by John Berger
This polarity covers that of interior / exterior, but is not confined to it. For example, as well as separating carpet from earth, it separates milk and cow, perfume and stench, pleasure and ache. The popular luxuries – honey-sweet to the tooth, shiny to the eye, silken to the touch, fresh to the nose – offer amends for the natural foulness of the world. Many Turkish popular expressions and insults play across this polarity. ‘He thinks,’ they say about someone who is conceited, ‘that he’s the parsley in everyone’s shit.’
Applied to class distinction, this same polarity of purity / foulness becomes vicious. The faces of the rich bourgeois women of Istanbul, sick with idleness, fat with sweetmeats, are among the most pitiless I have seen.
When friends of mine were prisoners in the Selemiye barracks, their wives took them attar of roses and essence of lemons.
The ferry also carries lorries. On the tailboard of a lorry from Konya is written: ‘The money I make I earn with my own hands, so may Allah bless me.’ The driver, with grey hair, is leaning against the bonnet, drinking tea out of a small, gilt-rimmed glass. On every deck there are vendors of tea with such glasses and bowls of sugar on brilliant copper trays. The tea drinkers sip, relax, and look at the shining water of the Bosphorus. Despite the thousands of passengers carried daily, the ferry boats are almost as clean as interiors. There are no streets to compare with their decks.
On each side of the lorry from Konya, the driver has had a small landscape painted. Both show a lake surrounded by hills. Above is the all-seeing eye, almond-shaped with long lashes, like a bridegroom’s. The painted water of the lakes suggests peace and stillness. As he sips his tea, the driver talks to three small, dark-skinned men with passionate eyes. The passion may be personal, but it is also the passion you can see all over the world in the eyes of proud and oppressed minorities. The three men are Kurds.
Both in the main streets of Istanbul, and in the back streets where there are chickens and sheep, you see porters carrying bales of cloth, sheets of metal, carpets, machine parts, sacks of grain, furniture, packing cases. Most of these porters are Kurds from eastern Anatolia, on the borders of Iraq and Iran. They carry everything where the lorries cannot. And because the industrial part of the city is full of small workshops in streets too narrow for lorries, there is a great deal to carry from workplace to workplace.
Fixed to their backs is a kind of saddle, on which the load is piled and corded high above their heads. This way of carrying, and the weight of the loads, obliges them to stoop. They walk, when loaded, like jack knives half-shut. The three now listening to the lorry driver are sitting on their own saddles, sipping tea, gazing at the water and the approach to the Golden Horn. The cords with which they fasten their loads lie loose between their feet on the deck.
Altogether, the crossing takes twenty minutes (about the time needed to read this article). Beside the landing stage rowing boats rock in the choppy water. In some of them fires burn, the flames dancing to the rhythm of the slapping water. Over the fires, men are frying fish to sell to those on their way to work.
Beyond these pans – almost as wide as the boat – of frying fish lie all the energies and torpor of the city: the workshops, the markets, the mafia, the Galata Bridge on which the crowd walking across is invariably twenty abreast (the bridge is a floating one and incessantly, almost imperceptibly, quivers like a horse’s flank), the schools, the newspaper offices, the shanty towns, the abattoir, the headquarters of the political parties, the gunsmiths, the merchants, soldiers, beggars.
These are the last moments of peace before the driver starts up the engine of his lorry, and the porters hurry to the stern of the ship to be among the first to jump ashore. The tea vendors are collecting the empty glasses. It is as if, during the crossing, the Bosphorus induces the same mood as the painted lakes: as if the ferry boat, built in Glasgow in 1961, becomes an immense floating carpet, suspended in time above the shining water, between home and work, between effort and effort, between two continents. And this suspension, which I remember so vividly, corresponds now to the destiny of the country.
1979
The Theatre of Indifference
A story I want to write soon concerns a man from a remote village who settles in a city. A very old story. But the late-twentieth-century city has changed the old story’s meaning. Such a city, in its extreme form, I see as white and northern. Climate helps a little to regulate the frontier between public and private. A Mediterranean city, or a city in the south in the United States, is of a slightly different character.
How does such a city, in its extreme form, first strike the villager? To do justice to his impression, one must understand what is impressing him. One cannot accept the city’s version of itself. The city has at least as many illusions about itself as he, at first, has about it.
Most things look or sound unfamiliar to him: buildings, traffic, crowds, lights, goods, words, perspectives. This newness is both shocking and exciting. It underlines the incredibility of the sentence: I am here.
Quickly, however, he has to find his way among people. At first he assumes that they are a traditional element in the city: that they are more or less like men and women he and his father knew. What distinguishes them are their possessions – including their ideas: but relations with them will be more or less similar. Soon he sees this is not the case. Between their expressions, under their words, through accompanying gestures of hand and body, in their glances, a mysterious and constant exchange is taking place. He asks: what is happening?
If the storyteller places himself equidistant from city and village, he may be able to offer a descriptive answer. But it will not be immediately accessible to the questioner. Economic need has forced the villager to the city. Once there, his ideological transformation begins with his questions not being answered.
A young woman crosses the street, or the bar, using every part of her body, her mouth, her eyes to proclaim her nubility. (He calls her shameless to himself, but explains it in terms of what he assumes to be her insatiable sexuality.) Two young men pretend to fight to attract the girl’s attention. Circling one another like tom-cats, they never strike a blow. (He calls them rivals, armed with knives.) The girl watches them with a bored look. (He calls her too frightened to show emotion.) Police enter. The two immediately stop fighting. The faces of the police are without a trace of expression. Their eyes scan the public and they walk off. (He calls their impassiveness impartiality). The mythic quality and appeal of the early Chaplin lay in his spontaneous ability to act out so convincingly such ‘innocent’ misinterpretations of the city.
For the first time the villager is seeing caricatures, not drawn on paper, but alive.
Graphic caricature began in eighteenth-century England and then had a second lease of life in nineteenth-century France. Today it is dead because life has outstripped it. Or, more accurately, because satire is only possible when a moral reserve still exists, and those reserves have been used up. We are too used to being appalled by ourselves to be able to react to the idea of caricature. Originally the tradition of graphic caricature constituted a rural critique of the towns, and it flourished when large areas of the countryside were first being absorbed by the new cities but before the norms of the city were accepted as natural. Drawn caricature exaggerated to the point of absurdity when compared with the supposed ‘even tenor’ of life. Living caricatures imply a life of unprecedented fervour, danger and hope; and to the outsider it is his exclusion from this exaggerated ‘super-life’ which now appears absurd.
Graphic caricatures were of social types. Their typology took account of social class, temperament, character and physique. Their content invoked class interests and social justice. The living caricatures are simply creatures of immediate circumstance. They involve no continuity. They are behaviourist. They are not caricatures of character but of performance. The roles performed may be influenced by social class. (The girl crossing the street or bar in that particular way is likely to belong to the
petit rather than grand bourgeoisie; the police are mostly working class; and so on.) But the contingencies of the immediate situation hide the essential class conditions. Likewise the judgement the living caricature demands has nothing to do with social justice, but with the success or failure of the individual performance. The sum total of these performances make a collectivity. But it is the collectivity of theatre. Not a theatre of the absurd as some dramatic critics once believed, but a theatre of indifference.
Most public life in the city belongs to this theatre. Two activities, however, are excluded. The first is productive labour. And the second is the exercise of real power. These have become hidden, non-public activities. The assembly line is as private – in this sense – as the President’s telephone. Public life concerns inessentials upon which the public have been persuaded to fix their hopes. Yet truth is not so easily ousted. It returns to transform public life into theatre. If a lie is accepted as truth, the real truth turns the false one into a merely theatrical truth.
The very cohesion of public life is now charged with this theatricality. Often it extends into domestic life – but here it is less evident to the newly arrived villager. In public nobody can escape it; everyone is forced to be either spectator or performer. Some performers perform their refusal to perform. They play insignificant ‘little men’, or, if they are many, they may play a cohort of ‘the silent majority’. The change-over from performer to spectator is almost instantaneous. It is also possible to be both at the same time: to be a performer towards one’s immediate entourage and the spectator of a larger more distant performance. For example: at a railway station or in a restaurant.
The indifference is between spectator and performer. Between audience and players. The experience of every performer – that’s to say everyone – has led him to believe that, as soon as he begins, the audience will leave, the theatre will empty. Equally, the experience of every spectator has led him to expect that the performance of another will be irrelevant and indifferent to his own personal situation.
The aim of the performer is to prevent at least a few members of the audience from leaving. His fear is to find himself performing in an empty theatre. (This can happen even when he is physically surrounded by hundreds of people.) There is an inverse ratio of numbers. If a performer chooses an audience of a hundred, he is, in one sense, further from his fear of an empty theatre. But a hundred can leave in seconds. If he chooses an audience of three, he will be able to hold at least one of them back for a longer period – until this third person is forced to perform boredom or indifference.
Performing in the theatre of indifference inevitably leads to assuming and cultivating exaggerated expressions. Including expressions of uninterest, independence, nonchalance. It leads to the hamming of everyday life. The most usual final appeal to the departing audience is violence. This may be in words (swearing, threats, shouts), in grimaces, or in action. Some crimes which take place are the theatre’s purest expression.
Exaggeration and violence become habitual. The violence is in the address of the exaggeration. In this sense the girl’s performed nubility was as violent as a pointed gun. Gradually the habit of exaggeration informs the physical being of the performer. He becomes the living caricature of the expression towards which he is most generally forced, either by temperament or situation, in his performances.
The existence of the theatre makes itself felt when there is not even a second person present, when the minimum requirement for any performance (two people) is lacking. Solitude is confused with the triumph of indifference and made entirely negative. The emptied theatre becomes the image of silence itself. To be alone in silence is to have failed to retain a single member of the audience. Hence the compulsive need to walk on again: to the corner shop to buy an evening paper; to the pub for half a pint. This helps to define the particular pathos of the old in the city.
Only one thing can defeat indifference: a star performance. The star is credited with all that has been suppressed in each spectator. The star is the only form of idol in the modern city. He fills the theatre. He promises that no indifference is final.
Following the example of the great stars, who occur in every spectacular activity from sport through crime to politics, everyone can aspire to be a small star of an occasion. If there are six customers in a shop, any one of them can be made a star, by the consensus of those present, elevated, for a brief instant, to that status by a remark, a reaction or a knack of physical presence. In a crowd on an escalator, in a line of traffic at the traffic lights, in a queue at the guichet, there is a chance, like that of winning a sweepstake, for anyone to briefly fill the theatre. During that instant a purely urban pleasure passes over the temporary star’s face. An unexpectedly coy pleasure, comprising modesty and conceit. Like the pleasure of a child praised for something he has done by accident.
The theatre of indifference should not be subsumed under the artificiality of city life. It is a new phenomenon. The social life of a village is artificial in the sense that it is highly formalized. A village funeral, for example, is more, not less, formalized than any contemporary public event in a city. The antithesis of the theatre of indifference is not spontaneous simplicity, but drama in which both the principal protagonists and the audience have a common interest.
The historical precondition for the theatre of indifference is that everyone is consciously and helplessly dependent in most areas of their life on the opinions and decisions of others. To put it symbolically: the theatre is built on the ruins of the forum. Its precondition is the failure of democracy. The indifference is the result of the inevitable divergence of personal fantasies when isolated from any effective social action. The indifference is born of the equation between excessive mobility of private fantasy and social political stasis.
In the theatre of indifference, appearances hide failure, words hide facts, and symbols hide what they refer to.
A villager cannot conceive of the theatre of indifference. He has never seen people producing such a surplus of expression over and above what is necessary to express themselves. And so he assumes that their hidden lives are as rich and mysterious as their expressions are extreme. He demeans himself because he cannot yet see the invisible – that which, according to his imagination, must lie behind their expressions and behaviour. He believes that what is happening in the city exceeds his imagination and his previous dreams. Tragically he is right.
1975
Modigliani’s Alphabet of Love
The photographs show a man who fits his own laconic description of himself: born in Livorno, Jew, painter. Sad, vital, furious and tender, a man never quite filling his own appearance, a man searching behind appearances. A man who painted unseeing eyes – often closed, and even when open without iris or pupils, and yet eyes which in their very absence speak. A man whose intimacy had always to traverse great distances. A man maybe like music, present and yet detached from the visible. And nevertheless a painter.
With Van Gogh, Modigliani is probably one of the most regarded of modern artists. I mean that literally: the most looked-at by the most people. How many postcards of Modigliani at this moment on how many walls? He appeals particularly but not exclusively to the young. The young of succeeding generations.
This popular reputation has not been much encouraged by museums and art experts. In the art world during the last forty years Amadeo Modigliani, who died sixty years ago, has been acknowledged and, mostly, left aside. He may even be the only twentieth-century painter to have won, in this sense, an independent acknowledgement. Without cultural retailers. Beyond the reach of critics. Why should this be so?
In themselves his paintings demand little explanation. Indeed they impose a kind of silence, a listening. The whirrings of analysis become more than usually pretentious. Yet the answer to the question has to be found within the paintings. A sociology of popular taste will not help much. Nor can much weight be given to the ‘Modigliani legend’. His life story, lending itself
easily to film and sensational biographies, his apotheosis as the peintre maudit of Montparnasse in its heyday, the many women in his life, his poverty, his addictions, his early death, provoking the suicide of Jeanne Hebuterne, last companion, now buried near him in the cemetery of Père Lachaise: all this has become well known, but it has little to do with why his paintings speak to so many people.
And in this, Modigliani’s case is very different from Van Gogh’s. The legend of Van Gogh’s life enters the paintings, the two tumults mix. Whereas Modigliani’s paintings, instantly recognizable as they are, remain at a profound level anonymous. In face of them, it is not the trace or the struggle of a painter that we confront, but a completed image, its very completeness imposing a kind of listening, during which the painter slips away, and gradually through the image, the subject comes closer.
In the history of art there are portraits which announce the men and women portrayed – Holbein, Velázquez, Manet … there are others which call them back – Fra Angelico, Goya, Modigliani, among others. The special appeal of Modigliani is surely related to his method as a painter. Not his technical procedure as such, but the method by which his vision transformed the visible. All painting, even hyper-realism, transforms.
Only by considering a painting’s method, the practice of its transformation, can we be confident about the direction of its image, the direction of the image’s passage towards us and past us. Every painting comes from far away (many fail to reach us), yet we only receive a painting fully if we are looking in the direction from which it has come. This is why seeing a painting is so different from seeing an object.
A single drawn curve on a flat surface – not a straight line – is already playing with the special power of drawn imagery. The curve stays on the surface like that of the letter C when written, and, at the same time, it can leave the surface and be filled out by an approaching volume which may be a pebble, an orange, a shoulder.