Review: Michael Robbins on John Berger

Berger is faithful throughout his work to the idea that looking at the world can lead to changing it

Everyone whose life is devoted to books has a small stable of sacred writers, without whose example one might never really have learned to live, and John Berger is one of mine. He was one of the first writers I read who put into plain statement something I had begun to suspect about art and literature: “We can only make sense of art if we judge it by the criterion of whether or not it helps men to claim their social rights.” He doesn’t say that art matters only insofar as it helps people to claim their social rights, or that it must do so. (Though perhaps it must.) He is talking about how we make sense of art. And I know of very few writers who are as good at making sense of it.

Berger came to wide attention, of course, with the BBC series Ways of Seeing, which aired in 1972, a month before I was born. I rewatched it for this piece, and it’s more moving than I remember. Partly this is because it’s 1972: the series has become a demonstration of one of its own theses, that the reproduction of images changes the way we see. I watched it on YouTube, for instance, with a constant awareness that nothing like this could be made today. A document of such intellectual rigor, broadcast into millions of homes in the faith that people might welcome the opportunity to sit still for a half-hour listening to a learned critic talk about art—well, I laughed out loud when Berger said, “but supposing you had just turned on to this channel from one of the other two.” Of course we were on trajectory to our present idiot overload even then. The first episode relies on an essay Walter Benjamin published in 1935.

In that episode, Berger argues that art must be
stripped of the false mystery and the false religiosity which surrounds it. This religiosity, usually linked with cash value but always invoked in the name of culture and civilization, is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.

This is no longer a radical attitude among art historians, but there is no space for such critique in mass media now. I went to the Louvre last summer and watched dozens of phones gather before a distant Mona Lisa barricaded behind bulletproof glass. Just across the hall, three other Leonardos stood available for uncrowded view. How does the Mona Lisa change when it is seen for a few seconds in the middle distance through an iPhone as we jostle for position, crammed like straphangers on the 1 train at rush hour? Or rather, how does our seeing change? These are the sorts of questions Berger made us ask.

Indeed, the thrust of Ways of Seeing is opposed to our very way of life, then and now. Why look at original paintings in museums, if one is able to, rather than at reproductions? Because “the most important thing about paintings themselves is that their images are silent, still.” I love my students, but they are for the most part not very interested in the virtues of “uninterrupted silence and stillness.”

Contemporary art historians like Jonathan Crary have taken up Berger’s critique in this direction, but I want to notice something else, which is that for Berger the experience of standing before a Leonardo or a Vermeer is not, or not only, a private aesthetic experience—it is absolutely a way of being involved with the world, with social life. Because looking at art connects us with an earlier moment in time, art throws “into question a way of measuring time itself.” Clock time is abolished, and we can see into other possibilities, other ways of organizing the world. We realize that our own moment is contingent and thus open to revision.

Perhaps that is de trop, but Berger is faithful throughout his work to the idea that looking at the world can lead to changing it. As he put it in the introduction to Permanent Red (1960), his first essay collection, “A way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action.” This is one way art might help people to claim their social rights—it’s not a question of content or subject matter.

Berger spent his life working out this idea, including in G., his Booker-Prize-winning reworking of the Don Juan story (“Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present”);¹ and in my favorite of his essays, which isn’t about art as such at all, “Why Look at Animals?” from 1980’s About Looking, soon to be reissued by NYRB Classics.

Before the “rupture between man and nature” that began in the nineteenth century, “animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man.” They used to be always there, always encountered, “subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed.” Now, “the category animal has lost its central importance. Mostly they have been co-opted into the family and into the spectacle.” We know animals from the zoo, or as pets (no offense to my wonderful cat, Ursula). My friends and I share clips of animals doing cute or funny or interesting things. Children grow up in cities without ever seeing a cow in real life, much less the elk and bison and bear I used to see as a child in Colorado.

Berger is unequivocal on, for instance, the brutal injustice of zoos (remind me to tell you about the orangutan in Valencia sometime), but his ambit is broader than mere denunciation. He investigates what is lost when our ways of looking at animals, and their ways of looking at us, change. He notes that children are often disappointed when animals in the zoo aren’t visible, or are sleeping. “Where is he? Why doesn’t he move? Is he dead?” These questions, to which parents give predictable and inadequate responses (“What do you expect? … It’s living its own life”), reveal something about our relations to animals within “the culture of capitalism”: “However you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you … you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal.”

It is characteristic of Berger to compare the zoo visitors proceeding from “cage to cage” to “visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next.” I often consider, as I teach the art of poetry, the centrality of animals to the beginnings of Western poetry. Dogs and birds in the first sentence of The Iliad; Hermes a shepherd, Cædmon the same. To look at animals required no special excursion to see them in artificial habitats, decontextualized and inert, as we now see paintings. It was the same as to look at one another, or at clouds and trees. They were part of the world, no less a part of poetry and painting. And their disappearance, “this historic loss”—consider how many animals you regularly see in the wild that aren’t birds or deer or rodents or insects—is an index of our own isolation, captivity, and dependence.

As ever in his writings, Berger is concerned here with relations, not hierarchies. “That look between animal and man,” now “extinguished,” went both ways, involved both parties, and if the relations were often unequal, they were nevertheless based on something shared, something lived together.

This is just one essay, and I could go on for pages about it (I haven’t even mentioned Beatrix Potter and Disney). There’s a lot of Berger out there—both NYRB and Verso are engaged in mostly valuable reissue series. I haven’t read all of it, and it’s very thinly sliced. I have here Understanding a Photograph (2013), Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015), and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (2016), just a few of the samplers that thematically repackage essays that appear in Berger’s collections proper. If you’re new to Berger, you might go straight to these—About Looking or The Look of Things—or to Geoff Dyer’s generous curation, Selected Essays. The latter was published at the same time as The Shape of a Pocket (2001), which contains Berger’s boffo essay on the prehistoric cave paintings at Chauvet, so maybe get that one, too. (It’s also in Portraits, but I prefer it as part of Shape.)

That essay begins not in the cave but in “the street market in a suburb south of Paris,” where “there’s a woman who sells the best paprika I know.” An encounter with a fishmonger leads to a meditation on the beginnings of art, “the first painted animals,” because that’s who Berger was—moving in the world, talking with people, making minute discriminations, thinking about pictures, all one fluent process. What strikes me now, with Ways of Seeing on my mind, is that these particular pictures on the cave walls are not still. They were made to move in the firelight, primitive motion pictures.² They were painted before history, and are free of its determinations. Such images are unquestionably different from anything we have learned to consider “art.” But, Berger points out, “apparently art did not begin clumsily.” There is “a grace” to the hands of the first painters. And it is here, looking at animals painted on rock thirty thousand years ago, that he allows, not for religiosity or some imagined “essence” of art, but for something more open-ended: “There was a grace from the start. This is the mystery, isn’t it?”

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.

Read Michael Robbins in Book Post on Rilke, Ovid, and Baudelaire, as well as Bomarzo, Marcel Proust, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, trash, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, cheesy reading, and an almost-vanished series of Penguin anthologies of translations of classical poetry.

Image: Panel of the Three Lions, The Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave, Ardèche, France

1. I must confess I don’t like G. Many people I know absolutely love this novel. And I don’t hate it—I couldn’t hate anything written by John Berger. But I find it overwritten, grandiose, and full of very silly sentences about sex. While I’m on the subject, I also find his poetry, which permeates the much-celebrated And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, completely mediocre. (Both books are newly reissued by NYRB Classics.) I am confident in my ability to defend these judgments, but I don’t want to, because while I love Berger too much to let him off the hook, I also love him too much to waste my words on what seems to me negligible in his work.

2. I borrow this from Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. My poem “The Seasons” explores this idea further.