Another Way of Telling by John Berger, Jean Mohr (review)

Books 329 example, one taken at the foot of a lander shows a collection of rocks, the largest of which is about I m across. Craters and volcanoes are sharply detailed, revealing a beautiful but alien place. The book, however, is not intended for the reader casually interested in Mars. It is "aimed at the informed scientific reader. A working knowledge of physics and chemistry and a familiarity with scientific units are assumed. Also assumed is a basic vocabulary of geology, although the use of specialized terms is avoided where possible. Those that might be unfamiliar to most scientists are explained" once. The language is scientific, with infrequent concession to ordinary folk. For example, storm is described as having winds of" I7 m/sec. with gusts up to 26 m/sec.". A translation into earth-based velocities of 61 and 94 km/hr would have been helpful. The pictures are fabulous and for everyone;the text style is that ofdry, graceless scientific paper. Particles and Fields. Readings from Scientific American introduced by William Kaufmann. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1980. 137 pp. illus. Text ed. $17.50. ISBN: 0-7167-1233-4. ISBN: 0-7167-1234-2. Reviewed by Nan Conklin* The ten Scientific American articles in this volume trace the steps in modern research for the ultimate building blocks of matter. The introduction summarizes the individual articles in considerable detail, in some cases with greater clarity than the originals. However, it is impossible to improve the first two articles written in 1953 by the great and articulate physicists, Schrbdinger and Dyson. These 'dated' writings would hardly be expected in a collection of current research publications, but they give a background to current research that is both olympian and comforting to those who learned physics in a less chaotic time. The next two articles (1957 and 1964) continue Kaufmann's plan to show how "the greatest human minds began struggling with the perplexing issues that faced physicists in the 1950s and 1960s." This scheme invites the reader to participate in a real and complex search. However, I soon found it hard going. This is in part due to the unfocused nature of the research discussed. It is difficult to concentrate for much time on the accumulation of elaborate symmetries and properties of a whole 'zoo' of particles. In typical Scientific American style the articles are elaborately illustrated and well edited. A little clarity appears in the article by Drell (1975), written in lucid and graceful prose. It is here that quarks are first discussed. The following sections proceed into the complexities of "colors", "flavors", and "strangeness" of quarks, thought to be the ultimate constituent of matter. In fact, this may be "all you wanted to know" and a bit more. Although there are a few flights into the philosophical implications of the discoveries, this collection primarily represents reviews of work in progress. They require readers willing to apply themselves to understanding some difficult material. For someone newly interested in the subject, I recommend beginning the book with James S. Trefil's article, From Atoms to Quarks. A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe. John Berger and Jean Mohr. Writers & Readers, London, 1982 (1975 first edition) £2.95. ISBN: 0-686-32051-4. Reviewed by Lucia Adams** This book defies rational analysis, being the inspired manifesto of an inspired amateur. As usual Berger harks back to the pre-positivist world ofinchoate experience and general impressions about life. We find a few facts, some philosophy, some feelings, some vague ideas that sum up the romanticization and alienation of the author. The incarnation of the devil-<:apitalism-<:reates "unfreedom," the general theme of the book. This is illustrated by an amalgam of black-and-white photographs by Jean Mohr of Turks, Croats, and poor peasants from around the world who flee north to man factories and take jobs western Europeans no longer want. The sly canny faces that peer from the pictures simply do not bespeak the misery and horror Berger and Mohr insist that we feel; the uniformly lovely, often serene, faces of uneducated simple people stare at the camera with amusement and the *Clay Road, North Thetford, VT 05053, U.S.A. **535 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, U.S.A. inevitable loneliness that accompanies farewells. One is left with a sense ofoptimism that these men and women might be doing the best things to better their economic situation when they eventually return to their native sites. The hagiography English intellectuals often express regarding the "superior virtue of the oppressed" (Russell) is present not only in the photographs but in the marxist harangue accompanying them. We are left with a vague feeling ofenlightenment for experiencing the situations of others. A Seventh Man has little else to offer students and scholars of the visual arts. Another Way of Telling. John Berger and Jean Mohr. 1982. £6.95. Reviewed by Lucia Adams* To depict the lives of mountain peasants through photographs is the avowed purpose of this book, much of which is given over to the competent but unremarkable photographs of Jean Mohr. The authors' narrative and literary intentions outweigh their esthetic concerns. This is the fourth collaboration between John Berger and Jean Mohr, and it is more disjointed and impressionistic than their previous books. Berger's text is a general rumination about photography, encompassing various philosophical enquiries concerning perception, ambiguity, and individuality. It might stimulate photographers to think about what they are doing, but the end result of the exploration is usually trite or incomprehensible. Thus such nonprofundities as, "Appearances both distinguish and join events", and "Appearances also cohere within the mind as perception" pepper the text. Perhaps we are on the brink of a new language of the esthetics of feeling, but it is insufficiently developed to have much value. Another Way of Telling assumes too much knowledge or thoughtfulness on the part of the reader. It is so elliptical in style and conception that it is difficult to respond to in any but the most unthinking way. Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object. Murray Krieger. Univ. of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1981. 71 pp., illus. Cloth, $7.50. ISBN: 087049 -308-6. Reviewed by Hans Brill** Professor Krieger attacks recent approaches to criticism which he feels have tried to 'level' the arts. He asks for a new aesthetic that, while acknowledging some strictures of the 'levellers', will reinstate art to its spec.ial place. The levellers have a pathological need to tear things down and make them 'equal', usually by applying some universal formula that is found to be reductionist, for example, bad political systems can only produce bad art! The professor begins with a pleasing conceit: 'level' is not only a palindrome, but looks flat and dull and is emblematic of its meaning. Art, on the other hand, is dedicated to the exceptional and the elevated: the romantics liked mountains (not the sea?), and Kant showed that art could create its own special reality. Art lies in the realm of disinterestedness, where the art object is free and self-sufficient. But, although free, art is purposive because it seeks form and our formseeking minds respond to art objects with aesthetic judgements. Krieger's discussion of how traditional aesthetics isolate the work of art as an object of value and end up by making a fetish of it leads to the disastrous levellers, at work in various ways. One approach, which might be termed "critics lib", claims that criticism has the same status as imaginative literature. Structuralism treats art as it treats any other activity, as a text for deconstruction. Conceptualism reduces art to the level of undifferentiated flux and experience, as at that antiart gallery, the Beaubourg. Minimalism and its analogues in poetry try to reduce the art object's control over the viewer's responses. Most corrosive of all, egalitarianism argues that if all of society's values are materialistic, art cannot escape: connoisseurship becomes investment-counselling to fulfill the role assigned to art by the socio-economic forces of an acquisitive society. Classless society, on the other hand, needs classless art. Distinctions must be suppressed on moral grounds, and art works with aristocratic connections must be discarded along with their outdated socio-political systems. We cannot accept the masterpieces and reject the systems that produced them. *535 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, U.S.A. **Royal College of Art, College Library, Kensington Gore, London SW7, U.K. ...