Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  The social and economic modes of appropriation changed a great deal during the five centuries. In fifteenth-century painting the reference was often directly to what was depicted in the painting — marble floors, golden pillars, rich textiles, jewels, silverware. By the sixteenth century it was no longer assembled or hoarded riches which the painting rendered up to the spectator-owner but, thanks to the unity that chiaroscuro could give to the most dramatic actions, whole scenes complete with their events and protagonists. These scenes were ‘ownable’ to the degree that the spectator understood that wealth could produce and control action at a distance. In the eighteenth century the tradition divided into two streams. In one, simple middle-class properties were celebrated, in the other the aristocratic right to buy performances and to direct an unending theatre.

  I am in front of a typical European nude. She is painted with extreme sensuous emphasis. Yet her sexuality is only superficially manifest in her actions or her own expression; in a comparable figure within other art traditions this would not be so. Why? Because for Europe ownership is primary. The painting’s sexuality is manifest not in what it shows but in the owner-spectator’s (mine in this case) right to see her naked. Her nakedness is not a function of her sexuality but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture. In the majority of European nudes there is a close parallel with the passivity which is endemic to prostitution.

  It has been said that the European painting is like a window open on to the world. Purely optically this may be the case. But is it not as much like a safe, let into the wall, in which the visible has been deposited?

  So far I have considered the methods of painting, the means of representation. Now to consider what the paintings showed, their subject matter. There were special categories of subjects: portraits, landscapes, still life, genre pictures of ‘low life’. Each category might well be studied separately within the same general perspective which I have suggested. (Think of the tens of thousands of still-life canvases depicting game shot or bagged: the numerous genre pictures about procuring or accosting: the innumerable uniformed portraits of office.) I want, however, to concentrate on the category which was always considered the noblest and the most central to the tradition — paintings of religious or mythological subjects.

  Certain basic Christian subjects occurred in art long before the rise of the easel painting. Yet described in frescoes or sculpture or stained glass their function and their social, as distinct from purely iconographic, meaning was very different. A fresco presents its subject within a given context — say that of a chapel devoted to a particular saint. The subject applies to what is structurally around it and to what is likely to happen around it; the spectator, who is also a worshipper, becomes part of that context. The easel picture is without a precise physical or emotional context because it is transportable.

  Instead of presenting its subject within a larger whole it offers its subject to whoever owns it. Thus its subject applies to the life of its owner. A primitive transitional example of this principle working are the crucifixions or nativities in which those who commissioned the painting, the donors, are actually painted in standing at the foot of the cross or kneeling around the crib. Later, they did not need to be painted in because physical ownership of the painting guaranteed their immanent presence within it.

  Yet how did hundreds of somewhat esoteric subjects apply to the lives of those who owned paintings of them? The sources of the subjects were not real events or rituals but texts. To a unique degree European art was a visual art deriving from literature. Familiarity with these texts or at least with their personae was the prerogative of the privileged minority. The majority of such paintings would have been readable as representational images but unreadable as language because they were ignorant of what they signified. In this respect if in no other most of us today are a little like that majority. What exactly happened to St Ursula? we ask. Exactly why did Andromeda find herself chained to the rocks?

  This specialized knowledge of the privileged minority supplied them with a system of references by which to express subtly and evocatively the values and ideals of the life lived by their class. (For the last vestiges of this tradition note the moral value still sometimes ascribed to the study of the classics.) Religious and mythological paintings were something more than mere illustration of their separate subjects; together they constituted a system which classified and idealized reality according to the cultural interest of the ruling classes. They supplied a visual etiquette — a series of examples showing how significant moments in life should be envisaged. One needs to remember that, before the photograph or the cinema, painting alone offered recorded evidence of what people or events looked like or should look like.

  Paintings applied to the lives of their spectator-owners because they showed how these lives should ideally appear at their heightened moments of religious faith, heroic action, sensuous abandon, contrition, tenderness, anger, courageous death, the dignified exercise of power, etc. They were like garments held out for the spectator-owners to put their arms into and wear. Hence the great attention paid to the verisimilitude of the texture of the things portrayed.

  The spectator-owners did not identify themselves with the subjects of the paintings. Empathy occurs at a simpler and more spontaneous level of appreciation. The subjects did not even confront the spectator-owners as an exterior force; they were already theirs. Instead, the spectator-owners identified themselves in the subject. They saw themselves or their imagined selves covered over by the subject’s idealized appearances. They found in them the guise of what they believed to be their own humanity.

  The typical religious or mythological painting from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth was extraordinarily vacuous. We only fail to see this because we are deceived by the cultural overlay that art history has given these pictures. In the typical painting the figures are only superficially related to their painted surroundings; they appear detachable from them: their faces are expressionless: their vast bodies are stereotyped and limp — limp even in action. This cannot be explained by the artist’s clumsiness or lack of talent; primitive works, even of a low order of imagination, are infinitely more expressive. These paintings are vacuous because it was their function, as established by usage and tradition, to be empty. They needed to be empty. They were not meant to express or inspire; they were meant to clothe the systematic fantasies of their owners.

  The easel picture lent itself by its means of representation to a metaphorical appropriation of the material world: by its iconography to the appropriation by a small privileged minority of all ‘the human values’ of Christianity and the classic world.

  I see a rather undistinguished Dutch seventeenth-century self-portrait. Yet the look of the painter has a quality which is not uncommon in self-portraits. A look of probing amazement. A look which shows slight questioning of what it sees.

  There have been paintings which have transcended the tradition to which they belong. These paintings pertain to a true humanity. They bear witness to their artists’ intuitive awareness that life was larger than the available traditional means of representing it and that its dramas were more urgent than conventional iconography could now allow. The mistake is to confuse these exceptions with the norms of the tradition.

  The tradition and its norms are worth studying, for in them we can find evidence such as exists nowhere else of the way that the European ruling classes saw the world and themselves. We can discover the typology of their fantasies. We can see life rearranged to frame their own image. And occasionally we can glimpse even in works that are not exceptional — usually in landscapes because they relate to experiences of solitude in which the imagination is less confined by social usage — a tentative vision of another kind of freedom, a freedom other than the right to appropriate.

  In one sense every culture appropriates or tries to make the actual and possible world its own. In a somewhat different sense all men acquire experience for themselves. Wha
t distinguishes post-Renaissance European practice from that of any other culture is its transformation of everything which is acquired into a commodity; consequently, everything becomes exchangeable. Nothing is appropriated for its own sake. Every object and every value is transmutable into another — even into its opposite. In Capital, Marx quotes Christopher Columbus writing in 1503: ‘By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise.’ Nothing exists in itself. This is the essential spiritual violence of European capitalism.

  Ideally the easel picture is framed. The frame emphasizes that within its four edges the picture has established an enclosed, coherent and absolutely rigorous system of its own. The frame marks the frontier of the realm of an autonomous order. The demands of composition and of the picture’s illusory but all-pervasive three-dimensional space constitute the rigid laws of this order. Into this order are fitted representations of real figures and objects.

  All the imitative skill of the tradition is concentrated upon making these representations look as tangibly real as possible. Yet each part submits to an abstract and artificial order of the whole. (Formalist analyses of paintings and all the classic demonstrations of compositional rules prove the degree of this submission.) The parts look real but in fact they are ciphers. They are ciphers within a comprehensive yet invisible and closed system which nevertheless pretends to be open and natural.

  Such is the tyranny exercised by the easel painting, and from it arises the fundamental criterion for judging between the typical and the exceptional within the European tradition. Does what is depicted insist upon the unique value of its original being or has it succumbed to the tyranny of the system?

  Today visual images no longer serve as a source of private pleasure and confirmation for the European ruling classes; rather, they have become a vehicle for its power over others through the mass media and publicity. Yet it is false to draw a comparison between these recent commercial developments and the hallowed tradition of European art. Their references may be different: they may serve a different immediate purpose; but their determining principle is the same — a man is what he possesses.

  Delacroix was, I think, the first painter to suspect some of what the tradition of the easel picture entailed. Later, other artists questioned the tradition and opposed it more violently. Cézanne quietly destroyed it from within. Significantly, the two most sustained and radical attempts to create an alternative tradition occurred in the 1920s in Russia and Mexico, countries where the European model had been arbitrarily imposed on their own indigenous art traditions.

  To most young artists today it is axiomatic that the period of the easel picture is finished. In their works they try to establish new categories in terms of media, form and response. Yet the tradition dies hard and still exerts an enormous influence on our view of the past, our ideas about the role of the visual artist and our definition of civilization. Why has it taken so long to die?

  Because the so-called Fine Arts, although they have found new materials and new means, have found no new social function to take the place of the easel picture’s outdated one. It is beyond the power of artists alone to create a new social function for art. Such a new function will only be born of revolutionary social change. Then it may become possible for artists to work truly concretely and constructively with reality itself, to work with what men are really like rather than with a visual etiquette serving the interests of a privileged minority; then it may be that art will re-establish contact with what European art has always dismissed — with that which cannot be appropriated.

  1970

  The Nature of Mass Demonstrations

  Seventy-three years ago (on 6 May 1898) there was a massive demonstration of workers, men and women, in the centre of Milan. The events which led up to it involve too long a history to treat with here. The demonstration was attacked and broken up by the army under the command of General Beccaris. At noon the cavalry charged the crowd: the unarmed workers tried to make barricades: martial law was declared and for three days the army fought against the unarmed.

  The official casualty figures were 100 workers killed and 450 wounded. One policeman was killed accidentally by a soldier. There were no army casualties. (Two years later Umberto I was assassinated because after the massacre he publicly congratulated General Beccaris, the ‘butcher of Milan’.)

  I have been trying to understand certain aspects of the demonstration in the Corso Venezia on 6 May because of a story I am writing. In the process I came to a few conclusions about demonstrations which may perhaps be more widely applicable.

  Mass demonstrations should be distinguished from riots or revolutionary uprisings although, under certain (now rare) circumstances, they may develop into either of the latter. The aims of a riot are usually immediate (the immediacy matching the desperation they express): the seizing of food, the release of prisoners, the destruction of property. The aims of a revolutionary uprising are long-term and comprehensive: they culminate in the taking over of state power. The aims of a demonstration, however, are symbolic: it demonstrates a force that is scarcely used.

  A large number of people assemble together in an obvious and already announced public place. They are more or less unarmed. (On 6 May 1898, entirely unarmed.) They present themselves as a target to the forces of repression serving the state authority against whose policies they are protesting.

  Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the state. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.

  If the state authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat. (A demonstration in support of an already established alternative state authority — as when Garibaldi entered Naples in 1860 — is a special case and may be immediately effective.)

  Demonstrations took place before the principle of democracy was even nominally admitted. The massive early Chartist demonstrations were part of the struggle to obtain such an admission. The crowds who gathered to present their petition to the Czar in St Petersburg in 1905 were appealing — and presenting themselves as a target — to the ruthless power of an absolute monarchy. In the event — as on so many hundreds of other occasions all over Europe — they were shot down.

  It would seem that the true function of demonstrations is not to convince the existing state authority to any significant degree. Such an aim is only a convenient rationalization.

  The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delays between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality — the intensity of rehearsed awareness — may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.

  A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lie its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.

  A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function, instead of forming in response to one: in this it differs from any assembly of workers within their place of work — even when strike action is involved — or from any crowd of spectators. It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.

  State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference. (It would only make a significant difference if demonstrations really were an appeal to the democratic conscience of the state.) The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbe
rs and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.

  I say metaphor because the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present, and certainly their actual strength as deployed in a demonstration. The more people are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognize that the function of their class need no longer be limited; that it, too, like the demonstration itself, can create its own function.

  Revolutionary awareness is rehearsed in another way by the choice and effect of location. Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones — railway stations, barracks, radio stations, airports. A mass demonstration can be interpreted as the symbolic capturing of a city or capital. Again, the symbolism or metaphor is for the benefit of the participants.

  The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They ‘cut off’ these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatize the power they still lack.

  The demonstrators’ view of the city surrounding their stage also changes. By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence — greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic — than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.