And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (review)

102 the minnesota review In writing about some of Berger's most recent essays, Dyer makes the following claims about Berger's conception of the aesthetic: Far from being an idealist category, the aesthetic for Berger is that part of reality in which the labour of existence, "the production of the world," is most intensely revealed . Berger sees this most clearly in the work of Van Gogh: "Take a chair, a bed, a pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter to the carpenter's or the shoemaker's act ofmaking them." . . .That is what the aesthetic means to Berger. Art is part of the labour of producing the world. In the aesthetic we see at the highest level of intensity the process by which reality is being produced, (pp. 140-41). This is a false move, which, far from avoiding idealism, reproduces one of its classical avatars: the elevation of poiesis to the plane of metaphysical principle. The closeness to a certain Heidegger here—Berger's choice of Van Gogh as exemplar cannot have been fortuitous—is both obvious and telling. As Wittgenstein once said of philosophy, the conception of art to which Dyer appeals leaves everything just as it is. Historical materialism imposes more stringent demands upon the aesthetic understood as a social practice. If Dyer's account of Berger bends the stick too far in the direction of a metaphysics of art, this is no doubt due largely to the impasse which any socialist artist must encounter when reflecting lucidly upon the position of art within class-divided societies. Among Berger's earliest attempts to grapple with this problem, A Painter ofOur Time still seems to me to have posed its necessary conditions. For Janos Lavin, painting and politics are utlimately irreconcilable inside the social forms of the present. Authentic art, by which is meant an art that expresses the reality of human achievement (as opposed to its Utopian aspirations), is deeply incompatible with the structures of life in capitalist societies. Luka'cs once remarked that only in the classless society of the future will the true nature of the aesthetic be realized. Chastened by just this understanding of art's relationship to politics and history, Lavin abandons his budding career in London to return to his native Hungary and participate in the 1956 revolution. We may perhaps recognize in Berger's light from Britain and his removal to a peasant community in the Haute-Savoie a similar commitment. While there are unmistakable gestures in Berger's writings toward a possible art and society of the future, it would not be inconsistent with the entirety of his output to see it equally as a militant repudiation of art. If such a conclusion leaves us vaguely dissatisfied, this is but the mark of the failure of capitalism to realize the conditions under which a successful artistic career might be attained. The horizon of John Berger's project remains that which he so brilliantly mapped apropos of Picasso and cubism some twenty years ago. MICHAEL SPRINKER And Our Faces, My Heart, Briefas Photos by John Berger. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 101 pp. $5.95 (paper); $12.45 (cloth). One painting that John Berger discusses in this book is Rembrandt's The Woman in Bed, whose model was the great love of Rembrandt's life, Hendricke Stoffels. "In the painting ," Berger writes, "there is a complicity between the woman and the painting ___ In her face, the two of them are reunited, ... his image of her in bed, as he remembers her; her image of him, as she sees him approaching their bed." We are at once privileged to witness an intimate moment in the lives of two lovers at the same time we are shut off from their lives, which remain opaque to us. It is, Berger implies, what art can do: it tells us all, while, in a certain sense of the world, it tells us nothing. It is very much the image we must keep in mind for this remarkable book, which is also about Berger's love for the woman in his life, the relationship of...