A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
- - - -
For more information
about this contest,
click here.
- - - -
A Pair of
Convergences
Off of Tina Barney.
- - - -
Here are two letters from readers of Everything That Rises, both of whom were responding to the "Fathers and Daughters" piece, in which Weschler riffs off a suite of photographs by Tina Barney of the same father and daughter, Peter and Marina. The Barney photographs below are from 1987 and 1997, respectively.
- - - -
Letter 1:
From Whitney Sander.
- - - -
By now I am sure you have seen this association (between the Barney photo and Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, from 1863). I thought of it immediately on cracking Weschler's book and seeing these luscious photos. The man's pose and gesture were the reminders to me, and the girl's innocence, and the figure behind. Though the father (in the Barney) is hardly a lunch companion to fully unclothed hauteur, the power relationships in both are compelling. The figures behind in each (hypothetical nonobserver) seals the deal for me. This passivity behind, the attention elsewhere, only brings the front relationships further forward.
- - - -
Letter 2:
From Laura Myers.
- - - -
I was walking through a bookstore today and this card (John Singer Sargent's Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, circa 1892–93) jumped out at me as the great-grandmother of the Tina Barney girl on page 88. Check out the pink sash and the pink canopy over the bed. The white bedding and the white dress. The looks on their faces are the same!
- - - -
Weschler Responds.
- - - -
Aren't those amazing? The question, of course, being, what are we to make of the rhyme: intentional or not, and does it matter?
In the case of the former, we know that Manet himself was quite self-consciously bounding off of the marvelously evocative (and yet endlessly elusive) Concert champêtre (1508–9) by Giorgione (though some attribute it to Titian), in which the artist appears to have been making some sort of allusion to the muses and their minions.
Manet, for his own part, translated the scene to the present, causing a considerable scandale (and getting the piece rejected at that year's Salon), even though, when you think about it, Giorgione/Titian's figures had likewise been garbed in then-contemporary dress, and nobody seemed to mind then.
The question is whether Barney had Manet in mind when composing the photo at hand, or, at any rate, when picking this vantage in particular rather than any of the others from that day's shoot. As it happens, I was able to ask her and she insisted absolutely not, the rhyme hadn't even occurred to her, and she still couldn't quite see it. And Tina Barney is an honorable source ... Still, the rhymes do just keep on rebounding: the canopy of the bed and the canopy of the leaves; the overbrimming hat and the overbrimming basket—for that matter, the one hat and the other; the closet and the pond both pushing back into further space there at the center; the horizontality of the canvases, both of them banded by those repeating verticals ...
I don't know.
As for the other, again, yes, look at that. Exactly the same look on their faces, a look that I would describe—and in fact did describe—as "self-assured, ironical, a drowsy-lidded gaze freighted with entendres and double entendres," and one which, now, seeing the Barney alongside the Sargent, I realize is quite simply a look of sublime entitlement, of high bourgeois (yes, that word again) hauteur.
"Ah," sighed Talleyrand, "nobody who wasn't alive then will ever know the sweetness of life (la douceur de la vie) before the Revolution."
- - - -
WINNERS.
- - - -
1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
MORE ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT RISES
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.