Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  A painting can be pitiful?

  How is pity made visible?

  Perhaps it’s born in the spectator in face of the picture?

  Why does one work produce pity when another does not? I don’t believe pity comes into it. A lamb chop painted by Goya touches more pity than a massacre by Delacroix.

  So, how does catharsis work?

  It doesn’t. Paintings don’t offer catharsis. They offer something else, similar but different.

  What?

  I don’t know. That’s why I want to see the Holbein.

  We thought the Holbein was in Berne. The evening we arrived we discovered it was in Basel. Because we had just crossed the Alps on a motorbike, the extra hundred kilometres seemed too far. The following morning we visited instead the museum in Berne.

  It is a quiet, well-lit gallery rather like a space vessel in a film by Kubrick or Tarkovsky. Visitors are asked to pin their entrance tickets on to their lapels. We wandered from room to room. A Courbet of three trout, 1873. A Monet of ice breaking up on a river, 1882. An early cubist Braque of houses in L’Estaque, 1908. A love song with a new moon by Paul Klee, 1939. A Rothko, 1963.

  How much courage and energy were necessary to struggle for the right to paint in different ways! And today these canvases, outcome of that struggle, hang peacefully beside the most conservative pictures: all united within the agreeable aroma of coffee, wafted from the cafeteria next to the book shop.

  The battles were fought over what? At its simplest — over the language of painting. No painting is possible without a pictorial language, yet with the birth of modernism after the French Revolution, the use of any language was always controversial. The battles were between custodians and innovators. The custodians belonged to institutions that had behind them a ruling class or an élite who needed appearances to be rendered in a way which sustained the ideological basis of their power.

  The innovators were rebels. Two axioms to bear in mind here: sedition is, by definition, ungrammatical; the artist is the first to recognize when a language is lying. I was drinking my second cup of coffee and still wondering about the Holbein, a hundred kilometres away.

  Hypolyte in The Idiot goes on to say: ‘When you look at this painting, you picture nature as a monster, dumb and implacable. Or rather — and however unexpected the comparison may be it is closer to the truth, much closer — you picture nature as an enormous modern machine, unfeeling, dumb, which snatched, crushed and swallowed up a great Being, a Being beyond price, who, alone, is worth the whole of nature …’

  Did the Holbein so shock Dostoevsky because it was the opposite of an ikon? The ikon redeems by the prayers it encourages with closed eyes. Is it possible that the courage not to shut one’s eyes can offer another kind of redemption?

  I found myself before a landscape painted at the beginning of the century by an artist called Caroline Müller — Alpine Chalets at Sulward near Isenflushul. The problem about painting mountains is always the same. The technique is dwarfed (like we all are) by the mountain, so the mountain doesn’t live; it’s just there, like the tombstone of a distant grey or white ancestor. The only European exceptions I know are Turner, David Bomberg and the contemporary Berlin painter Werner Schmidt.

  In Caroline Müller’s rather dull canvas three small apple trees made me take in my breath. They had been seen. Their having-been-seen could be felt across eighty years. In that little bit of the picture the pictorial language the painter was using ceased to be just accomplished and became urgent.

  Any language as taught always has a tendency to close, to lose its original signifying power. When this happens it can go straight to the cultivated mind, but it bypasses the thereness of things and events.

  ‘Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.’

  Without a pictorial language, nobody can render what they see. With one, they may stop seeing. Such is the odd dialectic of the practice of painting or drawing appearances since art began.

  We came to an immense room with fifty canvases by Ferdinand Hodler. A gigantic life’s work. Yet in only one of the paintings had he forgotten his accomplishment and could we forget that we were looking at virtuoso pigment. It was a relatively small picture and it showed the painter’s friend, Augustine Dupin, dying in her bed. Augustine was seen. The language, in being used, had opened.

  Was the Jew who drowned in the Rhine seen in this sense by the twenty-five-year-old Holbein? And what might this being-seen mean?

  I returned to look at the paintings I’d studied earlier. In the Courbet of the three fish, hanging gaffed from a branch, a strange light permeates their plumpness and their wet skins. It has nothing to do with glistening. It is not on the surface but comes through it. A similar but not identical light (it’s more granular) is also transmitted through the pebbles on the river’s edge. This light-energy is the true subject of the painting.

  In the Monet the ice on the river is beginning to break up. Between the jagged opaque pieces of ice there is water. In this water (but not of course on the ice) Monet could see the still reflections of the poplars on the far bank. And these reflections, glimpsed behind the ice, are the heart of the painting.

  In the Braque of L’Estaque, the cubes and triangles of the houses and the V forms of the trees are not imposed upon what his eye saw (as happens later with the mannerists of cubism), but somehow drawn from it, brought forward from behind, salvaged from where the appearances had begun to come into being and had not yet achieved their full particularity.

  In the Rothko the same movement is even clearer. His life’s ambition was to reduce the substance of the apparent to a pellicle thinness, aglow with what lay behind. Behind the grey rectangle lies mother-of-pearl, behind the narrow brown one, the iodine of the sea. Both oceanic.

  Rothko was a consciously religious painter. Yet Courbet was not. If one thinks of appearances as a frontier, one might say that painters search for messages which cross the frontier: messages which come from the back of the visible. And this, not because all painters are Platonists, but because they look so hard.

  Image-making begins with interrogating appearances and making marks. Every artist discovers that drawing — when it is an urgent activity — is a two-way process. To draw is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive. When the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one, through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing. Giacometti’s life’s work is a demonstration of this.

  The encounter of these two energies, their dialogue, does not have the form of question and answer. It is a ferocious and inarticulated dialogue. To sustain it requires faith. It is like a burrowing in the dark, a burrowing under the apparent. The great images occur when the two tunnels meet and join perfectly. Sometimes when the dialogue is swift, almost instantaneous, it is like something thrown and caught.

  I offer no explanation for this experience. I simply believe very few artists will deny it. It’s a professional secret.

  The act of painting — when its language opens — is a response to an energy which is experienced as coming from behind the given set of appearances. What is this energy? Might one call it the will of the visible that sight should exist? Meister Eckardt talked about the same reciprocity when he wrote: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me.’ It is the symmetry of the energies which offers us a clue here, not the theology.

  Every real act of painting is the result of submitting to that will, so that in the painted version the visible is not just interpreted but allowed to take its place actively in the community of the painted. Every event which has been really painted — so that the pictorial language opens — joins the community of everything else that has been painted. Potatoes on a plate join the community of a loved woman, a mountain, or a man on a cross. This — and this only — is the redemption which painting offers. This mystery is the nearest painting can offer to catharsis.

  1987


  Ape Theatre

  In memory of Peter Fuller and our many conversations about the chain of being and Neo-Darwinism

  In Basel the zoo is almost next to the railway station. Most of the larger birds in the zoo are free-flying, and so it can happen that you see a stork or a cormorant flying home over the marshalling yards. Equally unexpected is the ape house. It is constructed like a circular theatre with three stages: one for the gorillas, another for the orang-utans and a third for the chimpanzees.

  You take your place on one of the tiers — as in a Greek theatre — or you can go to the very front of the pit, and press your forehead against the soundproof plate glass. The lack of sound makes the spectacle on the other side, in a certain way, sharper, like mime. It also allows the apes to be less bothered by the public. We are mute to them too.

  All my life I’ve visited zoos, perhaps because going to the zoo is one of my few happy childhood memories. My father used to take me. We didn’t talk much, but we shared each other’s pleasure, and I was well aware that his was largely based on mine. We used to watch the apes together, losing all sense of time, each of us, in his fashion, pondering the mystery of progeniture. My mother, on the rare occasions she came with us, refused the higher primates. She preferred the newly found pandas.

  I tried to persuade her, but she would reply, following her own logic: ‘I’m a vegetarian and I only gave it up, the practice not the principle, for the sake of you boys and for Daddy.’ Bears were another animal she liked. Apes, I can see now, reminded her of the passions which lead to the spilling of blood.

  The audience in Basel is of all ages. From toddlers to pensioners. No other spectacle in the world can attract such a wide spectrum of the public. Some sit, like my father and I once did, lost to the passing of time. Others drop in for a few moments. There are habitués who come every day and whom the actors recognize. But on nobody — not even the youngest toddler — is the dramatic evolutionary riddle lost: how is it that they are so like us and yet not us?

  This is the question which dominates the dramas on each of the three stages. Today the gorillas’ play is a social one about coming to terms with imprisonment. Life sentences. The chimpanzees’ is cabaret, for each performer has her or his own number. The orang-utans’ is Werther without words — soulful and dreamy. I am exaggerating? Of course, because I do not yet know how to define the real drama of the theatre in Basel.

  Is theatre possible without an awareness of re-enactment, which is related to a sense of death? Probably not. But perhaps both, almost, exist here.

  Each stage has at least one private recess where an animal can go if she or he wishes to leave the public. From time to time they do so. Sometimes for quite long periods. When they come out to face the audience again, they are perhaps not so far from a practice of re-enactment. In the London zoo chimps pretended to eat and drink off invisible plates with nonexistent glasses. A pantomime.

  As for a sense of death, chimpanzees are as familiar as we are with fear, and the Dutch zoologist Dr Kortlaudt believes they have intimations of mortality.

  In the first half of the century there were attempts to teach chimpanzees to talk — until it was discovered that the form of their vocal tract was unsuitable for the production of the necessary range of sounds. Later they were taught a deaf and dumb language, and a chimp called Washoe in Ellensburg, Washington, called a duck a water bird. Did this mean that Washoe had broken through a language barrier, or had she just learnt by rote? A heated debate followed (the distinction of man was at stake!) about what does or does not constitute a language for animals.

  It was already known — thanks to the extraordinary work of Jane Goodall, who lived with her chimpanzees in the wild in Tanzania — that these animals used tools, and that, language or no language, their ability to communicate with one another was both wide-ranging and subtle.

  Another chimpanzee in the United States named Sarah underwent a series of tests, conducted by Douglas Gillan, which were designed to show whether or not she could reason. Contrary to what Descartes believed, a verbal language may not be indispensable for the process of reasoning. Sarah was shown a video of her trainer playing the part of being locked in a cage and desperately trying to get out! After the film she was offered a series of pictures of varying objects to choose from. One, for instance, showed a lighted match. The picture she chose was of a key — the only object which would have been useful for the situation she had seen enacted on the video screen.

  In Basel we are watching a strange theatre in which, on both sides of the glass, the performers may believe they are an audience. On both sides the drama begins with resemblance and the uneasy relationship that exists between resemblance and closeness.

  The idea of evolution is very old. Hunters believed that animals — and especially the ones they hunted — were in some mysterious way their brothers. Aristotle argued that all the forms of nature constituted a series, a chain of being, which began with the simple and became more and more complex, striving towards the perfect. In Latin evolution means unfolding.

  A group of handicapped patients from a local institution come into the theatre. Some have to be helped up the tiers, others manage by themselves, one or two are in wheelchairs. They form a different kind of audience — or rather, an audience with different reactions. They are less puzzled, less astounded, but more amused. Like children? Not at all. They are less puzzled because they are more familiar with what is out of the ordinary. Or, to put it another way, their sense of the norm is far wider.

  What was new and outrageous in The Origin of Species when it was first published in 1859 was Darwin’s argument that all animal species had evolved from the same prototype, and that this immensely slow evolution had taken place through certain accidental mutations being favoured by natural selection, which had worked according to the principle of the survival of the fittest. A series of accidents. Without design or purpose and without experience counting. (Darwin rejected Lamarck’s thesis that acquired characteristics could be inherited.) The pre-condition for Darwin’s theory being plausible was something even more shocking: the wastes of empty time required: about 500 million years!

  Until the nineteenth century it was generally, if not universally, believed that the world was a few thousand years old — something that could be measured by the time scale of human generations. (As in Genesis, chapter 5.) But in 1830 Charles Lyell published The Principles of Geology and proposed that the earth, with ‘no vestige of a beginning — no prospect of an end’, was millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of years old.

  Darwin’s thinking was a creative response to the terrifying immensity of what had just been opened up. And the sadness of Darwinism — for no other scientific revolution, when it was made, broadcast so little hope — derived, I think, from the desolation of the distances involved.

  The sadness, the desolation, is there in the last sentence of The Descent of Man, published in 1871: ‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’

  ‘The indelible stamp’ speaks volumes. ‘Indelible’ in the sense that (unfortunately) it cannot be washed out. ‘Stamp’ meaning ‘brand, mark, stain’. And in the word ‘lowly’ during the nineteenth century, as in Thatcher’s Britain, there is shame.

  The liberty of the newly opened-up space-time of the universe brought with it a feeling of insignificance and pudeur, from which the best that could be redeemed was the virtue of intellectual courage, the virtue of being unflinching. And courageous the thinkers of that time were!

  Whenever an actor who is not a baby wants to piss or shit, he or she gets up and goes to the edge of a balcony or deck, and there defecates or urinates below, so as to remain clean. An habitual act which we seldom see enacted on the stage. And the effect is surprising. The public watch with a kind of pride. An altogether legitimate one. Don’t shit yourself. Soon we’ll be entering another century. />
  Mostly, the thinkers of the nineteenth century thought mechanically, for theirs was the century of machines. They thought in terms of chains, branches, lines, comparative anatomies, clockworks, grids. They knew about power, resistance, speed, competition. Consequently, they discovered a great deal about the material world, about tools and production. What they knew less about is what we still don’t know much about: the way brains work. I can’t get this out of my mind: it’s somewhere at the centre of the theatre we’re watching.

  Apes don’t live entirely within the needs and impulses of their own bodies — like the cats do. (It may be different in the wild, but this is true on the stage.) They have a gratuitous curiosity. All animals play, but the others play at being themselves, whereas the apes experiment. They suffer from a surplus of curiosity. They can momentarily forget their needs, or any single unchanging role. A young female will pretend to be a mother cuddling a baby lent by its real mother. ‘Baby-sitting,’ the zoologists call it.

  Their surplus of curiosity, their research (every animal searches, only apes research) make them suffer in two evident ways — and probably also in others, invisibly. Their bodies, forgotten, suddenly nag, twinge, and irritate. They become impatient with their own skin — like Marat suffering from eczema.

  And then too, starved of events, they suffer boredom. Baudelaire’s l’ennui. Not at the same level of self-doubt, but nevertheless with pain, apathy. The signs of boredom may resemble those of simple drowsiness. But l’ennui has its unmistakable lassitude. The body, instead of relaxing, huddles, the eyes stare painfully without focus, the hands, finding nothing new to touch or do, become like gloves worn by a creature drowning.

  ’If it could be demonstrated,’ Darwin wrote, ‘that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’