Keeping a Rendezvous
John Berger
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0679737146
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When he stands before Giorgione's La Tempesta, John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long-banished hopes and dreams.
With the luminous essays in Keeping a Rendezvous, we are given to see the world as Berger sees it -- to explore themes suggested by the work of Jackson Pollock or J. M. W. Turner, to contemplate the wonder of Paris. Rendezvous are manifold: between critic and art, artist and subject, subject and the unknown. But most significant are the rendezvous between author and reader, as we discover our perceptions informed by John Berger's eloquence and courageous moral imagination.
(illustration credit 11.1) (illustration credit 11.2) THE SUICIDE OF AN ART is a strange idea. Yet I am bound to start with it, if I’m to talk about the story of Jackson Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. Krasner outlived her husband by nearly thirty years and went on working as a considerable painter in her own right until 1984. Now, however, I want to concentrate on the fifteen years during which the two of them lived and worked together and Pollock made a bid to change
years later Harold Rosenberg, thinking of Pollock and praising him, wrote: “The modern painter begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents.” AT THIS MOMENT, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his
underwent a series of tests, conducted by Douglas Gillan, which were designed to show whether or not she could reason. Contrary to what Descartes believed, a verbal language may not be indispensable for the process of reasoning. Sarah was shown a video of her trainer playing the part of being locked in a cage and desperately trying to get out! After the film she was offered a series of pictures of varying objects to choose from. One, for instance, showed a lighted match. The picture she chose was
painfully without focus, the hands, finding nothing new to touch or do, become like gloves worn by a creature drowning. “IF IT COULD BE DEMONSTRATED,” Darwin wrote, “that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” If the apes are partly victims of their own bodies—the price they pay, like man, for not being confined to their immediate needs—they have found a consolation, which Europe
the way we see it, from an animal in a zoo to a war photograph or a Giacometti sculpture. Art Criticism/0-679-73655-7/$10.00 AND OUR FACES, MY HEART, BRIEF AS PHOTOS Utilizing all his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties betweeen love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time in this extraordinary collection