John Berger (London, 1946 – Paris, 2017) occupies a reference space among authors who, in the mid-20th century, questioned formalist interpretations of how images should be read from a point of view that today we call modern.
Poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and film and television screenwriter, he stands out for a way of telling, of looking, that restores the ideological, moral, and aesthetic implications of the image, far, in most cases, from the academic and theoretical terms dominant in each of the decades and currents that were contemporary to him.
Permanent Red is an exhibition named after his book published in 1960, which collects art criticism Berger wrote for the Marxist magazine New Statesman, where he collaborated for over a decade starting in 1951. His writings, famous in their time, offered furious critiques against generalist bourgeois taste. He was characterized by presenting unknown or very minority artists, always driven by highlighting works outside the canon and by analyses that disagreed with the always conservative narrative.
The exhibition, one of the most complete carried out to date, particularly emphasizes Berger's political and revolutionary character, as well as his collaborations with photographers such as Jean Mohr, filmmakers such as Mike Dibb and Alain Tanner, playwright Simon McBurney, and poet Mahmud Darwish. Also on display are drawings and numerous documentary materials, mostly unpublished, and provided by the critic's heirs and the British Library in London, where most of his personal archive is located. Photo Elysée-Musée Cantonal pour la Photographie of Lausanne and the BBC also contribute pieces.
Berger defends dissent against capitalist indoctrination and the mercantilism of culture. He presents strong opposition against class segregations and adopts the words of the German philosopher Rosa Luxemburg: "The modern proletarian class does not develop its struggle according to a plan established in some book or theory; the current struggle of workers is part of history, it is part of social progress and it is the center of history and progress, in the midst of the struggle is where we learn how we must fight."
Berger defends dissent against capitalist indoctrination and the mercantilism of cultureHis drawings and collages are relevant, especially those from his early days, mostly made in the post-war period. An anthology of the BBC programs that Berger presented is also exhibited. It should be remembered that for most of the British public, John Berger is a relevant television figure.
From the 1950s onwards, Berger became, in the media, the antagonist of Kenneth Clark, the popular art historian whose series Civilization (1966 – 69) ratified the hegemonic and formalist interpretations of Western painting with a long continuist sense, a sense that was not innovative and already far from the new currents and new theories that validated different contexts, appreciations, and critical considerations, valuing other concepts that escaped academic terms.
At La Virreina, the films Pig Earth (1979), Parting Shots from Animals (1980) and Once Upon a Time (1985), fruit of Berger's collaboration with producer and director Mike Dibb, are screened; and, of course, the famous broadcasts of the star program Modos de Ver (Ways of Seeing. 1972), which over time have become the great reference for the author's work and the collective unconscious.
In the Miserachs room, Une Ville à Chandigarh (1966) by Alain Tanner, with a screenplay by Berger, which deals with Le Corbusier's urban project in India, is screened. La Salamandra (1974), El centro del mundo (1974) and Jonás, que cumplirá 25 años en el año 2000 (1976), which forms the bulk of the collaboration between the two artists.
The exhibition showcases the fruitful relationship between Berger and photographer Mohr over four decades. The book Un séptimo hombre (1975) is a visual essay that investigates the precarization of migrant workers in Europe in the 60s and 70s. Followed by Un hombre afortunado (1967), about the life of a rural doctor, and Otra forma de contar (1982), which is a photographic and literary account of peasants in the first person.
In 1972, Berger publishes G, an experimental novel about the protagonist's political awakening, after World War I. In the author's own words: a man who makes love as a way to mentally destroy established society. The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize. At the Booker awards ceremony, Berger harshly criticized the sponsors for their commercial exploitation in the Caribbean since the 19th century, which included slave trafficking. There he announced that he would donate half of the prize money to the English Black Panthers, while with the other half, he would finance an investigation into the terrible living conditions of migrant workers in northern Europe.
At the Booker awards ceremony, Berger harshly criticized the sponsors for their commercial exploitation in the Caribbean since the 19th century, which included slave traffickingOf fervent Marxist convictions, in the 50s he collaborated with various magazines such as New Statesman, Marxism Today, Modern Quarterly, Marxism Quaterly, Realism: The Journal of The Artist's Group of The Comunist Party and World News, in addition to the declared socialist Tribune, edited by George Orwell himself. Despite never being a member of the communist party (CPGB), he was always close to its members. Influenced by the historian Frederick Antal and his book Florentine Painting and its Social Background (1948), his theoretical models were the Marxist critics Ernst Fischer, Max Raphael and the then unknown Walter Benjamin. He thus began to publish in the Statesman in 1951, focusing his attention on artists without public repercussion, exiles from the Second World War, mostly, and who lived in absolute precariousness and anonymity.
Many of his criticisms always focused on socialist realism and on following the legacy of Andrei Zhdanov, political commissar and Stalinist censor. He published under that prism: Ascension and Fall of Picasso (The success and failure of Picasso, 1965) and the Permanent Red (1960) that concerns us, and which in its American version saw its title softened to Toward Reality (1962).
Berger's drawings portray the industrial proletariat: operators crowded in factories. In 1983, Berger even recorded a program in the mining community of Creswell (Derbyshire), in a clear analogy with Émile Zola's novel Germinal (1885) and the time Van Gogh spent in similar conditions in search of his religious vocation. His references in this field are: The General Intellect narrated by Karl Marx in Grundrisse (1939) and the "robotic man" from Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1926). Berger always offers a perspective of the worker organizing against the alienation of subjectivities and the kidnapping of bodies.
His notoriety came from the legendary episodes, broadcast every Saturday in January 1972 on BBC Two at ten at night, of the program Ways of Seeing. By then, Berger had already participated in other programs such as Is art necessary? Should every picture tell a story? (1958), talking about Picasso's Guernica and opposing Clark's theories. He also participated in Picasso (David Jones, 1960), Friso Ten Holt (1962), Drawn from life (Mike Wooller, 1962), Tomorrow couldn't be worse (David Cunliffe, 1963), Why leger? (1965), 10.000 days, 93.000 hours, 33 years of effort (Michael Gill, 1965), Giacometti (Jonathan Miler, Michael Gill y Nancy Thomas, 1965), Nureyev's Nutcracker / De Stijl (1968) y Ernst Neizvestny, an artist from Moscow (Robert Vas, 1969), all of them produced by the BBC.
The four episodes of Ways of Seeing, directed and produced by Mike Dibb, which lasted around thirty minutes, completely transformed not only the view of art or the pictorial tradition, but, above all, the ways of decoding certain ideological messages that, until then, remained hidden
To conclude, the exhibition projects Channel 4's very interesting program Voices, directed by Mike Lloyd, with the title Knowledge in crisis. To tell a story (1983), in which John Berger and American author Susan Sontag converse. The two authors debate about whether telling stories redeems us from reality and its meaninglessness, if it somehow whitewashes those dark parts of our society and acts as a balm, an idea close to the criticisms, for example, of Walt Disney, by contemporary intellectual currents and about its impact on children and on the generalized anesthesia of mass culture. Thus, many times, by imagining, we validate certain formalisms of reality, something we would not be able to do so efficiently in any other way. In the end, the two reach an agreement: every author "dies" upon finding their reader, although dying means, here, returning to the beginning, writing again...
Permanent Red completes the exhibition triptych, after On Photography, by Susan Sontag and Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, from La Virreina, Centre de la Imatge on the three seminal authors, to understand a true visual reflection. The exhibition, commissioned by Valentín Roma, will be open until October 15 and admission is free. A unique opportunity to see such valuable material and to approach a key figure in the history of contemporary art to be reclaimed, not only for his figure and his revolutionary ideas, which still resonate strongly today, but for the necessity of his informative discourse, for the fight against mercantilism and structural elitism in art, to end cultural classism and in favor of a definition and defense of an art that is and must always be political, involved, conscious and social.