“Seeing comes before words. The
child looks and recognizes before it can speak…. Soon after we can see, we are
aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye
to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.”
—John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp. 7, 9
“The relation between what we see
and what we know is never settled.”
—Ibid, p. 9
I finally located the, as they say,
groundbreaking documentary, Ways of Seeing, which appeared on BBC TV
in 1972, which will be the fixed point around which the old blog will turn today.
Its writer and host, John Berger, took as his starting point an essay by Walter
Benjamin, “A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (Some history on this author: As best as
can be determined, Benjamin, a brilliant thinker and writer (his essays form a collection called Illuminations which isn't easy going but is really worth a try) and a German Jew, escaped into Fascist-controlled
Spain in 1940 and, facing immediate deportation back to Germany, killed himself
at the age of 48—the age I am now. (Berger produced his documentary when he was
around that age, 46—I’ll come back to their ages in a bit.) I’m always so
deeply impressed how in the midst of certain death at the hands of the most
bigoted and ignorant among us, the great thinkers and artists go on thinking and creating up
until the edge of doom.) Berger begins by asking: What is a museum-quality oil painting, for example, and what does it
mean for us, in a time when you can now take a detail from it, print it up, and
make it into a postcard?
[NOTE: Can you even begin to
imagine, even fleetingly, such a documentary appearing on American television
today? Maybe in 1972—because the ‘70s had masses of groundbreaking
television—but today? And if that impossibility doesn’t have you reaching for a
beer, I don’t know why you are reading my blog.]
When we see, we often turn what we see into a story. Storytelling is the art of showing
humans to themselves. This is my own definition, formed while thinking about
which of my friends are and are not storytellers. John Berger (pronounced with a soft “g” in the
French way, in case you don’t want to sound ignorant when asking a librarian
for his books), is a massively brilliant man, alive and creating even now at
the age of 86. I first learned about him in my first class at Bread Loaf, “Narrative
and Desire,” a study of desire of/by/for “Woman” in literature. This sounds
deep, and it was, but all the guys who signed up for the course were there for
the sexy. They admitted it on Day 1. The women were there for vindication.
(Side Note: Sex sells, duh, but here’s a fun and, really, fucking ironic little tidbit
in light of the given subject of Berger’s documentary: The second episode
of the series, focusing on the female nude in oil painting and in advertising,
has gotten over one million hits on YouTube, whereas the rest of the series has
gotten only around 100K hits per episode. (For the students out there, take a
thesis.) And you have to laugh because of the pointed critique Berger discusses,
and can only hope the voyeurs looking for twat and titty learned a little
somp’n somp’n about objectification of women while wanking off.)
For a lot of us who have very full
daily lives, going to work and raising kids and doing laundry and trolling for
that next party and the easiest lay, such a question as What is art? or What is a
woman’s nude form in art? must seem pretty
indulgent. Even the word art
has become old-fashioned, I guess. Is the idea of “art” over? Let’s breathe on
that one, shall we?
Ways of Sneezing
At age 48, I am savoring the
greatest, most satisfying sneezes of my life.
I am finding of late that this is
an age when everything loosens: the skin around my bones pulls up and over and rather
farther out than one would think skin
should; my jaw at night has unclenched again, alive for drooling, rather than
remaining closed for grinding; my lips part far too freely allowing for a way
lot of talking; my fingers type my tales more recklessly and more quickly than
ever goddamned before. I am concerned that I may have lost all restraint, and then I remember that this is what aging is
for—the one clear payoff for having lived longer than 40 years.
That, and never having to have sex
again. Not as long as I have those orgasmic sneezes!
I mentioned the ages of Berger and
Benjamin back there (also the same age as Stephen Colbert is now), because I
think the 40s must send its entrants hurling ourselves into the universe,
toward immortality, or at least into the streets, with a degree of freedom we
hadn’t imagined possible. Woody Allen made Annie
Hall when he turned 40. While I personally haven’t accomplished anything on
the scale of any of these guys, I also know that I no longer care. I just the
fuck do it.
What we all do have in common is
the media and the need to use it to further our own thinking, and to possibly
affect the thinking of you, the reader/viewer/listener. Media should be—when it
is at its best—the beginning of a conversation, even if it’s a dialogue only
within each of us. (Later I’ll be
bringing in Albert Einstein, too, because by around age 45 he’d accomplished all of his
major scientific work, and the last years of his life were devoted to
humanitarian and political pursuits, including pacifism; as well as Sebastiao
Salgado, who changed his profession from economist to social documentarian photographer
when he was around 40. It occurs to me that all of the sexamples I am mentioning are men. That happens. Men have done an
awful lot of things, and have long lived in societal structures that have
allowed them to become famous for their accomplishments. What’re ya gonna do?)
Media is really about showing us ourselves—not only as we are, but, as Berger points out, as we dream of being, or as we imagine ourselves. Who are we now? The whole
enterprise, in the end, is about storytelling—and the story isn’t always pretty
or smart; many of my favorite storytellers are people who have transformed themselves
over the years to become fearless chroniclers of ugly times. I discussed Salgado and Einstein, briefly, and, in addition,
John Berger trained as a painter, became an art critic (and I would say
philosopher) and novelist; and Stephen Colbert started out as an improv comic,
went on to report on The Daily Show,
and in his forties has become our pre-eminent political satirist and American societal critic.
Then there’s Miss O’.
Ahem.
!!!
Art and Education in the Age of Mechanization and Technological Turd
Bombing
What should a classroom be: A free
exchange of original ideas, or a standardized curriculum with measurable,
quantifiable outcomes? Can it be both? That “we” get stuck in debates like this
exposes our national fears and limited imaginations. Education and art, as you know, are a unity to me.
In one of the greatest poems of the
20th Century, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot,
Eliot’s protagonist wonders much the same things about his own mid-life, I
think. Here in an excerpt:
| ||||||||||||||||||||
I
have measured out my life with coffee spoons: My senior English teacher Mr.
Corbin used to ask his AP English students to examine Prufrock’s narrative in
terms of their own lives: With what do you
measure out your life? What do you fear? What do you think (if you think)
people say about you behind your back? Would a quiz question be more educational?
In
the poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the speaker says that he
measures out his life with
a. tea
cups
b. butter
pats
c. coffee
spoons
d. toilet
seats
What does anyone learn from such a
question, or reveal when writing down the letter of the correct answer? And how
should we presume?
The poem opens and offers an early
reference to questions of meaning in life and in art:
LET us go then, you and I,
|
When the evening is spread out against the sky
|
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
|
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
|
The muttering retreats
|
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
|
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
|
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
|
Of insidious intent
|
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
|
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
|
Let us go and make our visit.
|
In the room the women come and go
|
Talking of Michelangelo.
|
I think of the way the speaker of
the poem goes through life: anesthetized, wandering, avoiding the big questions,
aware of the ladies who quip about art. John Berger recognizes that for many of
us, art hangs on the walls of museums, selected and judged as “the best,” so
that we ourselves as viewers are denied the experience of saying, “I relate to
that,” or “That is beautiful.” The pictures hang in an artificial place, and
the context of the painter’s experience is lost to us, except for what a
curator includes on a wall plaque. So should we care about the images we see?
I’ve written about photography
before—what it can do, how it can make us present. Now I am thinking about how
painting and photography tell us the story of ourselves.
Sebastiao Salgado: Humanist Photographer
In trolling for the Ways of Seeing episodes, I chanced upon
a related video of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, of whom I’d never heard.
And after watching his one hour talk at UCLA's Hammer Lecture, I was
profoundly embarrassed that I didn’t know his work, and even more so when he
revealed that his first book was not allowed to be published here for 15 years,
because the Americans, he was told, could not handle the truth of his images.
Our own political discourse bears
out the American publisher’s concerns: Witness the Facebook postings in the
wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold so-called Obamacare: RIP gravestones
of our Constitution, wild screeds of how we are all going to prison, and the
like, would seem to support this. And to hear Salgado speak of his art—the
earth-bound tones of his voice, the positive vocal energy, the clarity of
ideas, the lack of sentimentality and immense heart all at once, is to know how
all of us should aspire to be. Go on Google Images and type in his name. Spend
an hour. It’s work that goes unseen in this country, and my life has been less
for it. His books are available on Amazon, but they are expensive. Still, I
think I will have to send some money his artistic way.
A few notes I made: He encountered
cultures that don’t know “no” when it comes to personal exploration, how you
can’t tell a child or adult to “stop hitting my camera” for example. (Can you
imagine such people in desks?) Later he shares how he and his wife are actively saving and restoring
rainforests to Brazil—his love and hope are amazing to me—energy that says, “we
must do it, we can do it,” and from an honest place, from one who has seen the world. That 50 million
trees cost 100 million dollars sounds like a lot until you hear the
perspective: It’s the cost of two fighter
planes. (War is so, so, so stupid. You can’t believe it’s still going on.)
Just the way Salgado was able to explain
how the rainforest preserves the water table delighted me: He points to his shaved head: the
way your hair takes three hours to dry naturally, and a shaved head that holds
no water at all dries right away—trees are the key to our water supply.
And in all this talk of people in
harmony with nature and his discoveries on Earth, he lets us know, too, how
hard it is to do this work—arguing with airport security over rolls of film,
for example, in the wake of 9/11.
To see his images, I found this
blogspot, Witness This: http://witness-this.com/darkroom/sebastiao-salgado/
Here’s another, of coffee farms, on
a site from the U.N.: http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/field/042005_salgado_photo_gallery/salgado1.htm
Image-ine a Story
My own job in text book publishing
has taught me an astonishing amount about image and message—learning to edit text
around an image; choosing photos that do what you need them to do, such as
demonstrate a hard vocabulary word for an English Language Learner (ELL);
format restrictions in the book design—horizontal v. vertical spaces (the slide
show of the Hammer Lecture was limited this way, as Salgado discusses)—and all
the permissions and the photo vendors and the budget, to name a few other
issues. The way we have to fight to do our jobs—the restrictions, some real and
others self-imposed (but all of which reflect "the market")—always bring me back to the classroom, how I wished it
could be. I also think about how much we learn on the jobs we do. Yet isn’t it a
shame we can’t focus on the joy of the work instead?
“I don’t work for one picture, I
work for a story,” Salgado says of his photos. He sees himself as a
storyteller. Just so, John Berger sees his art criticism (as much as his novels
and drawings) as storytelling. Salgado is aware that “the memory side” of
photography—images as part of our memory, our archives—is storytelling. The oil
paintings Berger discusses are the same thing, all stories of us.
It is artists more than politicians who must hold the planet
together—they use activism to protect, or to rebuild what we destroy. We are
all artists in potential. What are you doing in your creative life? What is your story?
On a small and wonderful scale, the
site Humans of New York brings the images of myriad city denizens to Facebook: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/
The photographer, Brandon Stanton,
is wonderfully successful because he is open to seeing so many truths and
realities—he understands that for an artist to
get in, as Sebastiao Salgado has pointed out, you have to let people know you, and you must discover what is
around you. That is a big advantage of photography, he says—to know and feel
that we are not alone; we are an agrarian animal whether we live in the city or the country: I'm struck by the images this produces for me: the traffic cop as shepherd, for example, or the bottle and can collectors as blackberry pickers in sun-drenched, concrete fields.
To make these kinds of discoveries
and put this sort of art out there requires a lot of legwork. Planning,
packing, trekking, and finding toilets that work are all part of this endeavor.
Storytelling ain’t for sissies. I think of all of the flying people have to do
in the service of trying to help us learn to help ourselves—certainly the
climate scientists and artists who are trying to save us from ourselves must be
aware of the pungent irony that the process of travel (the fuels needed, the
ways those fuels are extracted, for example) is part of how we are killing
ourselves.
It Doesn’t Take an Einstein…or Does It?
I forced myself through a PBS
Documentary (with the least energized narration I’ve ever heard) to learn a bit
more about Einstein while viewing actual footage and hearing his actual voice. I also know that science and art are also a unity. Here are my notes: I learned that Einstein hated possessions, hated school,
hated rules; his Theory of Relativity was intuitively arrived at and scientists
spent 15 years proving it; Einstein called this “the detail work” (in 1919
during a solar eclipse his theory was proved—pretty cool); (and it occurred to
me that we need both the free thinkers and the detail workers). Einstein became
very political and pacifist; he realized that if only 2% of the population of
each country refused to serve in the military, then there could be no more
armies; he was terrified by the mass psychology of Fascism. Einstein’s books were burned because he was
“a Jew.” The terrifying footage shows Nazi soldiers slamming books into a fire, as
if to burn books full of many kinds of truth would then eliminate those truths;
I learned that German was always his language in any case. He was perplexed by
celebrity. Charlie Chaplin invited Einstein to the Hollywood premiere of City Lights: When a crowd surrounded the
limousine containing Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, Einstein asked, “What
does it mean?” and Chaplin replied, “Nothing.”
And there were perpetual arguments within the scientific community about
Einstein’s propositions: Einstein would say, “God doesn’t play dice,” to which
Niels Bohr would say, “How do you know what God is doing?”
Pacifists felt betrayed by
Einstein’s militant pacifism—he realized, What’s the point of pacifism if all
the peaceful die? He felt obligated to bring the end of war about—felt awful
about nuclear weapons and how his theories were used. He said in a statement on
war and its effects: “What need is there
for responsibility? I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical
conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our
lives, a disastrous by-product of the development of the scientific and
technical mentality. We are guilty. Man grows cold, faster than the planet it
inhabits.”
Politics and Prose
This awareness of the mechanization
and dehumanization of our lives is a theme in the works of artists and the
politics of my friends. My friend Rina, about whom I have written before, has
been studying the U. N. resolution known as R
to P, or Responsibility to Protect, wherein nations go in to protect
citizens in the throes of military assault by their own countries. Rina is
trying to prove that it is the economic problems that are at the root of all
revolutions. She is a Marxist, in that Marx's work informed her understanding of how the
system of capitalism works (and Marx wrote about this early in the development of capitalism, making him not only a critic but a seer in many ways): Capitalism depends, at its worst, on mechanization and
dehumanization. Anyone working in an office or a factory knows exactly what this means.
(In fact, Berger allows the camera to linger over workers in a perfume bottling
factory just to demonstrate this point, should you watch his documentary.)
Just like Rina, John Berger is a
self-identified Marxist, and he discusses this in an interview last year. (How Berger keeps being relevant: For his
1967 nonfiction book, A Fortunate Man, he and a photographer, Jean Mohr, follow a doctor around for a year in rural England and view socialized
medicine up close, questioning from the outset: Do any of these patients matter? Does this doctor? The book was
life-changing for me on the issue of health care.) John Berger’s latest book was the subject of the
interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7LZxCUApds
Some notes on the interview: Artist, art critic,
broadcaster: In Bento’s Sketchbook,
Berger explores the philosopher Spinoza and the idea of dualism (invented by
Descartes—the existent being material and spiritual; Berger says they are not separate
but are a unity); Spinoza was a lens
grinder, the stunning reality and symbolism of the microscopic and macroscopic
being very much part of Spinoza’s life, the needing of lenses; he was
excommunicated by the Jewish religion for all these heretical views of life as
it is—what else is new?) Berger discusses the sketching he did for the book,
and said something that utterly arrested me: “Drawing is a constant correcting of errors,
maybe a great deal of creation is actually that; there’s not really a point
when you are suddenly aware that there is nothing more to correct, and if you
were aware of that, it would probably be very bad.” The interviewer doesn’t
pursue that last bit, which I would like to have heard more about—but Berger does go on to say that his book explores the actual world we live in today, which
is both horrific and, in moments, incredibly beautiful.
I think the ideas of the Marxists are important to
listen to right now, though I have no patience with anyone who self-identifies
as Communist: Whereas reading Marx from an early age helped Berger “to
understand history, and therefore to understand where we are in history, and
therefore to understand what we have to envisage as a future, thinking about
human dignity and justice,” he also later saw that regimes established under
the auspices of Marx failed their people. One of the great reasons they failed,
according to Vaclav Havel (my playwright friend Mary told me), was the
Communist denial of the human need for beauty. One quote of Havel’s that I
found was this, and it ties in with Berger the art critic: If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist
now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure
entertaining rich people; he's really needed.
A Constant Correcting of Errors
I keep returning to Berger’s idea
of life being, like drawing, a constant correcting of errors.
Ways
of Seeing, the book version, ends, “To be continued by the reader…” for it
is Berger’s belief that it is not up to a critic to tell you what to think. I
gather that he believes that a good critic, like any good teacher, alerts you
to possible ways of seeing. Wholly original thoughts do not occur in a vacuum.
They are inspired, born out of encounters—with the natural world, with
texts, with work, with art, or with other people, for example. Moments of
elation take us over when a fresh insight overtakes us. The only way to really
experience this kind of elation is to remain open. We also have to start looking at
better pictures, demanding better images, better art. And, failing that, more
and better wine goggles with which to see.
As if by magic, this was the poem
in today’s “The Writer’s Almanac” on NPR:
The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts
For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer
every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose,
in its own exotic fragrance,
in its huge willingness to give
something, from its small self,
to the entirety of the world.
I think of them, thousands upon thousands,
in many lands,
whenever summer came to them,
rising
out of the patience of patience,
to leaf and bud and look up
into the blue sky
or, with thanks,
into the rain
that would feed
their thirsty roots
latched into the earth—
sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,
what did it matter,
the answer was simply to rise
in joyfulness, all their days.
Have I found any better teaching?
Not ever, not yet.
Last week I saw my first Botticelli
and almost fainted,
and if I could I would paint like that
but am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs
about roses: teachers, also, of the ways
toward thanks, and praise.
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer
every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose,
in its own exotic fragrance,
in its huge willingness to give
something, from its small self,
to the entirety of the world.
I think of them, thousands upon thousands,
in many lands,
whenever summer came to them,
rising
out of the patience of patience,
to leaf and bud and look up
into the blue sky
or, with thanks,
into the rain
that would feed
their thirsty roots
latched into the earth—
sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,
what did it matter,
the answer was simply to rise
in joyfulness, all their days.
Have I found any better teaching?
Not ever, not yet.
Last week I saw my first Botticelli
and almost fainted,
and if I could I would paint like that
but am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs
about roses: teachers, also, of the ways
toward thanks, and praise.