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Looking at Art
A Review by Sven Birkerts

In the introduction to his early collection Permanent Red, one of the first pieces in this compendious and — I use the following adjective very rarely — essential gathering, John Berger writes, apropos looking at works of art: "What we take away with us — on the most profound level — is the memory of the artist's way of looking at the world…The truth of this is confirmed by the fact that we can often recall the experience of a work, having forgotten both its precise subject and its precise formal arrangement."

This introduction was written in 1960 — several centuries ago, in other words — but it struck me straight on for several reasons. The first, personal and immediately applicable, is that it captures exactly my experience of this writer, whose art criticisms, polemics, novels and documentary works I have read for many years. If I could not reconstitute from memory the argument or analysis of any one essay, or call up the narrative configuration of, say, his Booker Prize-winning novel, G. or one of the books in his powerful Into Their Labors trilogy, I can still summon, instantly, a most vivid impression of the sensibility and soul — yes, soul — of this astonishing man. His sensuous immediacy of perception is coupled with a fiece, highly concrete, political idealism, and it is coupled further with what can only be called his gut-love for the stuff of — the fact of — creation. From this last, I think, comes everything else, certainly Berger's radical intensity (he remains one of the great heroes of the Left) and bedrock intransigence about his values and beliefs. In his mid-70s now, living as he has for decades among the French peasants, he is still drawing from his deepest source places, producing a prose that feels more necessary than ever. If the world is going one way, Berger is defintely going the other.

But the quote also gives us, in simplified form, Berger's basic approach to art (and photography, and literature), his recognition that the encounter is, at root, an almost supernaturally charged experience, and as such has, like any of the most intense human exchanges, revolutionary potential. Art is not product, but a relationship; it does not mark the end, or summing up, of some artist's visionary encounter with the world. Art is the beginning of a series of detonations that have the potential to change everything about the way we see — and, therefore, live.

Whether he is writing about Rubens, Hals, Poussin, Picasso, Monet or Modigliani — or photographs depicting agony, or animals in zoos, or (pardon me) a load of shit — Berger is always moving from the most gratifyingly immediate physical characterizations to their more elusive experiential implications. To say that he illuminates is trite, but behind the worn word is the original sensation: that of a light thrown brightly on something that had seemed obscure, unclear. Often as not, the switch is thrown by the sharpness, or the poetic rightness, of the expression. Writing on Modigliani, in Berger's view the great painter of love, he writes: "All that makes a difference is whether the painter had, or had not, crossed that frontier of imaginary intimacy on the far side of which a vertiginous tenderness begins." Vertiginous tenderness is perfect. Add in brilliance, tough-mindedness combined with an epical faith in human possibility, and you have John Berger himself.

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