JOHN BERGER: From Life
TOM OVERTON
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: A magisterial biography of novelist and critic John Berger, whose work—including Ways of Seeing and the Booker-prize winning G.—revolutionized the critical tradition in the twentieth century
John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.
Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.
Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
You lived through enough zeits for there to be many geists.Ways of Seeing is part of a moment of experiment with televisual equipment all around the world, from The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, Nam June Paik in America, to Harun Farocki and Cristina Perincioli in Germany. Not experiments your producer...remembered knowing anything about.A friend writing his friend's biography either is wielding one of the Long Knives in anticipation of the famously horrible Night of them returning, or is barely stopping short of a public act of fellation. The staccato rhythm of the above sentence supports either interpretation in its sibylline recounting of Berger's wide field of cultural vision.
Considering how many, many, many coital acts are presented as factual in this extended celebration of the interesting and salacious life of a man who thought deeply and was very willing to detail the trails his thought had brought him down. An artist, a Booker-winning novelist, a public intellectual with a strong leftist bent...he created the riposte to Kenneth Clark's deeply conservative and Eurocentric Civilisation, Ways of Seeing, in the same year he won the Booker...a career highlight for anyone, even a wunderkind polymath who never left the cultural radar after exhibiting paintings in the post-War gallery scene of London until his death as a grand old man of Culture in France in 2017.
Author Overton has worked on and with Berger, his children, and his archives on multiple fronts. It's expertise one feels as the story of John Berger, polymath and bounder, unspools. His 1972 Booker acceptance speech...well...what a moment. It's a master class in how to make a statement as a principled person, while using the system's kindness against its failings and cruelties to others. As one would expect, there are illustrations, though goodness knows there could be an entire photo essay on John Berger's œuvre.
I hope a few of y'all, who have not heard of Berger before, will discover him; and the rest of us who remenber some bits and fragments of his art(s) career will gain insight and context on him, on how he came to think, and what he came to mean to a world that had then and has now a limited attention span for those who don't think outside the box.
They disassemble it, reuse the best bits, and chuck aside the dross with both hands.
