I love my John Berger, even if he's a funny mix of progressive thinking and old fashionedness and romanticizing. In this collection, the pieces are primarily about art, and I find them evocative.From "Opening a Gate": "Our customary visible order is not the only one: it coexists with other orders. Stories of fairies, sprites, ogres were a human attempt to come to terms with this coexistence. Hunters are continually aware of it and so can read signs we do not see. Children feel it intuitively, because they have the habit of hiding behind things. There they discover the interstices between different sets of the visible.Dogs. . . are the natural frontier experts of these interstices. Their eyes, whose message often confuses us for it is urgent and mute, are attuned boh to the human order and to other visible orders."From "Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible": "Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparant from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system's mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, an appetite for more.""When a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start. He stays at a copying distance. . . To go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self. It also means risking incoherence, even madness.""the eye evolved and developed where there was enough light for the visible forms of life to become more and more complex and varied. Wild flowers, for example, are the colours they are in order to be seen. . . There is a certain ontological basis for the collaboration between model and painter."***Painting as an act of collaboration between model/subject and painter; receptivity:"Shitao wrote--Painting is the result of the receptivity of ink: the ink is open to the brush: the brush is open to the hand: the hand is open to the heart: all this in the same way as the sky engenders what the earth produces: everything is the result of receptivity.""The Fayum Portraits": "Neither those who ordered the portraits, nor those who painted them, ever imagined their being seen by posterity. They were images destined to be buried, without a visible future. . . This meant that there was a special relationship between painter and sitter. . . the two of them, iiving at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death. . . Looking at these 'portraits' which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy."From "Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff": "In your landscapes the receptivity of the air to what it surrounds is even more evident. . . for the sky to 'receive' a steeple or a column is not simple, but it's something clear (It's what, during centuries, steeples and columns were made for.) [nearly flipped when I read through this part, since I used to feel pretty often a sense of mystery/excitement looking at where a building's roof edge met the sky]"It is impossible to set out to paint light. Light in a painting makes its own appearance. It occurs as a result of a resolution of the relationships within the work."From "Studio Talk": "Photos, videos, films never find the face; at their best they find memories of appearances and likenesses. The face, by contrast is always new. . . A profile is never a face, and cameras somehow turn most faces into profiles.""What any true painting touches is an absence--an absence of which, without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss."From "Vincent": "from this nakedness of his, which his contemporaries saw as naivety or madness, came his capacity to love, suddenly and at any moment, what he saw in front of him."From "Giorgio Morandi": "In art the tempation to please too easily is ever present: it comes with mastery. The obstinacy of reculses, familiar with failure, is art's saving grace.""and we realize that what interests the artist is the process of the visible first becoming visible, before the thing seen has been given a name or acquired a value. The lonely life's work of the crotchety sexton is about beginnings!. . . .Traces are not only what's left when something is gone, they can also be marks for a project, of something to come."From "Frida Kahlo": "The capacity to feel pain is, her art laments, the first condition of being sentient. The sensitivity of her own mutilated body made her aware of the skin of everything alive--trees, fruit, water, birds and--naturally--other women and men. And so, in painting her own image, as if on her skin, she speaks of the whole sentient world."From "Against the Great Defeat of the World": "In the history of painting one can sometimes find strange prophecies. Prophecies that were not intended as such by the painter. It is almost as if the visible by itself can have its own nightmares. . . [The hell depicted in Bosch's Millenium Triptych] has become a strange prophecy of the mental climate imposed on the world at the end of our century by globalisation and the new economic order. . . There is no horizon there [in the space depicted of his hell] There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present. Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere is there any outcome. Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium."From "Will it be a likeness?": "sometimes a sound is more easily grasped as a silence, just as a presence, a visible presence, is sometimes most eloquently conveyed by a disappearance.Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, thna when you embraced them before they climbed into the train.""A presence has to be given, not bought. . . A presence is always unexpected. However familiar. You don't see it coming, it moves in sideways.""Silence, you know, is something that can't be censored.""The other day I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Mozart's Fantasy in C Major. I want to remind you of how Gould plays. He plays like one of the already dead come back to the world to play its music."How I do like Berger's preoccupations--and how they do preoccupy ME!
"I could call this the history of my family as the history of our characteristic illness. I could also call it the history of an illness as the history of one family", says Michael Ignatieff at the outset of his novel Scar Tissue. Although the author has built himself a reputation as a scholarly historian, biographer and culture chronicler, this book is by no means a vapid academic exercise. To the contrary, in barely 200 pages the author paints a very personal and infernal journey to the extremities of human life.The book can be read in different ways. First it is a detailed account of the dynamics of a particular pathology. The narrator describes step by step how his mother is overpowered by a mysterious illness and how it gradually dismantles her personality. Here, Ignatieff's prose can be very moving. The description of his youth is suffused with a fragile, arcadian light, contrasting effectively with the searching, melancholy figures of father and mother. The dramatic clair-obscur is tastefully woven into the fabric of the whole novel and lends a poetic tension to the work.Additionally, the confrontation with a devastating neurological illness forms the basis for a compelling philosophical investigation. In this sense, the book draws the contours of a few classical questions in personality theory. What is a person? When has someone reached the point of psychic regression where the 'I' has been dissolved? Can human identity be reduced to a particular neurochemical balance, or is there more than only organic substance? In Scar Tissue, Michael Ignatieff explicitly confronts two distinct philosophical positions - materialism and idealism - with the mystery of life and death. The narrator, philosopher, and his brother, neurophysiologist, are proxy for these two different types of rationality: "As my father used to say, 'Your brother has a propositional intelligence.' Meaning he had a way of reasoning that viewed ordinary life and its problems from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Whereas, my father said, I had 'an autobiographical intelligence', which was his way of saying I had a scatty female mind, interested in gossip and personal details and stories and character, things he didn't have time for.' So, a Platonic, conceptual and scientific way of thinking and an Aristotelian, pragmatic and context-sensitive rationality are crushing their teeth on the abyssmal problem of fate and death. Maybe, at the end of the story, we are witness to some sort of synthesis: "Human identity is neurochemical. Infinitely small amounts of neurotransmitter fluid, microscopic levels of electrical charge make the difference between selfhood and loss. Sanity is finely poised. Fate is measured in pica-litres. On the other hand, fate is beautiful. Feel the slow beating descent of its black wings.'The book's finale may seem a little contrived: pushed completely out of his existential balance, the narrator undertakes a radical quest for selflessness, an intentional destruction of his own person, into a state of pure emptiness. However, it seems to me this is another level at which Scar Tissue can be read: ultimately, in its appeal to the symbolism of death and rebirth, the story develops a logic akin to an initiation rite. Ignatieff's state of pure vacancy and selflessness corresponds to the embryonic condition, a prerequisite for each regeneration (Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane is useful background reading here). On the final page, the author prepares for the final part of the journey: "But I know that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my mind." And then back to the magnificent motto from the hand of John Milton:"So by this infirmity may I be perfected, by this completed. So in this darkness, may I be clothed in light."
What do You think about The Shape Of A Pocket (2003)?
When I started reading this book, I didn’t expect to think about Richard Dawkins. It’s Berger’s fault. About midway through the book, there's an essay on a portrait of an unknown man by Gericault. Commenting on the painting, Berger states that “[c:]ompassion has no place in the natural order of the world, which operates on the basis of necessity.”When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the role of altruism in natural selection. Richard Dawkins is the champion of the idea of the “selfish gene.” His theory suggests that altruism exists only to ensure the future of one’s genetic material. This is why bees will sacrifice themselves to protect the hive. They’re all related. By killing themselves, they give the future of their genetic material a better chance at survival. I disagree with Dawkins. The idea of the “selfish gene,” at least in the case of altruism, seems to lose steam when applied to humans.The theory of group selection makes a lot more sense to me. This idea suggests that individuals will commit acts of altruism for the good of the group, not exclusively for their genetic material. Adoption, for example, is an altruistic act that benefits someone else’s genes without any selective benefit to the adopter.What does all of this have to do with a painting? Perhaps I’m romanticizing things too much, bringing natural selection in and all, but the relevance seems to be there. Gericault, Berger claims, painted a compassionate portrait. Compassion is the BFF of altruism. The viewer of this portrait, in this case Berger, feels compassion when looking at it. Berger doesn’t know who the man in the portrait is, but if he can be moved to feel compassion for another person simply by looking at a painting, what potential does art really hold? Is art actually furthering our species, contributing in some way to our relationships with each other? I have a hunch it is.While Berger’s line of thought is essentially at odds with everything I’ve expounded upon here, I can’t help but attribute my thought process to him. Each of these essays was clearly a labor of love. He speaks of these artists and their work in such a way that makes it painfully obvious that their contributions are something far more than nice things to look at. My only real complaint about this experience was that, other than Kahlo and Degas, I wasn’t really familiar with the artists or pieces Berger was talking about. I hope to remedy that one day.
—Caris
Che emozione questo libro!Se ami l'arte e in particolare la pittura, se sei cresciuta con un padre che dipingeva in una casa piena di libri d'arte. Se ogni tuo viaggio, ogni tua gita insieme ai tuoi figli è stata sempre finalizzata alla visita di mostre o musei, fino al punto che tua figlia ha finito per laurearsi in Beni Culturali, non puoi non goderti fino allo spasimo queste letture. Berger ti apre gli occhi e da significato e storia alle emozioni che hai provato davanti ad ogni quadro che hai visto. E non ti vergogni più di dire che quando agli Uffizi ti sei trovata davanti al Tondo Doni di Michelangelo ti sei bloccata e non avevi il coraggio di avvicinarti, o che hai pianto come una scema davanti allo sguardo della Madonna della seggiola di Raffaello. Perchè Berger ti spiega che tutto questo è normale, perchè l'arte, quella vera, è un atto d'amore e l'amore ti commuove e poi ti soggioga, ti esalta e ti fa paura e ti fa soffrire e ti fa provare tutte le emozioni del mondo! E pochi scrittori al mondo sanno trasfondere "amore" nelle loro opere come Berger.
—Mita
This is about my favorite author. I do not agree with all of his ideas. He is an old communist, for instance. I have no opinion on Palestine/Israel. Too many people have those already. But the important thing about this book is the careful and beautiful way he treats art, artists, and humans in general.To say he is thought-provoking is a big undersatement. He thinks differently than most of us, and is clear as a writer. He is known as The art critic, but I don't really read about art much, and I like all his other books. He has written a trilogy or two.
—John O'shea
