Landscapes. John Berger
precisely analogous design by Francis Hayman suggests that the people in such pictures were engaged in philosophic enjoyment of ‘the great Principle … the genuine Light of uncorrupted and unperverted Nature’.
Berger’s counterargument was that one form of enjoyment does not preclude the other. If the couple are enjoying nature philosophically, they are only able to do so because they are not distracted by the possibility of being chased off it with shotguns and horse whips.
Also in 1972, the academic John Barrell published The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place. In 1980 he followed it with The Dark Side of the Landscape, in which he asked whether, when looking at the works of Gainsborough, Constable and George Morland, we ‘identify with the interests of their customers and against the poor they portray’.2
Barrell and Berger each developed their ideas on landscape through critiquing the other’s. They share some of the same motivations – Berger declared himself ‘still among other things a Marxist’ as late as 2005,3 Barrell is a ‘leftist’. But their differences become clearer in Berger’s review of The Dark Side of the Landscape, which concludes ‘Mightn’t the slogan be: Down with Enclosures! Intellectual as well as rural?’ Berger found ‘the English academic role (so dependent upon the voice and syntax)’ preserved in the book, and lamented its tendency ‘to encourage specialisation at the price of isolation’. On balance, he thought,
John Barrell’s book is a brilliant reading of certain sets of pictorial conventions (signs) and how they changed during a given historical period. But it gives little indication of knowledge, or even curiosity, about the two practices which lie, as it were, on either side of the sign. In this case the practice of painting on one side, and the practice of poor or landless peasants on the other. And so, though the book discloses and denounces an ideological practice, it contributes to and confirms the closed intermediary space in which such ideology operates.
These two practices are forms of work. Berger’s preoccupation with the work done by artists was shaped early in life. As a teenager, Berger wrote vivid short stories about the music hall and the French Resistance. But, as he describes in ‘To Take Paper, to Draw’, he went to art school (the Central and then Chelsea schools) rather than university, and, though he gave up painting around the age of thirty, his writing seems always to be accompanied by drawing. Sometimes this is purely imaginative, in much the way that say Ruskin’s or Hazlitt’s criticism is often nuanced by the experience of having made art. In the case of Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), or ‘A Gift for Rosa Luxemburg’ (2015, collected here), the companionship of drawing is, though the term seems counterintuitive, literal: Berger’s drawings are reproduced alongside the text.
We have to be careful here not to oversimplify the relative merits of practising and non-practising critics. In ‘The Function of Criticism’, T. S. Eliot described moving from ‘the extreme position that the only critics worth reading were the critics who practised, and practised well, the art of which they wrote’ to demand for ‘a very highly developed sense of fact’ – for critics who could offer ‘interpretation’ in the sense of ‘putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed’. Berger’s critical dialogue with Barrell was bound up with his most sustained engagement with the idea of landscape, the Into Their Labours trilogy (1979–91).4 Through imaginative, fictional writing, these three books – Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag – engage with the work of the peasants among whom he went to live in the 1970s, and whose companionship he has called ‘my university’.5 The ‘Historical Afterword’, extracted here, gives an outline of the approach to history that the trilogy takes. This is a landscape in the sense my title proposes: metaphorical perhaps, but equally alive to those who control both the appearance and the actuality of the terrain, and to those who live in it. A Fortunate Man puts it like this,
Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographical but also biographical and personal.
BERGER’S WORK IS an invitation to reimagine; to see in different ways. Accordingly, the texts here are divided into two parts. The first collates a range of pieces that tell us about the individuals – not necessarily visual artists – who have shaped Berger’s thought. Some – Antal, Raphael – are straightforwardly art critics; others – Brecht, Barthes, Benjamin – do not fit easily into that category, but nevertheless demonstrate how early Berger came to much of what now constitutes the expanded art-school reading list. They all play their role in shaping the self-definition as a storyteller with which, as I noted in the Introduction to Portraits, Berger frames the diversity of his written output. To consider these relationships as ones of influence would be inconsistent with this self-definition. Rather than the collective, collaborative act of storytelling, the idea of ‘influence’ seems more associated with the individualism of novel writing, and a capitalist logic of debt and restitution that Berger rejects.
The remainder of this section freely explores the limits of how writing can be about art, and the way in which Berger had been led by his painter’s eye towards storytelling. It ends with ‘The ideal critic and the fighting critic’, a kind of manifesto for how to put these examples into practice. By the end of Part I we see how, particularly in ‘Kraków’, the felt presences of Joyce, Márquez, and the tradition that now includes writers like W. G. Sebald, Arundhati Roy, Ali Smith and Rebecca Solnit have led Berger to tell the story of one of his very first teachers, his ‘passeur’, Ken, in the way that he does. The section’s title, ‘Redrawing the Maps’, originally comes from Geoff Dyer’s suggestion that ‘it is not enough simply to lobby for Berger’s name to be printed more prominently on an existing map of literary reputations; his example urges us fundamentally to alter its shape’.6
In 2012, as part of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Ways of Seeing and G., ‘Redrawing the Maps’ was the name given to a ‘free school’ in London that brought together an astonishingly broad range of people loosely inspired by Berger’s work to teach and learn from each other. With none of the rigidity the word might imply, Part I is a kind of syllabus, while Part II represents its application. The title of the latter is taken from one of Berger’s poems, ‘Terrain’. Here, the list of guides and maps gives way to the territory Berger uses them to navigate. Laid out in roughly chronological order, these pieces become less categorisable as they proceed, and less obviously ‘art writing’ about landscape. Yet ‘The Third Week of August 1991’ is among other things an attempt to understand the meaning of public sculpture in post-Soviet Europe. ‘Stones’ (2003) refracts contemporary Ramallah and its visual culture through some of the earliest sculpture – a cairn in Finistère. Finally, ‘Meanwhile’ (2008), the long essay that concludes the collection, defines our contemporary landscape as a prison. These pieces can be read as a sketch of art history – not that this is ever how Berger would describe his work – or as background for the individual texts of Portraits: in the sense of either the period in which they were written or the period they describe. ‘Without landmarks’, Berger writes in ‘Meanwhile’, ‘there is the great human risk of turning in circles.’
In the recent film The Seasons: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), the actor Tilda Swinton notes that she and Berger share a birthday, 5 November (remember, remember). She reads ‘Self Portrait 1914–18’ (1970), his poem stressing how much the Great War shaped him, through his father, and the wider world into which he was born in 1926. Landscapes, then, is published to mark his ninetieth birthday. But, even alongside Portraits, it represents only a part of a much broader and still ongoing achievement – albeit one that it nourishes, and has been nourished by.
One aspect of this achievement which seems especially vital in 2016 is the great arc of Berger’s work that connects his decision to share the proceeds of his 1972 Booker Prize with the Black Panthers and his project on migrant workers, A Seventh Man (1975), through the Into