Tuesday 3 January 2017

John Berger 1926 - 2017



I heard this morning that John Berger has died. For anyone interested in how to think about drawing the writings of John Berger are and will continue to be a necessity. I first came across Berger when I was at college when his landmark TV programme ‘Ways of Seeing’ was aired. He seemed able to articulate many of the questions that I had begun to ask but didn’t yet know how to phrase them.

Berger wrote extensively on drawing and you were always aware that his writing began with a sense of what it was to be someone who drew. At no time did I ever feel that he was writing from a theoretical point of view, he always seemed to be emerging from a grappling with the reality of making and what this might mean, rather than trying to fit his ideas into an existing intellectual framework.

In recognition of his huge contribution to the intellectual life of my times I have decided to take just one essay from 1976, ‘Drawn to that Moment’ and perhaps give a sense of why his writing is so rich.

Berger begins the essay by reminding us of a story about Kokoschka teaching a life class. Kokoschka was concerned that the students were not really thinking about what they were doing, so quietly asked the model to at a given signal from him to pretend to collapse and die. This of course caused great consternation and Kokoschka knelt down at the side of the model, checked for a pulse and pronounced the model’s death. Then just as students were trying to come to terms with the experience, Kokoschka clapped his hands and the model was miraculously restored. He then forced the students to begin their drawings again, this time with an awareness of the preciousness of life and their responsibility to always be aware that what they were doing in making a drawing was to capture the experience of life. The point being that only in the presence of death are we fully aware of what life means.  

This type of anecdote was typical of Berger, he would get you thinking of those big issues, life/death, politics/religion and make you fully aware that drawing was a serious matter and that it could be used to frame up questions around any of life’s philosophical or existential questions.

He reminds us that every time you undertake an observed drawing, what you are drawing will never be seen again. He was in this article writing about making a drawing of his recently dead father, but the reader could easily open out the specific issues into a much wider context. Drawing for Berger was about mortality and our attempts to reconcile an awareness of this with the fact that we have to live our lives with an awareness of death. In order to further explain this, he then gives an excellent interpretation of ‘mannerism’ in drawing, which he says is about inventing ‘urgency’ instead of submitting to the urgency of what is. Each drawing he suggests is a site of departure. For me he is referring to both that journey the soul must take across the River Styx and the fact that all drawings are a beginning as well as an end. Berger finally hangs the drawing he has done on a wall and reflects that now it begins to mark the site of arrival, it is a doorway through which moments of life could enter.

As the essay evolves Berger covers issues such as, ‘Drawings reveal the process of their own making,’ he points out that a drawing forces us to stop and enter its time. He goes on to explain that a drawing of a tree shows not a tree but a tree being looked at. This is a fundamental issue as it allows us to make a clear distinction between what a photograph is and how it operates and what a drawing is. The drawn image collects together in a simultaneity a multitude of experienced moments. Each glance reveals a small piece of evidence, these pieces are woven together to create an assemblage, which will eventually become a new totality. Each of these issues as they arrive have come from his initial reflections on drawing and death and he concludes these reflections with the final sentence of the essay, ‘Every day more of my father’s life returns to the drawing in front of me.’

John Berger was for myself one of those guiding spirits that I could always return to. He had a deep moral conviction that art was fundamental to the human experience and believed that an artist had a responsibility to help society articulate what it is to be a thinking, feeling human. I will miss him, there is already a hole where there wasn't one before.













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