table obviously accommodates six or more people. At the same time, the eerie stillness of the photo, depicting the window facing the viewer from the far end, was carefully composed so that the lines in the photo, including the table's edges, direct one's attention unerringly to the window. But there were no curtains to cover it and prevent outsiders from looking in, no outsiders looking in nor occupants looking out, which makes one wonder about the significance of the window to the story. Perhaps meant to convey, as the others in the class suggested, that the world within that photo is circumscribed by the dining-room, so that the world beyond it, as depicted by the window, is irrelevant. No one has ever looked in nor out since all that exists is that lonely dinner setting.

My own response was to play on the words in the challenge: Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is

Below was my response given to the class:

Grammar tells us what object is (subject predicate object)

“[I] kind of object”: Anything grammar tells us? (Meaning there clearly is something else going on in this statement besides a straight up objection to something, as indicated by "kind of".)