Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events – which is what we mean by reality – is an imaginative construction. […] Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to establish its own power. Reality is inimical to those with power.

John Berger, ‘The Production of the World’

To the world of power I was only childishly chained.

Osip Mandelstam

This new collection of John Berger’s writings, although concerned primarily with the works of others, somewhat self-reflexively begs throughout that we need question the ways in which we approach the curation of work. Both Berger and editor Tom Overton’s commitments appear to engage in a kind of durational aesthetics, persistently asking us to manoeuvre ourselves around these relics, portraits and portrayals to try and glean not only a more purposive view of art but also a more active conception of history.

To navigate so weighty a statement, it seems appropriate to contextualise Overton’s own editorial métier as falling within the corpus of concerns prevalent within Berger’s own body of work. Finding a use for the prior is the editor’s raison d’être: there is always a better means to restate the terms of conversation, another method with which to shed a greater light on certain facts that will establish the scene depicted, as though it were spontaneously enacted in the better service of an idea rather than the fickle appeal of plot and action. For Berger, this temporal interest in revision is fundamental; early into his now canonical Ways of Seeing (1972) we’re given a simple and aphoristic instruction: ‘If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.’

This assertion haunts the greater character of his criticism as it so often points out of itself, looking for a referential reach, hoping to spin that speculative idea out so it can begin to resemble a narrative, a story. His attraction to photography then seems a given; ‘a photograph,’ he suggests in Another Way of Telling (1982), ‘preserves a moment of time and prevents its being effaced by the supersession of further moments.’ Photographs are, for Berger, a truly human art, intimating the muscle of memory; the photograph itself could be relayed as a simulacrum for recollection. ‘Yet there is a fundamental difference,’ he maintains: ‘whereas remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant’ – ‘when we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.’ This notion of the image as debtor to its observation is an idea re-trod across his oeuvre, but it’s a specific comment on this book’s images that preoccupies Berger’s preface:

The illustrations in the book are black and white. This is because glossy reproductions in the consumerist world of today tend to reduce what they show to items in a luxury brochure for millionaires. Whereas black and white images are simple memoranda.

For Portraits, as a collection, the monochrome picture is only an aide-mémoire – a poor reproduction that offers no conclusion. In his preface, Berger suggests that there is ‘occasionally a vision,’ occasionally ‘space’ enough for argument. But the ‘black and white’ connotes something of the empirical facticity of the images accommodated in this book: they point away from him, from his writing, away from his own seat as a critic to allude to a bigger past.

This volume revisits a catalogue of his writings on artists from across the latter half of the 20th century, charting a chronological survey that runs from the cave interior to the neutral white wall of the gallery, the work presents a series of recollections rather than any real sense of a cumulative history. Like a roll of film, there are recurrent themes and approaches that Berger will bring to bear on his subject, ideas that bleed from frame to frame, but these are more technical interests than exclusionary criticisms. It’s not that Berger was always looking for the same thing, but there’s a common remembrance of the fact that it was always his finger on the shutter. But a shared urgency persists: we need look for the right questions to ask. It is as much our work as it is Berger’s, and the quiet thread that runs through the text seems to be the search for a more effective means with which to negotiate a sense of a cultural past or canon that does not simply reform it as our own rendition or projection of our own interests, but rather a shared project. The book offers a way in which we can begin thinking on the real activities of expression; the purpose of old art, for Berger, is a method with which to speculatively frame the needs of our own epochal exigency.

Where do we begin with such an interrogation? Overton gives us his Berger, initially; arguably a nostalgic figure, looking over his shoulder at a long history of figurative expression and the disjunction always present between the expresser and the expressed. In his introduction, Overton reflects on the ways in which this edition ‘represents Berger’s history of art,’ under a certain light – EH Gombrich’s Story of Art as told by another character. There’s the constant ‘recognition that an image shapes a text, which then goes on to shape how we understand that image,’ much in the way that the past needs re-examining, to follow Berger’s line again, but only within the context of a fully exercised comprehension of the present can these images mean anything at all.

Overton admits, employing Berger’s own words, that there is a crucial danger at work here. Speaking in 1978, Berger would argue that any effort ‘to treat art history as if it were a relay race of geniuses is an individualist illusion.’ The contemporary world of production and publication treats the writer like a ‘horse,’ he would say in receipt of the Booker Prize in 1972; you never know the purchase of a text in much the way that you never fully know whether this is your race or otherwise. The ongoing principle that is constantly excavated here is how we go about assembling histories that remain speculative enough to allow for a proper outline of the present; how we can treat these myriad portraits as foreboding, in some way, of a better means to understand which foot is the best forwards from here.

This collection asks that it be reread in conjunction with Berger’s own reflection on the industrialisation of his corpus – the process of collection and recollection that has truncated his critical writings as a form of vicarious autobiography, as an almost photographic rendition of where he has been and what he has seen. Writing in a preface to his Selected Essays (2001), Berger adumbrates some of the anxieties at play in the culture of the reissue and the relationship of a text with the life of its author:

Re-reading this book I have the sense of myself being trapped and many of my statements being coded. And yet I have agreed to this book being reissued as a paperback. Why? The world has changed. Conditions in London have changed. Some of the issues and artists I discuss no longer seem of urgent concern. I have changed. But precisely because of the pressures under which the book was written – professional, political, ideological, personal pressures – it seems to me that I needed at that time to formulate swift but sharp generalizations and to cultivate long-term insights in order to transcend the trappings of the genre.

The recurring theme of that book is, according to Berger, ‘the disastrous relationship between art and property.’ As elucidated in earlier references to Berger’s prefatory comments to this present book, that theme still withstands as a worthy point of inquiry. To return to Berger’s aforesaid instruction – that the past can only pragmatically cohere when read in the context of a present made cognisant – it’s a wonder as to how we are best supposed to approach this collection. Beyond the black and white images themselves, these short critical works are gathered together as ‘portraits.’ They are imaged, curatorially, as much as pictures of the artists themselves as they are impressions of their works, or conversely, they read as an invitation to look for the common themes that preponderate through Berger’s own choice of subject – the reasoning for that particular sitter in that particular present.

This would be a broader criticism with which to tar the collection were it not made so pervasive a feature of Berger’s intellectual landscape. We read Berger on Bacon, for instance, and Bacon becomes a tool with which to again evoke this same thesis:

The Renaissance idealisation of the naked human body, the Church’s promise of redemption, the classical notion of heroism, or Van Gogh’s ardent nineteenth-century belief in democracy are revealed within his vision to be in tatters, powerless before the pitilessness. Bacon picks up the shreds and uses them as swabs. This is what I had not taken in before. Here was the revelation.

A revelation which confirms an insight: to engage today with the traditional vocabulary, as employed by the powerful and their media, only adds to the surrounding murkiness and devastation. This does not necessarily mean silence. It means choosing the voices one wishes to join.

To engage today with traditional vocabulary. The possibilities of an elective meaning prove limited, however, when he turns his attention to American art of the Modern, and again to the difficulties of commodification. Contextualising Pollock and Krasner, the only married portrait in the collection, again Berger notes the subservience of the hypothetical painter to the weight of a market economy:

Freedom of the market. The New York artists were working, more crudely than ever before, for an expanding free market. They painted exactly what they wanted, the size they wanted, with the materials they wanted. Their finished works, scarcely dry, were then up for sale, promoted, sometimes bought. Bought by collectors – and for the first time whilst, as it were, still wet – by museums. The competition, however, was ruthless and aggressive. The latest was always at a premium. Gallery fashions changed quickly. Recognition […] was dramatic but short-lived. The risks were high and the casualties many. Gorky and Rothko killed themselves. Kline, Reinhardt and Newman die young. Nearly all the painters drank heavily to protect their nerves, for finally their works, transformed into extraordinary property investments, benefitted from far more security measures than their working lives.

This sets the stage for Berger’s treatment of his artists across this collection. They are a dramatis personae driven on the quality of their various verbs rather than the rhetorical uses of nouns and this, in itself, fills out a parallel canon in kind. Their lives, works, and contexts are rendered as a satirical property that plays up his advocated need for constant revision, constant interrogation. Neizvestny performs a one-act play against Khrushchev, haunted by the pressures of state; Leon Kossof is displayed in epistolary form, with letters between himself and his ‘Dear John;’ Rembrandt appears only as Berger imagines travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce in a previous century. Rothko also emerges through correspondence, but Berger signs off one letter only to print another as addendum, carrying a line or two from Rothko himself:

If I must place my trust somewhere, I would invest it in the psyche of sensitive observers who are free from the conventions of understanding. I would have no apprehension about the use they would make of these pictures for the needs of their own spirits. For if there is both need and spirit there is bound to be transaction.

Transaction. Again Berger’s commentaries feel haunted not only by his own perspectivism but also by the real force of property and purchase on the ways in which we both respond empathically, frame our own stories and retell, resell and conceptualise those of others. The transaction (or perhaps ‘the incomplete sale,’ to borrow from Marx, is a more appropriate term) seems a real and tacit feature of Berger’s view of expression and its meaningful receipt that is somehow lampooned in his view of language and denotation as partners in some epistemic dance. Writing on Cy Twombly, he moves from the specifics of Twombly’s own 45-degree scrawl to consider a more general view of writing and its problematics:

A writer continuously struggles for clarity against the language he’s using, or, more accurately, against the common usage of that language. He doesn’t see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather, as a terrain full of intelligibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises and obscurities. It’s map is not a dictionary but the whole of literature and perhaps everything ever said. Its obscurities, its lost senses, its self-effacements come about for many reasons – because of the way words modify each other, cancel one another out, because the unsaid counts for as much, or more, as the said, and because language can never cover what it signifies. Language is always an abbreviation.

The artist is performed through their portrait – objectified therein – and their own relationship with form enacts their grappling for the ‘right questions’ for their time and place. Any account of their activities comes down to a question of their object of attention – their being is transacted as a kind of play in which the characters all remain perpetually determined by a shared pressure that remains off-stage at all times, their work floating off to meet its demands, their character determined by that self-same stress. Language, Berger perhaps suggests here, is a similar kind of terrain: 'Language is always an abbreviation.’ It is melted down in the process of understanding to be reclaimed as a territory again and again as we look for our place in conversation, our place relative to a history recollected and still occurring, and try and activate what we find as some sort of meaningful implement with which to understand the present.

Berger's Portraits has the character of a museum collection – those included within its walls have been thoroughly exonerated and accepted by society – but it feels reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot’s iteration of the archive. ‘The habits of thought’, Blanchot suggests, ‘which we owe to the commonplaces of subjective art lead us to believe that the artist or writer seeks to express himself and that for him what is missing from the Museum and from literature is he [or she].’ The same needs be said of Berger’s readings and his adumbration of the reader’s role. All writing needs be abbreviated for use, and for purpose, so we can carry it away from its binding and use it actively in some other context. That’s a small part of Berger’s brilliance, strung throughout this collection, that we need look, look and look again to find an aesthetics of use – find a way of talking more cogently about our own contemporary scene – find a question that fits and antagonises any subjection to the running order of things – a picture that we can lend both a past and a future.

Dominic Jaeckle is a writer and academic based in London.

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