Keeping a Rendezvous

Keeping a Rendezvous by Berger, John

Berger (The Sense of Sight, 1985, etc.) as art critic is a maddening case. Most of the time his once-fashionable leftism falls like a caul over the paintings and photographs that he uses, literally, as pretexts for these short essays (most reprinted from The Village Voice, Harper's, etc.). Ideology and preconception will force up a fatuity like ``How then does the cinema overcome this limitation to attain its special power? It does so by celebrating what we have in common, what we share. The cinema longs to go beyond individuality''; or one such as the recommendation of love's ``cyclical time'' that opposes corporate capitalism's ``unilinear'' view of it; or a celebration of peasant ``interiority.'' Berger may write of the abattoir and excrement here, but he is a Romantic at heart: Walter Benjamin with a rucksack. The best art critics make you want to see more; Berger wants you to feel more--and his wanting before images sometimes distorts or even obscures them. On the other hand, he can on occasion bring his eyes to bear on certain painters and sculptors with private intimacy and intuition. About Pollock, Henry Moore's sculptures (``Their notorious hollows and holes are sites of a sensation of enclosure, cradling, nuzzling. Before Moore's art, as before nobody else's, we are reminded that we are mammals''), and Renoir, Berger is unusually stellar. A too-mixed bag, unbalanced mostly by political deadweight. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

While each of Berger's essays originates from a single image or idea, the resulting train of thought is held to no predictable itinerary. A trip to a Swiss zoo segues into a meditation on apes, with whom we share 99% of our DNA genetic code, and then into thoughts on birth and death. Reflections on his obsessive childhood fear that his parents might die leads to a confession about how he became a writer. As an art critic, Berger ( The Sense of Sight ) constantly surprises. He fathoms Renoir's "sweet paintings of a terrible loss" in terms of the impressionist's fears of women and of reality. He analyzes Henry Moore's sculptures as erotic monuments to the mute, pre-verbal experiences of infants. In other pieces, Berger interprets today's resurgent nationalisms and such events as miners' strikes as protests against the marginalization of the spiritual. These 25 masterful, absorbing essays link the moral to the aesthetic, the personal to the political. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.