Love `n' Rockets

John Berger's collection of essays Keeping a Rendezvous approaches writing as an act of love. Berger's innovative art criticism explores not only the artwork itself but also the participating role of the art observer and the act of love that conspires between the canvas and the viewer.

Unsurprisingly, Berger idolizes Walt Whitman, another writer-lover, for beginning the democratization of art. When art rejects elitism, it "achieves...a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind. It is not an art of the princes or of the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant." In this spirit, Berger spins his own stories.

In the essay "That Which Is Held," Berger contrasts sexuality and love in their relation to art. Berger describes Sexuality, as a source of renewal, "forever unfinished, never complete; it finishes only to begin again, as if for the first time." Love, however, is aware of a whole, it permits the reflectiveness and perspective requisite for art; "the artist's will to preserve and complete, to create an equilibrium, to hold--and in that `holding' to hope for an ultimate assurance--derives from lived or imagined experience of love."

Thus, Berger concludes, "sexuality is the antithesis of art, [although] love is the human model for both." Berger hails an art which is not subject to the "tyranny of the modern view of time," which out of fragmentation can replicate the "single synchronic act," the act of loving.

Berger becomes frustrated with language, too, when it fails to rise above fragmentation. In the essay "A Professional Secret," he battles against language that loses its pictorial power, its signifying power: "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart; when this happens it can go straight to the cultivated mind, but it bypasses the thereness of things and events." Berger resists polish or slickness in art, even favoring imperfection if it reveals earnestness rather than perfection if it only presents glibness. Events which have been "really painted--so that the pictorial language opens up--[join] the community of everything else that has been painted." This synthesizing totality Berger sees as "the nearest painting can offer to catharsis."

Keeping a Rendevous

By John Berger

Pantheon Books

$21.00

Berger discusses the work of Henry Moore in these same terms of totality in art versus empty and emptying rhetoric in art. Moore's art became "distracted" when "no energy pushed out from within." Harvard public relations (which has exploited the Moore in front of Lamont to full advantage) would probably wince in reading that Berger blames the cliched attitudes towards Moore on "so many blind glossy colour shots showing reclining figures with holes through them on cultural sites throughout the world."

Berger refuses to submit not only to the reductiveness of the commercial reading of art but also to the oversimplification of the "politically correct" reading of art. He is certainly willing to admit sociopolitical truths in his writing. He acknowledges in his essay. "The Erogenous Zone" that "the visual may play a more important role in the sexuality of men than women, but this is difficult to assess because of the extent of sexist traditions in modern image-making."

Yet, he will not allow sociopolitical agendas to stand primary in the interpretation of art. Of Renoir, Berger writes, "Feminist reasoning applied retrospectively to Renoir is too easy." Feminists might play up Renoir quotes like "the best exercise for a woman is to kneel down and scrub the floor" without bothering to uncover the profound and across-the-board fearful fanaticism of which that quote is only one facet. Berger effectively warns us not to let our methodologies for "seeing" obstruct our sight.

Berger's "seeing" has been notably unique in all his work, his place in art criticism secure but set apart. In "Lost Off Cape Wrath," one of the last essays in this collection, Berger hints at his own tenets in art criticism.

"Authenticity," Berger asserts, "comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of experience...When his pages are finished, the reciprocal ambiguities coalesce into a mystery." Keeping the Rendezvous has this authenticity: He writes as unmysteriously, as precisely and as clearly as language allows, thus revealing mystery not as superficial obfuscation through art, but mystery as the very real ambiguities of life uncovered in art.