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The present collection, put
together by Geoff Dyer from a large body of his writings, once
again revives our faith in the lasting value of Berger’s art
criticism. Apart from his favourite painters Matisse, Leger,
Picasso and Kandinsky, there are here short assessments of poets
and writers as well as of sculptors, architects, museums and
photographers. The one motif running through them all is the
close connection between artistic pre-eminence and social
awareness. The Yeatsian difference between ‘perfection of work
or perfection of man’ becomes problematic in his writing.
Explaining the
title of Shape of a Pocket , Berger notes that ‘A
pocket is formed when two or more people come together in
agreement…the reader, me and those the essays are about’. It
is not necessary, though, that they all agree. But meaning
emerges through their dynamic interaction, enhancing our
awareness of our own potentiality.
There is always
a resistance to the existing order in an artist, says Berger.
The aim of the critic, then, is to record the points of
resistance in the subjects of study and show how these points
confer relevance to a work. Selected Essays is just this
evolving record of the ways in which Berger’s artists, viewers
and readers come together in pursuit of the meaning of the
artwork. Fernand Leger, peeking invisibly from behind Berger’s
writing, would call it the creation of an ensemble.
In an essay ‘Painting
a Landscape’ Berger remarks: "The marks on the canvas
must have a life of their own…Given the artist’s ability to
include his own work as part of the reality he is studying—the
image will act as a metaphor". It is as a metaphor that art
encompasses various stretches of our experience. This is why a
painting ‘interprets the world in its own language…Photography
has no language of its own’ (‘Understanding a Photograph’).
Berger
celebrates Fernand Leger not because he deals with robots, but
because he is socially conscious. Picasso, on the other hand,
‘does not belong to the twentieth century’ world of cities,
workers at work and circus acrobats. ‘It is in the use to
which he puts his temperament that Picasso is a modern man. (‘Fernand
Leger’).
This is Berger’s
way of discriminating between two towering painters and
sculptors. Many essays in the present collection depend on the
integration of the contingency of his own experience and the
historical moment of the artwork under scrutiny. He moves
everywhere with a sense of greater design and larger purpose,
which accounts for the comprehensive scope of his observations.
In the essay on Ulysses
this integration is seen at work. He notices Joyce’s penchant
‘for the lowly’: ‘He listened to their pains, their
stomachs, their tumescences…the more carefully he listened…the
richer became life’s offering…he showed me that literature
is inimicable to all hierarchies and to separate fact and
imagination is to stay on dry land and never put to sea’. In
his own criticism of artists and writers, Berger never forgot
this Joycean revelation.Berger has made forceful use of the
essay form to provide him a flexibility of argument not
available in a tawdry academic discussion. In his hands the
essay becomes a medium of exploration cutting across rigid
ideological positions. An early forerunner of cultural studies,
he uses the essay to reach a larger readership, At 75, he is
still our man.
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IN
my undergraduate days in the 1950s, I used to avidly read John
Berger and V.S.Pritchet in the columns of New Statesman.
Berger looked at paintings with a wide-ranging social
conscience informed by Marxism. Pritchet revelled in the
formal qualities of novels and other literary genres. As they
matured, both became exceptionally good essayists and wrote
novels of considerable merit. Berger’s novel, G, won
the Booker Prize.
