What’s So Bad About Politically Correct Art?

Political correctness has always mattered a lot to me. As far back as I can remember it’s been important to be on the right side of things—further even: In my baby book under “baby dislikes” my dad wrote “nuclear proliferation” and “caviar.” In middle school I started going to anti-war rallies and spending my time arguing dress code constitutional law with the principal. My high school class voted me “most outspoken,” which was a nice way of saying that I wouldn’t shut the fuck up about politics, no matter the subject. There are a lot more people who complain about “PC” than people who actually conform to the stereotypes, but I more or less do.

When I was a culturally engaged kid (roughly ’96-’06), political correctness was politically incorrect. In the Bay Area where I grew up we could assume most people were liberals, Democrats, and more specifically anti-Bush—if not necessarily anti-war. But this was the heyday of the Man Show and South Park and Crank Yankers and, especially as a boy, the last thing you were supposed to be was offended. By that time conservatives had already been bellyaching for years on the covers of national magazines about the “PC” menace, gleefully comparing college students to the Red Guards and, yes, Nazi stormtroopers. The script hasn’t changed much.

Political correctness connotes not just the inability to let go and enjoy yourself (e.g. I have never seen a Will Ferrell comedy), but a weak character. American history and humanities curricula still draw heavily on Cold War liberal ideas about the individual, and to be politically correct, we learn, is to surrender rather than cultivate your judgment. Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Animal Farm, Brave New World, To Kill A Mockingbird: When Americans learn about politics what we learn is that critical thinking means thinking “for yourself.” Groupthink is part and parcel of tyranny, and attempts to get everyone to think the same way—or make everyone act as if they’re thinking the same way—are tyrannical. What is the crime of calling a classmate’s shoes “gay” compared to the crime of telling other people what they’re allowed to say? It is, we are told, a slippery slope to Hitler.

The object of political correctness is rarely politics itself, at least not the formal kind. The “politics” cancels itself out—a secret ballot can’t be politically correct. The object is instead cultural, discursive, aesthetic. Political correctness is when you bring politics into spheres where it doesn’t belong, where it edges out judgment (or non-judgmental taste and tradition). Politics is about picking between options and letting yourself be counted on one side or the other, while judgment and taste are where and how we define ourselves as individuals. And only as judging, tasting individuals are we capable of delegating our judgment by vote. Political correctness, then, poisons our culture and the democracy that depends on it.

That is, as I understand it, the strongest version of the argument against political correctness. It is fundamentally a liberal argument in the classical sense, which helps explain why some of the strongest and most consistent reactions against PC come from one-tick-left-or-right-of-center pundits like Jonathan Chait and David Brooks. The issue among progressives and conservatives is where the lines of separation between spheres should be, which helps explain why the story of a gay wedding cake—a private baked good linked to a traditional religious rite that is also now a civil right—has acquired outlandishly large significance. Discrimination is a synonym for both judgment and taste, and the long conservative fight for the right to discriminate against is about more than organizing oppression, it’s about preserving that capacity.

(It’s worth noting that any moderately close reading of American history shows that elected progressives do not fight to extend the realm of the political so much as manage demands from elements in the public to do so. As I write it’s been less than 10 years since we marched in Washington, DC, for gay marriage, and Democratic lawmakers were not running out to join us.)

Conservatives can be politically correct, too, as liberals like to remind them. When they defended the criminalization of homosexuality, for example, they extended the realm of politics into the bedroom. The fight to ban abortion is likewise an intrusion of the political into the medical. Strict libertarians of the Reason magazine type consistently oppose political correctness of both kinds, defending the right to our taste in both cake customers and sex acts. But though the unrealistically fair-minded see the political spectrum as a horseshoe, when we’re talking political correctness, we’re talking about the left.

Where libertarians want to shrink the realm of the political as small as possible, for the PC, “everything is political.” This was a repeated complaint in John Taylor’s 1991 New York cover story “Are You Politically Correct?” The noted academic taste-and-judgment fanatic Stanley Fish is overly fond of the “Is everything political?” phrase, using it in op-eds year after year to argue against politics in the classroom. The lament “everything is political now” turns up 1,180 results on Google, including the Chicago Tribune headline gem: “Everything is political these days, even the moon landing.” But who are the people who really do believe that everything is political?

Communists.

     Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.—Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge (1843)

If you ask the average conservative, they’ll probably tell you political correctness starts with Soviet Russia, more specifically Josef Stalin. On one level this story is simply wrong. But on a deeper, more important level, it’s complicatedly wrong. Marching the political into “all that exists” truly is part of the Marxist plot, from the factory to the family (“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents?” says the Manifesto, “To this crime we plead guilty.”) Succeeding waves of Marxists have paid him the highest tribute by occasionally finding Marx himself politically incorrect, extending his analysis even further into society in accordance with the method.

“Cultural Marxism” has no particular meaning within the tradition of Marxist thought, whereas it does have a noted history as a code phrase on the antisemitic right. Lately it’s become a sort of harder-core synonym for political correctness, one that evinces a familiarity with far-right politics rather than garden-variety annoyance at college students. And yet, I admit, there’s some validity to the idea. The complaint—similar to the one about political correctness—is that Marxists want to subject every facet of society to politics, including the cultural sphere, which liberals (from right to left) believe is properly a realm of individuality.

Here’s how we might imagine they understand the cultural Marxist slippery slope: Instead of judging a comedian based on how funny they are, cultural Marxists want to judge adherence to a political line, which isn’t really judgment at all, it’s verification. At that point we’re no longer audience members or consumers or even people, we become bureaucrats, always looking for a condemnatory box to check. Slowly and then quickly cultural producers are incentivized and forced to conform, and we’re left in a desert of art so sycophantic it barely deserves the title.

With the development of social media and the contentification of everyday people’s regular speech we have a greater awareness of the role we all play in forming culture. What separated earlier generations of professional artists and critics from the amateurs was plausible reach, but now anyone online could go viral. This is occasionally thrilling for everyone involved (see: Lil Nas X), but it also makes more of us subject to expectations and pressures of political correctness that used to be reserved for public speakers. And if we’re deprived of a space beyond politics we can’t develop the courage or ability to exercise judgment, and we become the most dangerous kinds of citizens: all political allegiance, no critical thought.

This vision of life without thought is a caricature of socialism that Americans learn in school, along with social-contract theory, which is taught as fact. Politics is where we surrender our freedom to the state in return for a vote, yes, but also a retained freedom in the spheres of judgment and taste, which is where individuality and creativity thrive. The trade is between each individual and society as embodied in the nation: There are laws, but otherwise no one can tell you anything. On the other hand, Marxists, we’re told, don’t believe in the individual at all. Everything must be sacrificed to the collective.

Despite what you may have heard, Marxists recognize that people exist. But unlike liberals (in both red and blue flavors), we don’t understand the world via the existential individual’s relationship to society. Recorded human history is the history of class conflict, and every child is born into a specific historical moment and into a specific position within that specific moment. Societies, we Marxists believe, have their characters determined by their relations of production, sometimes called society’s “base.” Feudal society was feudal, and capitalist society—under the first truly global mode of production—is capitalist. That means, in the simplest version, that the conflict between workers and owners is what structures the rest. “It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything,” Marx writes, “tingeing all other colors and modifying their specific features.” Upon everything.

Under capitalism there’s no movie set that’s not a workplace, no marriage that’s not a workplace, no classroom that’s not a workplace. All is bathed in the light of that particular hue. If that sounds unfortunate or monotonous, it should. As Americans we’re taught to see that rosy light as an eternal sunset, history and struggle being put to bed, liberal democracy, the foundation for free taste and judgment. Marxists see a red dawn, a storm rising on a new day. Any mode of production based on exploitation is unstable and rife with conflict. (In order to use Marxist analysis without drawing attention to it, sociologists often say “conflict theory” instead.) Owners try to get the most out of their workers and workers try to get the most out of life, goals that are fundamentally at odds. The sparks from these grinding gears light the whole world.

If everything is properly understood as political—that is to say, engaged one way or another in the all-consuming struggle that defines society—how do we tell what’s on the right side? We’re taught to see political correctness as a shortcut around thought, where all that’s necessary is to verify adherence to the latest in PC phraseology. With a socialist party it’s even easier: agree with the Party. But Marxism is about constant criticism, and the most vibrant contemporary schools of thought emerge in part out of criticisms of the Soviet system. And not, like say Camus or Orwell, from within the liberal tradition.

The visual arts are a frequent subject of anti-PC complaint, with conservatives fearmongering about the bland uniformity of socialist painting. Making politically correct art is easy, they say, so if we judge art according to its political correctness, we surrender the lens of quality. John Berger confounds this view. Berger is one of the few great critics who is also universally acclaimed as a great artist. With novels like G., To The Wedding, and the Into Their Labors trilogy, Berger proved himself skilled beyond doubt, and his Ways of Seeing (and its BBC adaptation) is perhaps the single most influential work of English-language art criticism. And yet, Berger was resolutely politically correct, to a degree that sometimes shocked his liberal peers. In a debate with British art historian Benedict Nicolson over the work of Italian socialist painter Renato Guttuso,

Berger is rigid:

Berger: A work of art is moving in direct ratio to the degree to which it extends our experience of significant, objective facts.

Nicolson: Come now! … It would be foolish to argue that Van Gogh was less significant as an artist when expressing intensely personal emotions than when gearing his sensations to some social ideal.

Berger: I completely disagree. The most moving Van Goghs are precisely those in which his intense emotions are are applied to objective reality. It was because his own over-personal sensations finally smothered his vision that he killed himself. One day his work will be reassessed in the light of this fact.

Harsh!

Nicolson finds it hard to believe Berger is actually saying what he’s saying. How can an artist of Berger’s capacity—never mind an art critic of his ability—talk about a universal standard for judging quality? How can someone who crafts fictions at the highest level talk of “objective reality” that way? To Nicolson’s complaint that Guttuso would “never depict corruption among the workers” because to do so would be contrary to the painter’s politics, Berger answers it would be contrary to the truth:

Arbitrarily isolated facts can only lead to triviality in art…Of course, there are individual corrupt workers. Of course, there are decent bourgeoisie. But the fact remains that it is the peasants in Italy who remain undernourished, the working class who, in the struggle for their rights, get shot, and the bourgeoisie who connive.

Not individuals but classes. This is what Berger means by “objective”: more than the accurate story of something that happened, it’s about grasping the class struggles that structure the world. The best an artist who misunderstands the objective truth of their society can hope for, as Berger writes about Jackson Pollock, is that “his talent will reveal how it itself has been wasted.” It’s a difference in task akin to that between “blowing smoke rings and struggling like a wainwright to fashion a wheel that will turn.” Content to blow smoke rings, Pollock’s drip paintings are politically incorrect because he fails to develop the significance of his subject. Berger never joined the Communist Party and he maintained a deep contempt for state bureaucracy. His PC model was not passed down from above. Rather it came from his rigorous application of the Marxist method to the interpretation of culture. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

In 1972, the 24 year old Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña began work on a series of four paintings called Héroes de la Revolución. The democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende was in power, and Vicuña, like our stereotype of a good PC painter, produced portraits of socialist icons: Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro meeting Allende, and left-wing Chilean folklorist Violeta Parra. But these aren’t the kitschy realist works we’ve come to expect. Her Marx stands outsized on an aqua-green hill, the trees behind him purple. He is dignified, besuited with his hair in a white mane, a steady look toward the horizon. Above his head floats a banner with his name in cursive, flanked by seven colored roses: pink, yellow, and baby blue. Behind Marx to his left, in the background, two thick-thighed naked women make out. “In order to exalt Marx, I wanted to associate him with ideas that dogmaticians consider way removed from him, such as eroticism, poetics, blues, jazz and rock, female and homosexual liberation and that I consider intrinsic to the revolution,” Vicuña wrote at the time.

Even though she was an active member of the government’s party, Vicuña ran into some problems. She told the journal Manifesta that the painting of Castro and Allende was set to be shown at the National Fine Arts Museum but at the last minute they asked her to censor it. The painting shows the two leaders in profile, large heads tapering to small feet. Their right hands are clasped, with his left Fidel points to a butterfly balanced on Allende’s outstretched palm. Below them is a garland of flowers and in the same cursive, “Fidel” and “Allende,” like a journal doodling from a socialist historical slash fic. Their heads are leaned out and their hips tilt toward each other. Allende’s background arm is naked, and in the original (a black-and-white picture of which is memorialized in the artist’s book Sabor a Mi) so was Fidel’s foreground leg. The museum’s director told her that the right-wing attacked left-wing leaders as queers and the painting risked being misinterpreted as mocking its subjects. Vicuña covered Castro to the ankle.

Vicuña’s paintings wouldn’t hang long in the National Museum. On September 11, 1973 Augusto Pinochet seized power in a coup, beginning his brutal reign of terror in Chile. Vicuña and the museum director both went into exile, her staying London, him fleeing to Catalonia. Allende, after a live farewell address via radio and right before the presidential palace was taken, shot himself in the head. He’s said to have used an AK-47 he had received as a gift, bearing the engraving: “To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.” Vicuña didn’t paint any more Heroes.Who’s the politically correct one in the story? Liberals would probably say the censorious museum director, but don’t forget the artist was doing a portrait series called Heroes of the Revolution honoring—and she was honoring—Marx, Lenin, and her socialist president. (It’s not an anomalous situation either, plenty of left-wing artists have clashed with left-wing authorities.) Almost 50 years later, I think Vicuña got the politics right the first time. My favorite of the series is Marx, in large part because of the color palette. With the brown sky and blue-green hill it has a frolicking almost psychedelic vibe, and lording over it like a calm tuxedoed godzilla is Karl. The world is transformed: down come the walls between seriousness and frivolity, between masculine and feminine, between thought and being. A socialism that’s afraid of a naked leg or lesbian sex is a brittle thing. And, as we learned from the 20th century, a moral disaster waiting to happen.

One of the more politically correct movies I’ve ever seen is John Singleton’s 2005 action drama Four Brothers. On its face it seems like a strange choice because much of the movie consists of racist dickhead Mark Wahlberg joyfully playing a racist dickhead. Along with his three brothers—all four of them adopted as children by the same do-gooder—Wahlberg’s character seeks vengeance when their mom is murdered. They trace the hit to local gangster Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

The turning point isn’t when Wahlberg’s character beats up Sweet and throws him into an ice-fishing hole, it’s before, when his brother Jeremiah (André Benjamin) reveals that he’s made a deal with Sweet’s henchmen, offering them money that had been promised to Sweet to turn on their boss. Up until then the fact that Jeremiah had been “in the union” with Sweet’s guy Evan (Jernard Burks) was exposition, post-industrial Detroit worldbuilding. In his political correctness Singleton brings it to the fore at the crucial moment. And in a movie full to the brim with starpower, it’s Burks, a Black actor whose credits are listed mostly by occupation rather than character name, who delivers the killer line to his gangster boss: “The one thing you forgot about me is this: l was in the union for a long time. l ain’t never missed no meetings.”

There’s always some surprise twist in an action drama like Four Brothers; how else would the underdogs win in the end? But of all the double-crosses and shocking reveals Singleton and the writers David Elliot and Paul Lovett could have picked, they choose the one that extends our experience of significant, objective facts. It seems to come out of nowhere, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The conflict that structures society is not about gangs of individuals haphazardly tossed into battle with each other, as we’re often led to believe by action flicks, it’s between classes of oppressors and oppressed. Victor Sweet forgets it as well, treating his employees with the vicious disrespect that’s characteristic of villains, and Jeremiah is able to save the day by maintaining his fidelity to the organized labor movement.

Was John Singleton a PC hack? Everyone likes Boyz n the Hood.

Nothing undermines the standard complaints about politically correct art more than the overrepresentation of committed Marxists in the various artistic canons.

    The only way that poets and painters can fight against the bourgeois economy is to give their works precisely that content which challenges the bourgeois ideological values propping up the bourgeois economy.—Rene Magritte

   My joining the Communist Party is a logical step in my life, my work and gives them their meaning. Through design and color, I have tried to penetrate deeper into a knowledge of the world and of men so that this knowledge might free us.—Pablo Picasso

   I feel uneasy about my painting. Above all I want to transform it into something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement…I have to fight with all my strength to contribute what my health allows to the revolution. The only true reason to live.—Frida Kahlo

There’s no shortage of quotes like these from names American schoolchildren would associate directly with quality and uncompromisingly original artistic vision, and I could do the same exercise with poets, playwrights, novelists, composers, musicians, dancers, actors, directors, etc. Often, as in Magritte’s case above, they used Marx to argue against a Party that was supposed to represent his thought. These artists—there are too many to list, including whole movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, that American pedagogy has stripped of their communist politics—held themselves and each other to the standard of political correctness, applying it (as Kahlo does in the quote above) critically. To be politically correct is not to be self-satisfied or to rest on your laurels of compliance; it is to constantly hammer at your own work, your own self, and the world around you, so that it might become “something useful” politically. It means engagement and protest and weighing compromise and sometimes fleeing for your life. Far from staid or conservative, it’s a risky, experimental way to live.

Political correctness (as shorthand for “cultural Marxism”) is politically incorrect under liberalism because it asks that we think of ourselves as members of a class before we think of ourselves as individuals. Since classes are constituted by relations of exploitation, we think of ourselves first as workers or bosses in conflict, and women and men in conflict, and colonizers and colonized in conflict. (Looking at class relations beyond worker/boss is no violation of Marxist orthodoxy.) We shape our judgment and taste with our politics rather than the other way around. This is anathema to liberals, for whom individuals must think and act primarily as individuals, lest conformity overflow judgment, capsize meritocracy, and drown democracy.

Liberals find the idea that anything is more important than the individual, well, offensive. But does the world treat us as individuals? Is that what you tell a boss who has just laid you off? “I’m sorry the stockholders took a hit, but I need this job, and as you know nothing is more important than the individual.” Do we each wander a lonely path, advancing next to but separate from the people around us according to a mix of skill and luck, like a board game token? Does the world conform to our judgments, or is truer to say we mostly get what we get? Is it all-against-all or class-against-class? If the answer is the latter—and it is—then whose side you’re on precedes your individuality in importance. The individual only comes out when the authorities are looking for a distraction, a scapegoat, or an excuse.

The significant objective fact is that we live in a class society, and until we don’t anymore, that will continue to be the significant objective fact. To be PC is to acknowledge that truth as found, to recognize that we don’t each of us need to go rummaging through the bargain basement of ideas to understand society. The task for communists is to work with constancy and rigor in our thought and action toward a revolutionary break with class society. It’s only there, on an earth where people are not grouped for exploitation, where we can speak meaningfully about the individual. We’re looking forward to it.

Capitalism’s “particular hue” colors everything on the planet and even some stuff beyond; capitalists have wasted countless lives to make it so. If political correctness means Marxism which means the abolition of class society which means everything changes, then by the transitive property of equality, PC means the end of the world. When people object to political correctness that’s the real root of what they’re talking about: They think we want to destroy the whole world as their eyes have adjusted to it. And they’re right. But would that be so bad? To smash that ugly fluorescent overhead light would change everything, it’s true, but we needn’t fear being left in the dark. As the politically correct Langston Hughes wrote in his poem “Ballad of Lenin,” one of the ones we don’t learn in school:

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

What’s So Bad About Politically Correct Art? Why PC is not PC under liberalism. By Malcolm Harris.  Mother Jones, February 28, 2020.

Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit​: History Since the End of History, from which this essay was excerpted.

Malcolm Harris | Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit.

Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said "Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit" to the Occupy Wall Street protests. We all knew what he meant then . . . but where are we now? And how has so much happened since the so-called end of history?

Malcolm Harris, one of our sharpest and most versatile critics, tackles these questions in over 30 new and selected pieces, examining everything from the lowering of wages to the rise of fascism--and the maddening cultural landscape in between. Along the way, he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; investigates why the robots that will replace us so often look like sex objects; and, most comfortingly, assures us that Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we're in.

Rarely does a writer come along who can turn our world so thoroughly upside-down that we can finally understand it for what it really is, but Harris's wry and biting essays do just that, and help us laugh at what we see. Join us in the Rare Book Room as he discusses his work with Yale University's Martin Hägglund!

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, and n+1. His first book was Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. He lives in Philadelphia.

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four highly acclaimed books and his work has been translated into ten languages. He was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2009, awarded The Schück Prize by the Swedish Academy in 2014, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. His most recent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, was published last year by Pantheon.

Martin Hägglund talks with Malcolm Harris.  Strand Books, February 25, 2020.

More articles by Malcolm Harris. Muck Rack

A Writer of Our Time : The Life and Work of John Berger

People talk about being “right brained” or “left brained” as if you can’t be both. Such categories, of course, are not only cognitive but cultural, the constitutive divisions of Western philosophy—mind and body, vision and language, feeling and reason, image and word—having long since migrated into our everyday professional lives. We take it for granted, for instance, that the visual arts will be taught in one building while the humanities (what used to be called belles lettres) are taught in another. Or that the editorial department of a publisher will be housed in one office and the design department somewhere else. People who are good at accounting are not supposed to make good poets. Nor are philosophers meant to tell stories about real people. Among fiction writers, especially, there seems to be an unshakeable tendency to pit the abstract against the tangible, so as to do away with the first. The division between “critical” and “creative” is now so entrenched at an institutional level—each professor assigned a tag, each class allotted a domain—that it can seem to students as if such categories were pre-existing in nature.

In his own time John Berger was certainly one of them. Throughout his boyhood he experienced what he would later call a “divided loyalty”: a powerful inner tension between the world of appearances and the world of concepts. His first journals were full of sketches and poems, side by side, in equal numbers. In his twenties he made his money putting words to paper, but had been trained to put paint to canvas, and he never gave up drawing. “As the difficulties of thinking and writing became my primary conscious concern,” he said, “my primary reality became the visual one.”

Reviewing painting both harnessed and exacerbated this division. The literary critic can sidle up to her object of study: the two share the same medium. The art critic, by contrast, is always to a certain extent operating synaesthetically, using language to evoke and evaluate what is fundamentally non-linguistic. When Berger gave up art criticism his early fiction stalled precisely because he seemed unable to corral his unusual double talent into the traditional forms of literature. It was as if he was standing on one leg rather than walking with the two he had.

Then, in the early 1960s, he began to work in television. The experience proved definitive. Television not only helped him pay his bills and expand his influence; it immersed him in technical methods whose intrinsic means of composition reconciled the very schism he had struggled with. By writing scripts with a special awareness of how his voice-over would be paired with the image-track, his skill with words could be put in dialogue with a new visual dimension. Image and language formed a fresh circuit on the screen: early television was often called “radio with pictures.”

Television suited Berger in another way. As a presenter he had presence. Arriving in leather and zips at Lime Grove Studios in West London, he was handsome and magnetic and could speak in a direct way to a coveted new audience: the so-called “average man.” When the BBC’s monopoly was broken up, and Granada Television formed, he hosted two shows for the network, Drawn from Life and Tomorrow Couldn’t Be Worse, in which he talked to ordinary people about art. Later in the 1960s, he worked closely with Michael Gill (the director, subsequently, of Civilisation) to make special episodes for Huw Wheldon’s influential arts magazine, Monitor: one on Léger and another on the postman-architect Ferdinand Cheval, both filmed in the south of France. In other episodes Berger would be asked to share his thoughts on painters of the Western canon, from Bellini to Picasso.

At the New Statesman Kingsley Martin had been his mentor; at the BBC he had Wheldon. An imposing Welshman and the “philosopher king” of British arts programming (he was later knighted), Wheldon encouraged an impressive roster of young intellectuals to embrace the medium. “I fantasized this notion,” he later said, “that if Freud and Marx and Darwin lived in the 1950s and 1960s, instead of the 1850s and 1860s, we would have had an occasional television series from them as well as books.”

Wheldon’s entire philosophy, though, derived from the axiom that television, when successful, was wholly different from a book, that it should instead represent (his motto and mantra) “an individual and indivisible marriage of word and picture.” The workflow he supervised—scriptwriting, drafting shot lists; then filming, selecting, cutting, assembling, reassembling, and dubbing—was laborious, but allowed for new experiments to flourish. The open arrangement proved especially favorable for art critics. What had been a near-timeless practice for art historians—to lecture in front of a slide or painting, drawing a group’s attention to this detail or that—took on new technical life. “I have often been puzzled as to why the painting, even in monochrome, seems so vivid on television,” Wheldon said at one of his lunchtime lectures. “Perhaps the actual act of scanning, invisible to the naked eye, is in some way energizing the otherwise so still, still picture. It is uncompromisingly not the picture. It is undeniably a reproduction, but a reproduction like no other.” If the program was successful the result was a preternatural unity. “It is as if the words are in the picture; and the picture itself speaks through the words of a man who cares for nothing during that time but what is, and only what is, relevant to that picture.”

Through his work for television Berger became creatively conscious for the first time of a more general possibility—what he called the “speaking image.” He realized the idea of his divided loyalty was false—and, what’s more, that it was precisely by moving between forms, whether materially or imaginatively, within the same work or from work to work, that his disparate talents could most fruitfully find expression. (Tellingly, Berger’s best-known polemic, Ways of Seeing, is both a TV broadcast and a book, the second adapted from the first.) The expanded media environment of the postwar years was thus doubly formative: it raised the subject not only of cultural democratization, but also of media translation and difference. By making television programs about painted or sculpted artworks, critics such as Berger faced the question on an everyday working basis. It was a question, in turn, they often made central to their programming.

Berger’s first television appearance, for example, occurred alongside Kenneth Clark as part of Clark’s ATV Midland series Is Art Necessary? The episode was predicated on a question: Could painting still fulfill a popular purpose in the age of mass communication and modern art? During the live broadcast (which remains essential viewing for those interested in the Berger–Clark relationship), the pair discuss a trio of images: Picasso’s Guernica, a beach scene by Guttuso, and a printed advertisement for Guinness.

“Several forms do nonetheless remain hard to explain to the average man,” Clark says of Guernica. ‘I mean, this can have an impact on an ordinary person but it cannot be popular, it can really only be understood by people who’ve trodden the long hard road of modern art, don’t you think?’

“Yes, yes, yes, possibly,” says Berger. They move to the Guttuso painting. The broadcast cuts between the two men and close-ups of the painting as they look at it. What they say becomes an inquisitive frame around what we see.

“Guttoso is a Communist,” Clark remarks. “What difference does that make? Why do those painters who are endeavoring to bring back storytelling in art belong either to the communists or to the left? Is that because they seek to make people think a certain thing?”

“Yes,” Berger replies, “as soon as you have this purpose which is shared by both the likely public and the artist you’ll begin to get communication. In the West, of course, the only art used for a purpose is commercial advertising.”

Programs like these were self-reflexive, combining filmic representations of the art in question with conversations about what it meant to film art, and what art could do or not do in the age of film. Technically, they moved on two levels: image and sound. The production team would be tasked with visually conveying a painting, usually through an establishing shot of the whole work followed by close ups strung together through either panning or cutting. Meanwhile a second aural layer added sound and language to the artwork’s silence. As Berger later noted in Ways of Seeing (the book, not the program): “When a painting is reproduced by a film camera it inevitably becomes material for the filmmaker’s argument . . . The painting lends authority to the filmmaker. This is because the film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible.”

From A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. By Joshua Sperling.  Verso Books, 2018. 

Why Look at Art when you could Watch TV? LitHub , November 26, 2018.

Verso Books

As early as the mid-1950s, the art critic John Berger complained about the ways in which art was shown, taught, and written about. The art world — a term he deplored — was too insular, and the art historians and critics did very little to mitigate this. Perhaps most crucially, they failed to share art’s profound connections to human experience. It was no wonder that people expressed little interest in artworks, Berger said in a 1956 article for the New Statesman, because they’ve been led to believe “that such works as do exist have nothing to say to them.” Today, Berger’s demands appear more urgent and his criticisms only truer.

A new biography on Berger — the first published since his death in January of 2017 — reveals a writer who to this day speaks most eloquently and passionately to our frustrations, fears, hopes, and desires. The book, authored by Joshua Sperling and published by Verso, is titled A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. At Sperling’s Los Angeles book launch, where I led a conversation with him, he explained that the title is a riff on Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time. But the label of “a writer of our time” is also earned.

Early on, we are introduced to Berger as a fierce art critic and adamant Marxist in his 20s, raising controversy with his attacks on London’s old-school “museum critics.” Berger did not identify with the fashionable abstract art of the day — it was alienating and apolitical (in fact, for the rest of his life, he showed limited interest for abstract art). Instead, he advocated for a return to social realism: paintings depicting tangible, everyday life. And his call was heard, as he went on to foster a generation of British artists who would eventually be known as the “Kitchen Sink” painters, even organizing an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Moving into his 30s and the 1960s, Berger let go of his grip on social realism and opened his horizons to modernist art. Disappointed with the work of contemporary artists, including those he had cultivated, he turned his attention to artists like Manet, Picasso, and van Gogh. “No longer championing the coming art of the future,” Sperling writes, “he now championed what was lost but revolutionary in the art of the past.” And it seems, with few exceptions, that Berger’s eye stayed on the past for the remainder of his art writing career.

Today it might seem strange for an art critic to focus most of their energies on dead artists. But Berger found clarity in the past. As he once articulated in a 1973 essay on the 16th-century Grünewald altarpiece, engaging with artworks from even centuries ago helps to illuminate our present condition simply by paying attention to our reactions and how we look. “I was anxious to place it historically,” he writes of his initial encounter with the altarpiece. “Now I have been forced to place myself historically.” While Berger was no longer wedded to a social realist aesthetic, he carried with him a belief from his early criticism: that meaningful art will always connect with some aspect of human experience.

But Berger also accomplished something more: he restored a sense of connection to the past in a capitalist culture that was anxiously moving forward. “In an age otherwise characterized by belatedness and alienated repetition, his whole project was to return art to its origins, to rediscover the aura of shared moments and places, and to reinvest experience with a sacred meaning that the instant culture of capitalism had removed from it,” Sperling sensitively observes of Berger’s famous 1972 television program Ways of Seeing, in which he spoke about canonical works of art in a personable way. “It was a personal, artistic and intellectual programme of reenchantment.”

Berger continues to enchant me (and not just because he was very handsome). If you, like me, have taken an art history class, you might remember the ways in which paintings are coldly dissected into diagonals and paths of light. Or how they are relegated to movements and memorized into compartments. Berger, on the other hand, brings the past into the present. He places trust in what we see on our own terms, rather than spoon-feeding us art historical terms.

Throughout the biography, Sperling illuminates how Berger’s own life and social circumstances interweaved into and informed his writing. For me, A Writer of Our Time put much of what I love about Berger into context. And this is especially true in the last couple of chapters, which make up the most beautiful section of the book.

Moving into his 40s and the 1970s, Berger became, in Sperling’s words, “softer.” He became invested in ideas of love and hope, and how art could bring us unity and wholeness in fragmented times. This shift also coincides with Berger’s move to rural France, where he would settle for the remainder of his life. He had never identified with the British — in fact, he had many qualms with them — and it wasn’t until the age of 48, in the village of Quincy, that he felt like he belonged. “I feel at home here in a way I have felt nowhere else,” he said in 1981.

Suddenly it becomes clear that Sperling has been building to this point: the significance of place in Berger’s life and work. On the one hand, he finally felt grounded in a community — he had gained “not only a home but an anchor,” as Sperling puts it. In a fast-paced world, “he was after something durable” and found it. On the other hand, Berger became increasingly interested in how place informed a painter’s vision and how their environs showed up on the canvas, like how the frothy sinks of J.M.W. Turner’s father’s barbershop manifested in his paintings of waves. “Painting, for Berger, was rooted in the experience of sight, and sight was rooted in the local and particular,” Sperling writes. “Visibility takes place somewhere.” (Whereas abstraction was “placeless.”)

Perhaps Berger turned softer because he had finally found resolution: he was no longer searching for a sense of place. But up until that point, paintings — his greatest love — had been the most hospitable, offering him that durability he was after. In the 1990 essay “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” — an essay that I find myself returning to again and again — he describes the 20th century as “the century of disappearances,” marked by mass emigration, both forced and voluntary. This, he says, explains why film, the most ephemeral of art forms, is the art form of that century. Against this backdrop, paintings provide us with a sense of permanence and place, because they are “static and changeless.”

For some, Berger’s fixation on painting might seem old-fashioned. Others might rightly note that in some ways he was not a writer of our time, particularly in his narrow focus on Western art. But what continues to resonate, at least for me, is Berger’s broader vision for our relationship to art: that it can be deeply revealing of our history, where we came from, and where we strive to belong. In an age of flashy, obscenely expensive art, it is easy to forget this. In that sense, Berger’s writing still serves as a compass to realizing that amidst our scattered, continually shifting lives we can find momentary shelter in art.

How John Berger Restores Our Relationship to Art. By Elisa Wouk Almino. Hyperallergic , January 30, 2019. 

The Doyens of the 1950s art world, gallerists, critics, and artists alike, often flush with the CIA’s anticommunist cash, kept politics at bay by emphasizing the autonomy and neutrality of art. John Berger disagreed. As an art critic for The New Statesman who refused to keep politics out of art, he found himself at the center of controversy after controversy.

Joshua Sperling’s A Writer of Our Time, the first biography of John Berger to appear since his death, begins in the midst of this exciting period. Still in his 20s, Berger was metamorphosing from student at the Chelsea School of Art into a prominent art critic. Sperling’s biography focuses on Berger’s work, keeping his personal life an embroidery at the edge of the narrative.

“The name of his cause,” writes Sperling, “was realism; opposing it was modernism.” Realism was the official aesthetic of the Communist Party in several countries, but though he was sympathetic to the Party, Berger championed realism for his own aesthetic reasons. When he was an art student, Sperling tells us, Berger was influenced by the Euston Road School, “a short-lived prewar academy that had favoured tradition, naturalism and the ‘poetry in the everyday’.” His own art followed that pattern, with a special focus on paintings of people engaged in ordinary work. Then, as an art critic, he promoted a set of young British realists who exhibited similar tendencies. They came to be called the Kitchen Sink painters.

In Berger’s opinion, art communicated to a viewer what seeing had disclosed to an artist. Seeing was the ever-fruitful source of art, and severing art from that source was a dead end. Berger clung to this axiom for his entire life, and it led him in a surprising variety of directions. In his 20s, it meant he preferred artists who portrayed what they saw in the street to artists who indulged in abstraction.

This aesthetic standard also appealed to postwar Britain. Berger was popular beyond the left. He was even invited to curate a show at the Whitechapel Gallery. It was a chance to demonstrate what he had argued in his articles. It proved “one of the most influential [exhibits] of the decade,” writes Sperling: “Many programmers and gallerists were […] won over. For a few years, thickly rendered paintings, full of impasto and brownish-grey in palette, came into vogue: pictures of northern industry, men at work, football, street and domestic scenes.”

But eventually, Berger’s Kitchen Sink painters began to disappoint him, both politically and aesthetically. The movement produced no one of particular note, and its members were not as committed to the left as he had hoped.

In the late 1950s, it became difficult to be a communist-adjacent polemicist. Khrushchev’s “secret speech” had revealed Stalin’s crimes, and then Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, bringing a new era of doubt and ambiguity to the global left. Berger left his berth at The New Statesman to explore those doubts and ambiguities in fiction.

He also left England. From the 1960s onward, his life became more European and his work exploded with variety. He wrote novels. First, A Painter of Our Time, in which an artist grapples with his relationship to leftist politics, and eventually the Booker-winning G., an experimental narrative in which a Don Juan–like protagonist comes to political consciousness through his sexual escapades across Europe. He also collaborated with the photographer Jean Mohr to create three documentary photo-essays about, respectively, “rural medicine, migrant labour and mountain peasants.” He collaborated on screenplays with the filmmaker Alain Tanner. He wrote profiles of European leftist intellectuals. Eventually, he returned to writing about art.

Berger’s new interest, however, was art history. Once an avowed anti-modernist, he shocked his readers by announcing that Cubism was the most important and genuinely revolutionary recent development in art. Not because the Cubists themselves were politically radical, but because their aesthetic revolution was the appropriate correlate to political revolution. Cubism, he wrote, was “the only example of dialectical materialism in painting.” This revisionist announcement met with an explosion of disagreement from the left. Some people assumed his position meant he had become an anticommunist. Sperling explains why his view was so shocking:

  “The traditional narrative of nineteenth-century modernism follows the rise of the avant-garde away from mimesis towards an aesthetic of subjectivity, abstraction and pure sensation. Both liberals and Marxists shared this view; what they disagreed over was whether it was good or bad.”

The Marxists thought it was bad, and now Berger was telling them it was good. His about-face stems from his deeper, unchanged commitment to seeing:

“The point of departure for Berger was the work of [Juan] Gris who, he says, was ‘as near to a scientist as any modern painter’. Disciple rather than innovator, the Spanish artist worked from a formula derived from the discoveries of [Pablo] Picasso and [Georges] Braque, and so became, in Berger’s words, ‘the purest and most apt of all the Cubists’. From his canvases more general principles can be gleaned. ‘The real subject of a cubist painting is not a bottle or a violin’, Berger hypothesized, ‘the real subject is the functioning of sight itself.’ The transposition had profound philosophical implications. The static empiricism of fixed appearances had given way to a new union: the Cartesian categories of mind (self-consciousness) and matter (extension in space) were brought together by the painters in their work. As in phenomenology, sensory experience was both in and of the world. As in post-classical physics, measurement and nature were now entangled in a kind of quantum dance. Looking at cubist painting was, for Berger, like looking at a star. ‘The star exists objectively, as does the subject of the painting. But its shape is the result of our looking at it.”

Seeing, more than anything, was the substance of Berger’s career. It extends backward to his first creative aspirations as an artist. He never gave up sketching, often including his drawings in later books. Seeing also formed the method for his essays, where he often describes an act of seeing and the thoughts that arose from it.

While Berger’s range as a writer was broadening and his thinking as a critic deepening, he also transformed his life. It is here that I wish Sperling had been more detailed, and explored the influences on and specifics of Berger’s personal life, but he does give us a glimpse:

 “At the start of the [1960s], it had been as if Berger was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, testing the balance of a new, more Mediterranean bearing — further from the chattering classes but closer to the land and to history — before making the final jump. As the sixties swung towards its apogee he made the jump: he committed to it. He passed weeks in a stone hovel in the shade of the Luberon mountains, among fig trees, fruit orchards, chickens, dogs, cicadas and owls, working the land in the morning and reading philosophy in the afternoon. It was a new life of continental thought and feeling — the feeling of thought — he had found (and curated) for himself, a life of lavender and onions, terra cotta and shared meals. He took philosophical modernism outdoors, letting it bronze his skin. In the process, he tried to live out what [Martin] Heidegger had called for but may never have personally achieved: the return of philosophy to life. The revolution had to be lived all the way down.”

It’s odd that Sperling cites the Nazi philosopher Heidegger here when the thinker whose vision of life is called up and even echoed in Sperling’s sentences is Karl Marx. Marx described the communist vision of the good life this way: “[I]t [becomes] possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind.” Berger seems to have sought out a way of life that prefigured this utopia. Later, he would fully commit to it, settling down in the rural village of Quincy, outside Geneva.

As he got older, Berger’s stories grew shorter and his essays more observant — humbler. His texts became filled with descriptions of nature and animals, preoccupied with time and love. His comments late in life about the war on terror, about poverty, colonialism, nationalism, environmental degradation, and bigotry, attained a new gravity.

There is one major exception to the trend of Berger’s work after he left England: the famous art historical TV documentary Ways of Seeing. Produced in 1972, it was a throwback to the combative John Berger of The New Statesman’s art pages. It is a blunt takedown of Western art as a cultural expression of classism, racism, and misogyny, and of academic art criticism as a conspiracy of obfuscation. Ways of Seeing became a staple of the classroom, and has, indeed, come to define our predominant ways of seeing. Ideology critique of the kind it models has become one of the major forms of critical discourse about art. Berger’s TV show did more in a few episodes to destroy the cultural assumption that art is autonomous than his decade writing for The New Statesman. One could be forgiven for assuming, on the basis of Ways of Seeing, that Berger believed the art of the past needed only to be unmasked and debunked.

But in fact, since Berger’s reappraisal of Cubism, he had begun a quest, as Sperling puts it, to find “what was lost but revolutionary in the art of the past.” It’s too bad that the thousands exposed to the still-ubiquitous Ways of Seeing likely won’t also encounter Berger’s decades of writing in search of this lost ordnance. (A good place to start would be the recent collection of his essays on painters, Portraits, which has been arranged by Tom Overton into a kind of history.) Berger believed that art was not just an expression of and apology for oppression — though it certainly can be, and often is — but a smuggler through time of visions of human dignity and hopes of liberation.

Across the 90 years of John Berger’s life, he was by turns, and sometimes at the same time, an art critic and novelist, documentarian and screenwriter, farm laborer and historian, poet and polemicist. He invited controversy and also modeled the writer in seclusion. He wrote about struggles for liberation around the globe and also spent the last 40 years of his life in an obscure village. In the 1950s he scandalized his colleagues by dragging politics into aesthetics, attacking modernism; and in the 1960s he scandalized his comrades by dragging aesthetics into politics, defending modernism. He wrote one of the most avant-garde novels ever to win a Booker Prize, and then he devoted the better part of his career to the anecdote, sketch, and folk tale. He made a documentary about art history which defined art criticism as the unmasking of ideologies concealed in visual culture, and he wrote dozens of essays about how great works of art transcend their context. Does this mass of apparent contradictions add up to anything? The trick for any would-be biographer of John Berger is to find the unity in variety.

Joshua Sperling is up to the task. At the beginning of A Writer of Our Time, he sums up the unity of Berger’s career like this: “He is the only postwar writer I know of to have so powerfully and obstinately refused to separate a loyalty to both the general and the particular, to what was happening politically and morally in the world and what was happening physically just outside his window.”

The Window and the World: On Joshua Sperling’s “A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger” By Robert Minto. Los Angeles Review of Books , December 12, 2018.

John Berger was one of the most various of writers and men: art critic, essayist, novelist, poet and much-missed friend of the shop. In A Writer of Our Time (Verso), Berger’s first full biographical study, Joshua Sperling traces Berger’s development from his roots as a postwar arts student and cultural journalist amid the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic, to the long hangover after the New Left and Berger’s reinvention as a rural storyteller.

Joshua Sperling was in conversation with Leo Hollis, editor at Verso, whose most recent book is Cities are Good for You.  London Review Bookshop , November 22, 2018.

John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’

The writer and art critic John Berger passed away on Monday the second of January. His trilogy Into their Labours, Pig Earth (1980), Once in Europe (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990) moved me. A trilogy of novels that traces the journey of the European peasant from the mountains to the metropolis. The Dutch translations by Sjaak Commandeur were published by De Bezige Bij between 1988-1990.
                                                                             

                                                                      

“The way I observe comes naturally to me as a curious person – I’m like la vigie – the lookout guy on a boat who does small jobs, maybe such as shovelling stuff into a boiler, but I’m no navigator – absolutely the opposite. I wander around the boat, find odd places – the masts, the gunwale – and then simply look out at the ocean. Being aware of travelling has nothing to do with being a navigator.”

In his 1975 book A Seventh Man, about migration, the rescuing impulse is clear. Berger writes in the preface: “To outline the experience of the migrant worker and to relate this to what surrounds him – both physically and historically – is to grasp more surely the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject is European, its meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom.” When he considers today’s refugee crisis – no longer confined to Europe – does he see the first world as suffering from a failure of imagination? There is another extended pause, like a ravine into which one might fall. Eventually he replies: “What two different people have in common will always, in all cases, be larger than what differentiates them. And yet for dozens of different reasons, circumstances blind people to that.”

But Berger’s greatest strength in old age is his ability to live in the present. “I cultivated this early on – and this is the paradox – because it was an escape from prescriptions, prophecies, consequences and causes.” The present moment is key to his thinking too. In Ways of Seeing, he suggests that paintings embody the present in which they were painted. Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”. He has also written about the circularity of time. Does he think that applies to an individual life? Is there, in old age, a way in which one starts to hold hands with one’s younger self?

The Guardian 

Some interesting video's here,  in particular his talk with Susan Sontag from 1983: To tell a story.  

Hyperallergic 

“A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others – and particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

Berger’s  analysis of the female figure in art and advertising.

Dazed