Ali Smith: One of the things I love in Berger’s vision is his insistence on the artist not as creator, but receiver, as a figure crucially open and receptive, since art’s impetus is essentially collaborative or communal. Storytellers, he suggests, must “lose their identities”. It’s the only way to be “open to the lives of other people”. This open self-effacement is part of the act: as he says in A Seventh Man, his 1975 book on migrant workers in Europe, “To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it and to reassemble it as seen from his.” Art as a natural border-crosser: “If one thinks of appearances as a frontier, one might say that painters search for messages which cross the frontier.” And since we’re talking frontiers and the crossing of them – if Cézanne said of Monet, “Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” I’m going to say of Berger, Berger is only a man, but my God, the multitude of us, here, gone, and yet to come, that’s in him.
What a fruition, what a seer of past and of futures, of the damage that “the poverty of the new capitalism” would do to the multitude across all the frontiers, the people desperate right now to cross the frontiers as the only way to survive. What a gifting of voice to – and recognising and celebrating of, and fury at the injustices done to – the working classes, the underclasses and the people who have had to become migrants is in his work. What a clear vision of “consumerist ideology . . . the most powerful and invasive on the planet”, and of “the innate paranoia of the politically powerful” and the narratives this paranoia inflicts on the world.
[…] Meanwhile, what an energy and a pleasure and a humanity there is, he points out, against the odds, of the poor, and of the people called migrants, when it comes to that survival. That “ingenuity of the dispossessed” is always up against a reductive power at every point, he says: “There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronise the urban poor in its naming. That is power.”
[…] He quotes Pasolini. “Disperazione senza un po’ di speranza: for we never have despair without some small hope.” And here’s Rosa Luxemburg, via Berger, from that recent letter to the past: “‘To be a human being,’ you say, ‘is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful . . . because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.’” More here.