A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Contest Winner No. 40.
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Vegetable Matters
Submitted by Eli Horowitz
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Young Eli himself, the Master Magus presiding over all things McSweeneyian, deigns to join us this week in the Contest pit, pointing us here, suggesting that we, "Look at this: It's not exactly a convergence, but it's ... something."
And indeed it is. One really should explore the entire site, but even just a sampling of the deliciously daft creations proffered forth by the artist in question, one Ms. Ju Duoqi (born 1973 in Chongqing, a 1996 graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, since then a website and computer game designer) will reveal the sheer over-the-top something-or-otherness of the project in question, "The Vegetable Museum," as she terms it. To wit, for example:
Liberty Leading the Vegetables
The Raft of the Lotus Roots
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Pickled Cabbage
Third of May 2008
Van Gogh Made of Leek
Picasso with Onion and Noodles
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WESCHLER RESPONDS.
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Okay, well obviously the first association is to the corpus, as it were, of the divine Giuseppe Arcimboldo (ca. 1527-1593), master painter in the courts, successively, of the Hapsburg king Ferdinand I in Vienna, Maximilian II and his son Rudolph II in Prague, and Augustus of Saxony. His conventional work, mainly on religious subjects, has pretty much fallen into oblivion, but the stuff he was doing on the side ... Well, you get the idea:
The Water
Spring
Summer
Autumn
Winter
Souren Melikian focused his New York Times review of the big 2006-7 Arcimboldo retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris on the question of whether Arcimboldo was himself quite mad or merely catered cannily to the madness of his times, "the passion for weirdness," as Melikian delicately parses the matter, that engulfed "the Habsburg Court during the second half of the 16th century." And I suppose one could ask a similar question of Ms. Ju. Though Melikian's stark alternatives seem a bit pinched. Far be it from us here at the Contest, at any rate, to question the sanity of any other convergence-besotted artisans. Or their fans.
Somewhat more intriguing, in the case of Ms. Ju's project, is the question of just how she does it. The Artist's note that accompanies her web museum, cited above, suggests that she spends a lot of time in vegetable markets and then a lot more time back home in a sort of legume-and-toothpick frenzy. After which she photographs the results. A close look at those results, however, suggests that there may be a good deal of photoshopping involved as well. Or perhaps not. Hard to tell.
But that very question in turn leads us back to another earlier such instance, the case that is of Arcimboldo's Spanish contemporary Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), who worked in a somewhat more traditional still-life style, as for instance in hauntingly balanced masterpieces like these:
Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber
Still Life With Game Fowl
The thing that's in turn interesting about Cotán, especially in the context of Ms. Ju and this question as to whether or not she is photoshopping, is that the Spanish master's work has become a key instance in David Hockney's argument that all sorts of Old Masters were effectively photoshopping, or at any rate splicing and dicing imagery with the aid of optical devices such as lenses, curved mirrors, prisms, and camera-obscura style holes in walls, long before the invention of chemical fixatives in 1839. (See Hockney's 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, pp. 106-7, and my own summary of same in my 2008 book of conversations with Hockney, True to Life, pp. 115-87). Hockney's commentary on the two Cotán paintings above runs as follows:
Juan Sánchez Cotán painted this still life in 1602. The setting itself − a small window with a ledge − suggests our hole-in-the-wall technique, as does the lighting. How long would the cabbage look like that with such a strong light on it? How long would the cut melon stay like that without decaying? Not very long, that's for sure, certainly not long enough for Cotán to have eyeballed it so precisely. Cotán's is a beautiful painting with a lovely, satisfying, yet simple composition. The curve formed by the objects has been commented on before, and sometimes given a religious interpretation. But I would suggest that the objects are all on the same plane because of the depth-of-field problems I discussed and illustrated earlier. And now look at the second version of Cotán's still life, also painted in 1602. The composition is identical except for the addition of game and the vegetable in the bottom-left corner. The quince, cabbage, melon and cucumber are all in exactly the same place as is the first version. Could Cotán have used his mirror-lens as an epidiascope to make this copy, as I think van Eyck had done with the portrait of Cardinal Albergati almost two centuries earlier?
And, as if to bring Hockney's conjecture right up to the moment, all sorts of funny business begins to occur when you take to Google-image-surfing for Cotán images these days, because things like these keep cropping up:
Bodegon con paquetes, Homenaje a Sánchez Cotán
by Claudio Bravo, 1966
Pomegranate
By Ori Gersht
And perhaps most tellingly (or at any rate we suspect that this is what many of you usually start suspecting about us around this point in these postings), this one here:
Juan Sánchez Cotán. Still Life with Bong c. 1602 (?)
Posted by Hermann Wundrum
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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
39. Eggs and Bacon by Rosamond Purcell
40. Vegetable Matters by Eli Horowitz
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