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Imagine a multimedia art history class taught by a witty professor who seems to have read everything, been everywhere, forgotten nothing and remains thrilled by the joy of intellectual adventures.
That's what it's like to read Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. The author is Lawrence Weschler, an art historian, journalist and cultural observer.
The handsomely illustrated book collects 30 essays Weschler wrote during the past 20 years for magazines, including The New Yorker and McSweeney's.
All deal with connections between seemingly disparate photographs and works of art. Weschler describes them as "uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections -- sometimes in the weirdest places."
A nighttime photograph of rescue workers in the smoking bowels of the ruins of the World Trade Center is juxtaposed with Rembrandt's similarly lit 1642 painting of soldiers, The Night Watch.
The photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, says of the scene: "The quality of the glowing light in the center, the assembled men, the kind of smoky background, all the hardware of destruction of it gave me the feeling of those lances and curtains and all that heraldry (painted by Rembrandt). It was a gut reaction. Although I couldn't call up the painting exactly, I just knew this grand assemblage was a powerful image."
Weschler offers fresh ways to look at images, from Vermeer to Jackson Pollock, from a Mona Lisa-like Monica Lewinsky to the graphic logo of Solidarity, the Polish workers' movement.
He deals with the art of politics and the politics of art. Some connections seem like coincidences, seized on to make political points, such as the resemblance between Newt Gingrich, the former Republican congressional leader, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian dictator, two "Pillsbury Doughboy Messiahs."
At his best, Weschler provokes readers with questions. He's erudite yet readable.
He credits John Berger's essay The Look of Things. It linked a 1967 photograph of the half-naked body of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on public display, surrounded by his captors, with Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson.
Weschler concluded "that's undoubtedly the image (hot-wired, as it were, into all of their brains) that taught all of the strutting officers how to pose in relation to their prize, and taught the photographer where to plant his camera."
Weschler was wowed by Berger: "This guy doesn't read his morning newspaper the way I or anybody else I know reads the morning newspaper." You may not either after reading Everything That Rises.
Everything That Rises
By Lawrence Weschler
McSweeney's, 237 pp., $29
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