Moments Lived: The Death of John Berger
Marcos, I want to say something about a pocket of resistance. One particular one. My observations may seem remote, but, as you say, ‘A world can contain many worlds, can contain all worlds.’
Marcos, I want to say something about a pocket of resistance. One particular one. My observations may seem remote, but, as you say, ‘A world can contain many worlds, can contain all worlds.’
John Berger in
correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos [i]
About Looking (and
Listening)
Towards
the end of last year, a seismic year if ever there was one, I sat down and
watched a film by the Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli called Las Acacias
(2011). The premise was straightforward: A lonely, bitter and begrudging middle
–aged truck driver carrying timber from the forests of Paraguay to Argentina’s
capital city is instructed by his boss to allow a vulnerable young single mother
and her one year old daughter to hitch a ride. With sparse dialogue and shot
almost entirely in the cramped cab of the driver’s truck, what unfolded was a
moving, humane portrait of two bereft adults and a wide-eyed sometimes crying
child stuck on a long journey together. When it had finished I said to myself,
‘I am so glad I watched this’. The film had nourished me in a way that is
difficult to put into words. Three days ago when I heard the news that John
Berger had died and I started to contemplate what he meant to our culture, this
film resurfaced in my mind.
Berger
was many things – artist, tutor, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, television
presenter, playwright, poet – but for many he was one of our great contemporary
essayists; a lucid construer of accessible but meticulously informed exquisite
mini-masterpieces. And the thoroughness which underpinned (whether directly or
indirectly) these prolific chamber pieces was Berger’s unabashed but at same
time adaptable Marxist viewpoint. In an insightful article by Robert Minto celebrating
the latest curation of Berger’s essays ‘Landscapes’ Minto points out that
Berger’s Marxism was an elastic Marxism: ‘What Landscapes in
turn makes clear, through its assemblage of more programmatic pieces – book
reviews, manifestos, autobiography – is that Berger is a rigorous thinker with
a theory of art. That theory evolved considerably between the 1950s and the
2010s. Yet two threads hold it together with the tenacity of spider silk: a
critique of the political economy of art and a sophisticated account of its
human value, each rooted in a committed but elastic Marxism.’[ii]
How to Resist a
State of Forgetfulness
Consider
this 2015 meditation from ‘Confabulations’ on the absurdity of Picasso’s
painting Las Femmes d’Alger (1955) dedicated by Picasso to the Algerian
struggle against French colonialism selling for near on 180
million dollars: ‘During the last week I’ve been drawing mostly flowers,
motivated by a curiosity which has little to do with either botany or
aesthetics. I have been asking myself whether natural forms – a tree, a cloud,
a river, a stone, a flower – can be looked and perceived as messages. Messages
– it goes without saying – which can never be verbalized, and are not
particularly addressed to us. Is it possible to ‘read’ natural appearances as
texts?’ And then a paragraph later he writes: ‘In the totalitarian global-order
of speculative capitalism under which we are living the media ceaselessly bombard
us with information, yet this information is mostly a planned diversion,
distracting us from what is true, essential and urgent. Much of the information
is about what was once called politics, but politics have been superseded by
the global dictatorship of speculative capitalism with its traders and banking
lobbies.’[iii]
Now
consider Syria’s plight through the lens of the recent tragedy of Aleppo; that
ongoing, unresolved torturous scream which originated somewhere, sometime in
the arrogant Imperial 1800’s. What makes Berger’s written thought boundlessly
readable is this striving against a world that is becoming increasingly rigid
and trapped again; this time by a capitalist machine that appears to be have
been left on autopilot by a driver so drunk on financial excess and their own
self-spun disinformation, one wonders what will happen when either the satnav
malfunctions or the fossil fuel runs out. It is a world that is often panicked
by its own endless feeding of information and the internet curtains we a prone
to hide behind. A supple Marxism is merely one of many avenues which might lead
us back to our own sense of a shared humanity, grounding us back in the world, rather
than this current condition of perpetually lying to ourselves about what achievement
and success is or is not; of what it really means to be alive, living, and
creative.
Rembrandt and
the Body
There
is a little bit further to go in this brief adulation of someone who should be given more than just a forgotten grave in
England, for perhaps it will be in equally failed Paris rather than London that
Berger will find his resting place. John Berger was a man who took his time on
death, restlessly communing and speculating over the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this inevitably. Not only that,
he would write moving obituaries on the most ‘obscure’ of friends, dedicated
but unrecognised in their field. When you read about Sven from Sweden in Confabulations
you find an artist totally committed and living the life within his meagre
means. Berger doesn’t really tell us if he’s a great painter rather he focuses
on the Sven’s struggle and how after his the funeral he steps into Sven’s
studio: ‘After the funeral, the hundred or so people attending were invited to
a buffet meal in the garden, outside which Sven had been allotted a municipal
studio. At one moment I left the garden and opened the studio door I remembered
on the ground floor. The studio was uncannily tidy. The tidiness bespoke his
absence. There was nothing on the easel. A number of canvases were visible
instead of being face to the wall; the strong ones looked stronger; and the
weaker ones looked desolate. What astounded me most, however, was the large
reproduction pinned at eye level to the wall which was facing the easel. It was
the Rembrandt Simeon… It is thought to be the last painting Rembrandt worked
on.’
I
picture Rembrandt’s unfinished painting of the old man Simeon holding the
Christ child while what appears to be a young woman lingers in the background.
Rembrandt had made two busier more detailed versions when he was younger but
this final attempt is stripped back, muted; almost quivering because of what is
suggested rather than defined. I could stare at it for ages. And following
Berger perhaps I will make some sketches of it in ink or watercolour; just for
me, as a way of passing time, as a way of soaking up experience in time. The
image takes me back to the film: the aging muddled man, the young anxious
mother, and the beautiful wide-eyed child – her whole life ahead of her.
(Text by Olly
Beck,
5 January 2017)
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