Landscapes. John Berger
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on ‘The Struggle to Understand Art’, and by an appendix of an unfinished but extremely important essay entitled ‘Towards an Empirical Theory of Art’, written in 1941. The editing, production and translating of the present volume – under the direction of two of Raphael’s friends – are a model of an efficient labour of love.
I shall not discuss Raphael’s analysis of the five individual works. They are brilliant, long, highly particularised and dense. The most I can do is to attempt a crude outline of his general theory.
A question which Marx posed but could not answer: If art in the last analysis is a superstructure of the economic base, why does its power to move us endure long after the base has been transformed? Why, asked Marx, do we still look towards Greek art as an ideal? He began to answer by speaking about the ‘charm’ of ‘young children’ (the young Greek civilisation), and then broke off the manuscript and was far too occupied ever to return to the question.
‘A transitional epoch’, writes Raphael,
always implies uncertainty: Marx’s struggle to understand his own epoch testifies to this. In such a period two attitudes are possible. One is to take advantage of the emergent forces of the new order with a view to undermining it to affirm it in order to drive it beyond itself: this is the active, militant, revolutionary attitude. The other clings to the past, is retrospective and romantic, bewails or acknowledges the decline, asserts that the will to live is gone – in short, it is the passive attitude. Where economic, social, and political questions were at stake Marx took the first attitude; in questions of art he took neither.
He merely reflected his epoch.
Just as Marx’s taste in art – the classical ideal excluding the extraordinary achievements of palaeolithic, Mexican, African art – reflected the ignorance and prejudice of art appreciation in his period, so his failure to create (though he saw the need to do so) a theory of art larger than that of the superstructure theory was the consequence of the continual, overwhelming primacy of economic power in the society around him.
In view of this lacuna in Marxist theory, Raphael sets out to ‘develop a theory of art that I call empirical because it is based on a study of works of art from all periods and nations. I am convinced that mathematics, which has travelled a long way since Euclid, will someday provide us with the means of formulating the results of such a study in mathematical terms.’ And he reminds the sceptical reader that before infinitesimal calculus was discovered even nature could not be studied mathematically.
‘Art is an interplay, an equation of three factors – the artist, the world and the means of figuration.’ Raphael’s understanding of the third factor, the means or process of figuration, is crucial. For it is this process which permits him to consider the finished work of art as possessing a specific reality of its own.
Even though there is no such thing as a single, uniquely beautiful proportion of the human body or a single scientifically correct method of representing space, or one method only of artistic figuration, whatever form art may assume in the course of history, it is always a synthesis between nature (or history) and the mind, and as such it acquires a certain autonomy vis-à-vis both these elements. This independence seems to be created by man and hence to possess a psychic reality; but in point of fact the process of creation can become an existent only because it is embodied in some concrete material.
The artist chooses his material – stone, glass, pigment, or a mixture of several. He then chooses a way of working it – smoothly, roughly, in order to preserve its own character, in order to destroy or transcend it. These choices are to a large measure historically conditioned. By working his material so that it represents ideas or an object, or both, the artist transforms raw material into ‘artistic’ material. What is represented is materialised in the worked, raw material; whereas the worked raw material acquires an immaterial character through its representations and the unnatural unity which connects and binds these representations together. ‘Artistic’ material, so defined, a substance half physical and half spiritual, is an ingredient of the material of figuration.
A further ingredient derives from the means of representation. These are colour, line and light-and-shade. Perceived in nature, these qualities are merely the stuff of sensation – undifferentiated from one another and arbitrarily mixed. The artist, in order to replace contingency by necessity, first separates the qualities and then combines them around a central idea or feeling which determines all their relations.
The two processes which produce the material of figuration (the process of transforming raw material into artistic material and the process of transforming the matter of sensation into means of representation) are continually interrelated. Together they constitute what might be called the matter of art.
Figuration begins with the separate long-drawn-out births of idea and motif, and is complete when the two are born and indistinguishable from one another.
The characteristics of the individual idea are:
1.It is simultaneously an idea and a feeling.
2.It contains the contrasts between the particular and the general, the individual and the universal, the original and the banal.
3.It is a progression towards ever deeper meanings.
4.It is the nodal point from which secondary ideas and feelings develop.
‘The motif is the sum total of line, colour and light by means of which the conception is realised.’ The motif begins to be born apart from but at the same time as the idea because ‘only in the act of creation does the content become fully conscious of itself’.
What is the relation between the pictorial (individual) idea and nature?
The pictorial idea separates usable from unusable elements of natural appearances and, conversely, study of natural appearances chooses from among all possible manifestations of the pictorial idea the one that is most adequate. The difficulty of the method comes down to ‘proving what one believes’ – ‘proof’ here consisting in this, that the opposed methodological starting points (experience and theory) are unified, brought together in a reality of a special kind, different from either, and that this reality owes its pictorial life to a motif adequate to the conception and developed compositionally.
What are the methods of figuration?
1.The structuring of space.
2.The rendering of forms within that space effective.
The structuring of space has nothing to do with perspective: its tasks are to dislocate space so that it ceases to be static (the simplest example is that of the forward-coming relaxed leg in standing Greek figures) and to divide space into quanta so that we become conscious of its divisibility, and thus cease to be the creatures of its continuity (for example, the receding planes parallel to the picture surface in late Cézannes). ‘To create pictorial space is to penetrate not only into the depths of the picture but also into the depths of our intellectual system of co-ordinates (which matches that of the world). Depth of space is depth of essence or else it is nothing but appearance and illusion.’
The distinction between actual form and effective form is as follows: Actual form is descriptive; effective form is suggestive, i.e. through it the artist, instead of trying to convey the contents and feelings to the viewer by fully describing them, provides him only with as many clues as he needs to produce these contents and feelings within himself. To achieve this the artist must act not upon individual sense organs but upon the whole man, i.e. he must make the viewer live in the work’s own mode of reality.
What does figuration, with its special material (see above), achieve?
Intensity of figuration is not display of the artist’s strength; not vitality, which animates the outer world with the personal energies of the creative artist; not logical or emotional consistency, with which a limited problem is thought through or felt through to its ultimate consequences. What it does denote is the degree to which the very essence of art has been realised: the undoing of the world of things, the construction of the world of values, and hence the constitution of a new world. The originality of this constitution provides us with a general