About Looking by John Berger (review)

66 Books and receives more complete coverage in the conclusion, is the influence of Marx. Freud and Saussure on the structuralist tradition. These figures (at least Marx and Freud) have been dominant in French intellectual life for some time. either through appropriation or critical assessment/rejection. Again. the book deals with structuralism as French tradition. (Is that why Piaget. a Swiss. is omitted?) Although coverage is somewhat uneven. clear exposition and exceptional disciplinary range make this a significant addition to the secondary literature on structuralism and a useful text for a survey course in the area. Seeing Berger: A Revaluation of Wuysof Seeing. Peter Fuller. Writers & and Readers Publ. Cooperative, London. 1980. 40 pp. Paper. 111.00. ISBN: 0-906495-48-2. Reviewed by John Adkins Richardson* Perhaps it isjust the taste of grapes gone sour-I grant the possibilitybut a great deal of today's critical writing smacks, for me. of vintage sophomore. Thus, a television program intended to enlighten the British public generally has been received as a revelation by a select minority which includes some art critics and historians. John Berger's Ways o f Seeing (1971) was predictably popular among the Left who perceived it. correctly. as an intended antidote to the 'bogus religiosity of art' presented by Kenneth Clark's stupefyingly successful series. Civilizarion . Berger set out to demonstratein what ways masterpieces of the past are in complicity with an elitist economic system. His was. as I noted at the time, 'an intelligent repudiation of many of the values assumed by those of us engaged in teaching about the arts'. 1 also remarked that anyone 'even slightly familiar with Marxist or neo-Marxist criticism will find little that is new'. In this last I was quite obviously wrong. Confronted by Peter Fuller's pamphlet, I find myself in the position of Dr Johnson upon reading Edward Young's Conjerrures-surprised to find the author taking as novelties what I thought very common maxims. After all. Arnold Hauser and Meyer Schapiro had given us similar analyses that were, respectively. of greater intellectual sweepand infinitely more penetrating long before Berger commenced as art critic. But. then. no art historical writing could possible have had the influence that a few moments of television can provide. And it must be said that Fuller is not completely adulatory; the latter portion of his essay takes Ways of Seeing to task for the very thing that annoyed others of us. specifically, Berger's evasive reluctance to deal with the near paradox that genius in the service of property surpasses its base purpose. Dealing with this, Berger sounded like a reluctant Trotskyite; Fuller is an eager one, ready to embrace bourgeois delights if they can but be transferred to socialist equity. Fuller is very different from someone like Nicos Hadjinicolau, who sees every work of art as being nothing more nor less than an ideological mirror. Hadjinicolau's Arr History and Class Sfniggle (London. 1978) is scarcely more than a cosmetically streamlined version of Zhdanov's 'socialist realism'. It draws no distinctions between advertisements and Abstract Expressionism. Berger worried about that in his review of the book. Fuller worries about Berger's inability to deal with the difference between works and reproductions. To me, the lot sound like well-read ninnies stumbling around in the dense mysteries that seem always to turn up whenever one tries to demystify art by exposing its role in (according to the Marxist lexicon) the reification of spiritual values. Only a simpleton would suppose that every art form generated out of a society is absolutely incompatible with other forms of social organization. Fuller's little book does, however. show some of the problems zealots face when they attempt to accommodate indifferent reality to strictly purposeful systems rather than proceeding the other way about. The internal contest of opinion dealt with in Fuller's essay will be understood by Marxists as one more instance of the larger conflict between the schools of Marxist aesthetic known as 'naive' (strict. doctrinaire) or 'critical' (revisionist. Trotskyite). The one thing to be said in support of these contestants. in contrast to the similarly tedious controversies common in conventional art historical scholarship, is that...