John Berger and Art History

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin & the BBC, 1976. (Apparently this is based on an old BBC show; I don't know where it might be available today, however).

Berger combines epistemology with recent media history and art criticism to make some interesting comments on the relation of form to media.

He takes seeing to "come before words" in a couple ways. "The child looks and recognizes before it can speak"; then, "It is seeing which establishes our place" (7). I am prone to suspect the cleanness of this hierarchy: when a stick enters the the top of a pool at a slant, I do not assume that it breaks sharply at the pool's surface. Likewise, listening to a telephone that relays the conversation of two friends at an office with a speakerphone, I can hear their relative position and the shape of the room, though I find it hard to know why.

It seems to me that vision's role as queen of the senses or whatever remains incomplete in something like the way Deleuze and Guattari describe such things in 1,000 plateaux. At the same time, Berger probably does have some point. Vision would seem to be substantive, whereas audition provides modification. What I see is, roughly, or I assume it to be, whereas I might say how I feel about it, and I might feel the tenor of your own commentary if I hear you. Like nouns, vision appears as self-identified, extensivle, relatively durable, Apollonian in Nietszche's sense. Sound operates more like verbs -- temporal, ephemeral, Dionysiac and so forth.

Well and good. Yet Berger also recognizes constructive and temporal aspects of seeing. "We only see what we look at" (8) of course. But the pattern of dark and light on Franz Hals' late portraits of the governers and governesses of an alms house constitute a rhythm, with implications for visual temporality, and, better yet, all this actually DOES relate to Hals' own relationships with these folks, and identifable social concerns, without for a second jettisoning formal considerations (12-13). Likewise, the relationship of the mythologies of art as these articulate between social classes is also analyzed (24). Such considerations allow Berger to conclude that "What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it -- or rather, to remove its images which tey reproduce -- from any preserve" (32) and "The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. It's authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose" (33).

Berger straightforwardly credits Benjamin for some of the ideas.