Week 4 Seminar: Painting and silence

Putting Ni Zan's blank silk next to Cage's rest --- do two disciplines' favourite omissions actually argue the same thing?

17 March 2027

Before the seminar#

Read the two set lectures back to back and write down, in one sentence each, what the blank silk is doing and what the musical rest is doing. Bring both sentences on paper — you’ll be asked to defend the difference between them, not just the similarity.

In the seminar#

We put a projected scroll detail next to a recording of a rest-heavy passage and argue the comparison directly: is “leaving it blank” and “leaving it silent” the same move in two media, or does the visual field’s simultaneity (you see the whole blank at once) make it a different kind of omission from the rest’s sequential one (you wait through it)? Half the room argues each side, then swaps.

Afterwards#

Add at least one entry to your Commonplace Book from a discipline neither the painting nor the music lecture covered — the point of this week is testing whether the pattern generalises past the two cases we handed you.