A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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From Da Vinci
to Duchamp, by Way
of Russia.
By Lawrence Weschler
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Leonardo da Vinci, cartoon of The Virgin and Child
With St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500)
On a recent visit to the National Gallery in London, I was struck speechless, as one is wont to be, happening upon the great Leonardo cartoon of The Virgin and Child With St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a drawing I've always somehow prized more than the painting it eventually led to, and, for that matter, more than just about any other drawing I can think of. After having spent several minutes in its thrall—especially, for some reason this time around, in thrall to the play of lines and forms, of charcoal and chalk, in the area around the intermeshing laps of the Virgin and the Saint—I gradually pulled away.
And, pulling away, I found myself thinking about Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which, I'd be the first to grant, even for someone as loose-synapsed as me, seems a bit of a stretch.
Later that afternoon, couched in a nearby café, I returned wonderingly to that strange splay of associations, and I suddenly realized what had been transpiring. For, the evening before, I'd happened to be browsing (or is the right word "grazing"?) around Geoff Manaugh's splendid BLDGBLOG website, when I happened upon an entry on the genius contemporary Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko, a name previously unknown to me (which surely says more about me than him). One picture in particular had been haunting me since, a time-lapse smear of a crowd scene from his City of Shadows series (1992–94):
Talk about the pencil of nature! The way people swarming over entry stairs themselves take on the aspect of a repeatedly scrumbled and endlessly worked-over drawing, the drawing, say, of an intermeshing pair of laps. I doubt Titarenko was himself referencing da Vinci's drawing (even though another rhyme comes with the four Cyrillic letters above the entry door in his photo, which recall the four figures in the da Vinci drawing: the two women and the two infants, with St. Anne's hand, like the triangle in the photo, pointing upward). If anything, he was likely riffing off of Eisenstein's Odessa Steps.
A still from the Odessa Steps sequence in
Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin
But if you want to see how I'd gotten from da Vinci to Duchamp, consider a couple of other images from Titarenko's City of Shadows series. I've included them below, creating the entire series of associations:
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
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For more on Alexey Titarenko, visit his website at www.alexeytitarenko.com.
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OTHER WINNERS.
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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
Cameras, Action! From Disney World to St. Peter's Square, the Mediative Flight From the Immediate by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 6
Convergent Postscripts by Lawrence Weschler
From Da Vinci to Duchamp, by Way of Russia by Lawrence Weschler
Venus on a Vespa, Berger on My Mind by Lawrence Weschler
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