Kristensen, J C ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2855-8746 and Potter, Laura (2024) The Drowned Book. [Artefact]

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Abstract

The Drowned Book is a set of three large digital prints of images made from a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminal work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).

In 1913, Wittgenstein constructed his wooden hut on a steep rock face over Eidsvatnet Lake in the Luster municipality of Vestland, Norway. It was whilst living in this perched precariously home that the philosopher first began to conceive of the work that later became the Tractatus.

In the summer of 2024, J C Kristensen and Laura Potter made a pilgrimage to the hut, taking with them a copy of Wittgenstein’s book, to return it to the place of its birth. Re-baptising it, they drowned the book in the lake for seven hours, an hour for each of the seven propositions about how the world is, as described by the philosopher.

The three prints are: an image of the end of the drowned book, after it had been curled into a circular form, which resembles a tree slice or maybe, perhaps, the world itself; an image of an individual page of the drowned book, capturing the layering of propositions and arguments through the sodden pages, exposing the multi-layering of any claim of how the world is; and an image of the book end, scaled at a distance against a black background, almost within touch, but hovering like a planet in the night's sky.

As the philosopher Catherine Malabou notes, “Destruction has its own sculpting tools”.

Item Type:	Artefact
Additional Information:	This work is part of a larger project called The Coral Notes.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, philosophy, book arts, artwork
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > NE Print media
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Design (DES)
Related URLs:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/49909
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2025 16:09
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/49911

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