The most revolutionary notion outlined in Ways of Seeing is Berger’s Marxist-feminist takedown of how women are depicted in classical art.
It’s another score for private ownership. The advertising sector manufactures an enviable hypothetical future with product x, making the choice to not buy product x seem inconceivable. This glorification of capital continues in contemporary commercials. It is defined as an object whose value depends on its rarity,” says Berger. “The meaning of the original work no longer lies uniquely in what it says but in what it uniquely is. The age of photographic reproduction may make an image once painted by Goya or Da Vinci more accessible, but it simultaneously makes the original work valuable because it is an original. For the form’s 500-year history, oil paintings exist as testimony and tribute to the wealth of their owners. Oil paintings have always been the preserve of the privileged capitalist class. The veiled language of the art catalogue adds a further layer of remove but inaccessibility is precisely the point of western art. While Berger acknowledges that the “uninterrupted silence and stillness of a painting can be very striking”, the aura that we, as viewers, bestow on an artwork is connected to a paintings function as “the final empty claim of the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture”. To counter this effect, he invites London school children to pour over a Carravaggio. Against this, there is heft to his arguments.ĭrawing on Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Berger questions the mystification of classical art, noting how the democratic availability of the reproduced image is frequently undercut by inaccessible text. It’s more entertaining than such a project has any right to be, as Berger confers with ordinary women and plays games and conducts fun little experiments with the audience.
#John berger ways of seeing temporal series#
And therefore to understand what we have to envisage as a future, thinking about human dignity and justice.”Īrguably Berger remains best known for his landmark four-part 1972 BBC television series Ways of Seeing. Conceived, in part, as a riposte to Sir Kenneth Clark’s earlier BBC series Civilisation, Berger’s arguments, which were later collected in a book of the same name, make for a lucid and accessible account of classical western art and an equally accessible Marxist analysis.
Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight in 2011, he said: “My reading of Marx helped me enormously to understand history, and therefore to understand where we are in history. The other half funded A Seventh Man, his 1975 study of migrant workers. Upon winning the Man Booker Prize for his novel G in 1972, he announced that in protest against award namesake Booker McConnell’s historic exploitation of indentured labour in British Guiana, he would donate half his prize money to the British Black Panther Party. The late John Berger (1926 – 2017) was a sometime soldier, scholar, poet, essayist, critic, painter and a lifelong Marxist. Conceived as a riposte to Sir Kenneth Clarke’s BBC series Civilisation, John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” is a lucid and accessible account of classical western art and an equally accessible Marxist analysis, writes Tara Brady.