Drawn to that moment By John Berger (The Sense of Sight, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, pp.146-151)
When my father died recently, I did several drawings of him in his coffin. Drawings of his head and face.
中譯：引向那個時刻， "加富最近去世，我為躺在棺材裡的他畫了幾幅像。他的面孔與頭的畫像。" (【講故事的人】(The Sense of Sight)北京：三聯，2009，頁186)
# While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others – and particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”
Art critic and writer John Berger, who died yesterday aged 90, spoke these words in the second episode of seminal BBC series Ways of Seeing. Together with a shoestring budget, a shared leftist ideology and a sympathy for the burgeoning women’s movement, he and director Mike Dibb challenged the elitism of arts programming, encouraged their audience to unpick the meanings of paintings rather than simply revere them, and managed to make Walter Benjamin’s ideas about mechanical reproduction digestible in a 30-minute episode. With the series spanning topics including the role of the critic, the way art is constructed for our ‘gazes’, how it depicts women and possessions, and even the way that advertising works, it remains deeply relevant today.
But it’s Berger’s discussion of how we look at women which resonates most strongly in our current image-obsessed society. Today, the idea of the male gaze may seem well established, and Berger and his all-male team didn’t claim to invent the concept which would later be christened by film critic Laura Mulvey. But this was 1972 – the Sex Discrimination Act was still three years away, contraception wasn’t yet covered by the NHS, and it would be almost a decade before women could take out loans in their own names without a male guarantor. And yet, here they were, on one of only three channels on mainstream television, sitting in a group and discussing issues such as agency, empowerment, and their relationships to their own bodies and to men. Of course, not everyone was pleased about it – according to the Guardian, Ways of Seeing was derogatorily compared to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book “for a generation of art students”.
“The female nude in Western painting was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer”
The ideas put forward by Berger and Dibb, which were later published in a best-selling book created with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis, were simple but radical. The female nude in Western painting – hairless, buxom, invariably with skin as white and unblemished as a pearl – was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She did not have desires of her own. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer, there only to be consumed. Of course, there was hypocrisy in this, too – “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,” wrote Berger, “Put a mirror in her...
Why we still need John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
In 1972, the critic opened our eyes with his analysis of the female figure in art and advertising – in today’s frenzied image culture, his lessons are still necessary
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胡適的翻譯事業1891-1962翻譯巔峰期 1918?-1933 胡適譯詩：他是詩人 (陳之藩)：《去國集》中《哀希臘歌》(1916，The Isles of Greece By Byron)；譯白郎寧《你總有愛我的一天》《清晨的分別》(1925)；哥德的Harfenspieler 打字小姐打到《老洛伯》《1918 嘗試集》和 《你總有愛我的一天》(1925：收入《嘗試後集》) 兩首詩的時候，都感動得流淚。胡頌平："(普及版)《嘗試集》校後記"， 胡適紀念館，1971 詩； 短篇小說；戲劇；翻譯論 在1924年和1925年，胡適譯了哈代的兩首詩《別離》《月光裡》:1961年致好友高宗武夫婦引：永不退讓，不屈服 (Tennyson) 胡適之先生的部分足跡 答T. F. C. (論譯戲劇)宗旨在排演：輸入戲劇裡的思想；輸入"範本"；戲劇長短介於短篇、長篇小說之間1919.3 胡適在《杜威先生與中國》：“自從中國與西洋文化接觸以來，沒有一個外國學者在中國思想界的影響有杜威這樣大。”《杜威五大講演》(約1920/1999) 杜威在華期間，印10次，每次印數一萬冊。 Reconstruction in Philosophy By John Dewey (1920東京大學演講)《哲學的改造》胡適、唐擘黃譯 (1934)21世紀初再版、增補版 做為哲學家的胡適：余英時舉羅素的字條：胡先生是個合格的哲學家 1939年10月18日寫短文Instrumentalism as a Political Concept，在10月20日參加杜威的80歲生日慶生會。胡適在1940年再將它擴充為長文發表在The Philosopher of the Common Man 論文集 胡適：《論翻譯：與曾孟樸先生書》1928.2.21，附曾先生答書，六千字的自敘傳。中國人能讀西洋文學書，60年來翻譯不滿200種.....近年只兩種：伍光健、徐志摩寫情小詩、獨幕劇、短篇小說；文學的經濟 胡適《論短篇小說》1918.3.15"用最經濟的文學手段，描寫事實中最精彩的一段，或一方面" 胡適《論翻譯---寄梁實秋，評張友松先生《評徐志摩的曼殊斐兒小說集》》1919.2 . 《新月》短篇《心理》半篇不敢譯下去。......因為我太笨了，不大愛讀她的作品， 《短篇小說 第一集》1919；《短篇小說 第二集》1933http://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCL-000452676 世界十大短篇小說短篇小說1929年 13版胡適編譯 華貿http://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCL-000452676 胡適《譯書》1923.4.《努力周報》：例。對原作者負責任、求不失原意；讀者，求他們能懂；自己不自欺欺人 胡適《翻譯之難》1924.12月：《現代評論》第一期，討論H. A. Giles 英譯胡適《景不徙篇》問題 《短篇小說第一集》(11篇) 銷行之廣,轉載之多,...相信外國文學的第一個條件是要使它化成明白流暢的本國文字。 《短篇小說第一集》譯者自序最後一課（La Derniére Chasse）〔法國〕都德柏林之圍（Le Siege de Berlin）〔法國〕都德 百愁門（The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows）〔英國〕吉百齡決鬥 〔俄國〕泰來夏甫梅呂哀 〔法國〕莫泊三二漁夫 〔法國〕莫泊三殺父母的兒子 〔法國〕莫泊三 一件美術品 〔俄國〕契訶夫愛情與麵包 〔瑞〕史特林堡一封未寄的信〔義〕卡德奴勿 ；她的情人（Her Lover） 〔俄國〕Maxim Gorky 《短篇小說第一集》譯者自序 米格兒 〔美國〕哈特 撲克坦趕出的人 〔美國〕哈特 戒 酒 〔美國〕哦亨利洛斯奇爾的提琴 〔俄國〕契訶夫苦惱 〔俄國〕契訶夫樓梯上 〔英國〕莫理孫 1939年7月3日，胡適買了毛姆 (W. Somerset Maugham1874-1965 )選的【短篇小說百篇】 (Tellers of Tales)Tellers of tales; 100 short stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany, 1937 1940.12.18 胡適50歲，給Roberta (Robby) Lowitz信，說Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) 的Double Birthday是其生平讀過的最佳小說之一我喜Willa Cather的書. 妳知道她嗎?...... 中華教育文化基金會編譯委員會(1926-)到台湾商務印書館(1961)合作"文須有益於天下"《人之子 : 一個先知的傳》, 盧特維克 (E. Ludwig，1881-1948)著 ; 孫洵侯譯，引《日知錄》卷19 他一向熱心于翻譯事業......約五年之內......包括關琪桐的培根《新工具》，羅念生的希臘戲劇，張谷若的哈代小說，陳綿的法國戲劇，還有我(梁實秋)的莎士比亞。 熊式一個案：給主持中華文化基金會的胡適送去大摞譯稿，胡適無意出版。徐志摩卻大為賞識，稱之為中國研究英國戲劇第一人 蕭伯納的《人與超人》，哈代的《卡斯特橋市長》，巴里的《彼德‧潘》和《可敬佩的克萊敦》.......英文處女作——話劇《王寶釧》，一九三四年夏由英國麥勳書局出版 個案：張谷若的哈代小說《還鄉記》、《德伯家的苔絲》1933.12.23 胡適之先生"校讀張恩裕翻譯的Tess《苔絲》.... (12.22 即說:此譯甚用心. 此人當有成就)「張恩裕，字谷若，北京大學英文係畢業的」 1937-38一年"......靠胡適之的編譯會的譯書的事 總算混過去了....."---hc按: 周要養約10口人。周作人1966.2.10 致信香港的徐訏 本會（原名中華教育文化基金董事會，簡稱中基會）係於1924年成立的財團法人，負責保管與支配美國庚子賠款餘額，用以促進中華教育與文化事業。China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture 1933.12.23 談翻譯:.....今不加咀嚼....豈不更失翻譯原意....胡適晚歲八論翻譯/胡頌平 鄭延國胡適日記 講"發揮"：Expression is the most effective means of approximating impression.要使你所得印象變成你自己的，最有效的法子是記錄或表現成文章。
The British author and artist John Berger (G., To the Wedding, Here Is Where We Meet, Ways of Seeing, Another Way of Telling) has for decades been writing books that are one of a kind: impassioned, big-hearted, politically…
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“Every artist’s work changes when he dies,” John Berger wrote in his essay on Alberto Giacometti. “Finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive … [His work] will have become evidence from the past, instead of being … a possible preparation for something to come.”
Berger wrote with an awareness “of the injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, wastefulness and alienation of our bourgeois society as reflected and expressed in the field of art.”
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” ―John Berger (1926-2017) in “Ways of Seeing” (1972)
John Berger, art critic, novelist, and author of “Ways of Seeing,” has passed away at age 90. Read his obituary in
John Frederick Kensett (American, 1816–1872) | Sunset on the Sea | 1872 http://met.org/2iM17SB
John Berger, Provocative Art Critic, Dies at 90
Photo
John Berger during a rehearsal of “Lying Down to Sleep’” at the Prado Museum in Madrid in 2010.CreditEmilio Naranjo/European Pressphoto Agency
John Berger, the British critic, novelist and screenwriter whose groundbreaking 1972 television series and book, “Ways of Seeing,” declared war on traditional ways of thinking about art and influenced a generation of artists and teachers, died on Monday at his home in the Paris suburb of Antony. He was 90.
Simon McBurney, the British actor and a friend of Mr. Berger’s, confirmed his death to The Associated Press.
As the host of “Ways of Seeing,” with his shaggy hair and tieless, loud-patterned shirt, Mr. Berger was a public intellectual who became a countercultural celebrity in 1970s Britain, where the BBC kept the four-part series in frequent rotation. The book became an art-school standard on both sides of the Atlantic.
He set the insurrectionary tone in the show’s opening sequence, taking a box cutter to a mock-up of Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” and slicing out the portrait of Venus.
John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 1 (1972)Video by tw19751
Mr. Berger’s intention was to upend what he saw as centuries of elitist critical tradition that evaluated artworks mostly formally, ignoring their social and political context, and the series came to be seen as an assault on the historian Kenneth Clark’s lofty “Civilisation,” the landmark 1969 BBC series about the glories of Western art.
Among many other subjects, Mr. Berger burrowed into the sexism underpinning the tradition of the nude; the place of high art in an image-saturated modern world; the relationship between art and advertising; and, of particular importance to him as a voice of the British New Left, the way traditional oil painting celebrated wealth and materialism.
“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations,” he wrote. “It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.”
In academic circles the book became, as one art historian described it, the equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book, and it went on to sell more than a million copies, never going out of print. Mr. Berger’s methods, influenced by the ideas of Walter Benjamin, tended to attract either ardent admiration or seething criticism, with little in between.
Susan Sontag once wrote that “in contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless.” Stephen Spender, on the other hand, called him “a foghorn in a fog” (a condemnation that Mr. Berger wryly spun into a compliment, asking what could be more useful in a fog). The critic Hilton Kramer complained that his brand of Marxism was not about real political problems but about provoking “social guilt among the comfortable, cultivated consumers of high culture.”
John Peter Berger was born in London on Nov. 5, 1926, and raised in only moderate comfort, with little high culture, in what he described as a working-class home.
His father, Stanley, a minor public official, and his mother, Miriam, managed to send him to private school, but he hated it and spent most of his time writing poetry and reading an anarchist weekly newspaper. He ran away from school at 16 and began studying art, continuing at Chelsea School of Art, now Chelsea College of Arts, after a stint in the Army.
Mr. Berger (pronounced BER-jer) wanted to be a painter but found that he was much better at writing. For a decade he was an art critic for The New Statesman, where he made a name for himself by antagonizing nearly everyone in the art world in prose that was beautifully spare and precise but heavily moralizing and also frequently humorless.
He was a champion of realism during the rise of Abstract Expressionism, and he took on giants like Jackson Pollock, whom he criticized as a talented failure for being unable to “see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs.”
But his love for favorite artists — among them Rembrandt, Velázquez, van Gogh and Frida Kahlo — was expressed with a fervor and depth of intelligence matched by few critics of his generation.
The year 1972 was Mr. Berger’s most prolific, with “Ways of Seeing” and the publication of his most critically acclaimed novel, “G.,” about the political awakening of a Lothario in pre-World War I Europe, which was awarded the Booker Prize. (Characteristically, Mr. Berger criticized the company that sponsored the prize, saying that it exploited Caribbean workers, and announced that he would split his winnings with the Black Panthers.)
In 1974, when his critical influence was probably at its height in Britain, he left London for Paris and then Geneva. He later decided to leave cities altogether, moving to a remote peasant community, Quincy, in the French Alps, where he lived with his wife, Beverly Bancroft, who died in 2013, and their son, Yves. (Besides his son, he is survived by another son, Jacob, and a daughter, Katya, from a previous marriage.)
In the Alps, where he learned to raise cattle, he wrote a trilogy of unconventional books called “Into Their Labors” — comminglings of short story, poetry and essay — examining the migration of peasants away from their traditions and into cities.
He also successfully dabbled in screenwriting, collaborating with the director Alain Tanner on three films, including the critically praised “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) about a group of radical idealists trying to stay true to their principles. His novel “From A to X” was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008, and in 2016, Mr. Berger was the subject of an anthology documentary, “The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger,” directed in part by the actress Tilda Swinton, a friend.
Despite his many forays into hard-to-classify forms of writing, he returned again and again to the essay, the bedrock of his reputation, whose underlying theme was almost always the impossibility of disentangling the aesthetic from the moral: A 1992 piece described the annual task of mucking the pit beneath his outhouse, an odious job but one that offered many of the same lessons that great art had taught him.
“Nothing in the nature around us is evil,” he wrote. “This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.”
“The just-hatched cuckoo, still blind and featherless, has a special hollow like a dimple on its back,” he continued, “so that it can hump out of the nest, one by one, its companion fledglings.”
「我認為一個寫作的人，應該勤於見證身邊正在發生的重要事情；即使書寫所立即產生的力量，可能看似微不足道、或一時被人忽略，但不要顧慮這些，還是要寫。『書寫』有著一種非常潛沉的生命，它蓄積著能量，在某個時刻，會對讀者產生一些微小或不小的改變。我引用剛過世不久的一位重要的波蘭記者Ryszard Kapuscinski的話，他談到記者這個角色時說，『一個記者必須要知道，對於他有機會看到的事情，他也只能看那麼一次。』我覺得這句話重要極了，因為它描述了一個寫作者必須發言的迫切義務。」＿＿ John Berger (1926-2017)
堅定地走在進步的道路上——郭力昕訪談 John Bergerby VOP on 一月 4, 2017 • 14:00
1980年代初期，我在美國初次讀到約翰‧伯杰（John Berger）的《Ways of Seeing》，大受啟發。這本基進地改變了幾世代學生對藝術觀看方式的書，其文字之簡鍊、觀點之犀利，讓我敬佩不已。1995年秋天我在英國，剛好碰上當時已年近七旬的伯杰，於倫敦的ICA（當代藝術中心）出席他新出版小說《To the Wedding》的發表會。那次我心理上完全像個朝聖的粉絲，聽完他的講話後，買了一本書，興奮的排著隊等著請他簽名。
記得他在書上簽名題字後，我告訴他，《Ways of Seeing》在華文出版界已經有三種不同的譯本。他親切的微笑著，很有力的握著我的手。那雙大而粗礪厚實的手，像是移居法國阿爾卑斯山區農村二十來年、跟農人們一起下田的結果。但伯杰努力不墜的，主要是筆耕。
郭力昕 ＿＿ 在《另一種影像敘事》中、〈照片的曖昧含混〉這篇文字裡，以及更早在《影像的閱讀》一書的「攝影術的使用」、「痛苦的照片」等文章裡，您都提到關於攝影裡的「時間斷裂所造成的驚嚇感」（shock of discontinuity），認為照片裡那些瞬間的、斷裂的資訊或事實，無法構成意義，也無法產生有意義的政治行動，例如您描述的麥庫林（Don McCullin）的戰地照片。然而，在2001年BBC的電視節目《希望的幽靈》（The Spectre of Hope）裡，您與薩爾加多（Sebastiao Salgado）對談他的全球移民攝影作品「Migrations: Humanity in Transition 」(2000)時，似乎非常肯定他的寫實主義攝影，對全球化產生的惡果，有著批判性的意義。請容我引述蘇珊‧桑塔格（Susan Sontag）在《旁觀他人之痛苦》裡對薩爾加多的批評意見。她說，薩氏的移民群像，將不同國家或地區的原因與類型不同的流離現象，籠統地歸納在一個「人性」的標題、與「全球化」的概念下；並且，在這種呈現下，觀者可能感到人間的苦難過於巨大無法逆轉、而任何地區性的政治行動亦因此無濟於事。雖然桑塔格在此書最後，似乎又自我矛盾地認為視覺效果聳動的戰爭攝影，仍有激發人們認識問題與產生行動的可能，並從而相當地否定了她早年在《論攝影》裡的批判觀點。您如何回應這些問題？
John Berger ＿＿ 首先我想表示，對於桑塔格最後這些年裡，針對幾個重要國際政治事件所發表的意見，或自我修正、轉向的看法，我是非常尊敬的。像她或我這樣的評論寫作者，有時會在書寫當時的特定氛圍與熱度上，為凸顯某個重點而損失了客觀的話語，但回頭檢視時的自我修正是可能發生的。
Berger ＿＿ 讓我引述一位巴勒斯坦友人的話：「在這個沒有盡頭的無光所在，求存與抵抗，分享著同一支燭光。」 （In this endless eclipse, survival and resistance share one candle.）現在擁有龐大權力的統治階級，都知道要控制媒體，他們自己也說過，要贏得媒體，才能贏得今日的戰爭。所以我們看到那些統治者聘用一些所謂的傳播專家，不斷的生產謊言。但是新科技的普及，確實帶來了拆穿謊言的新的可能性，使那些自以為壟斷了權力的人，無法真正取得權力的獨占。數位相機等科技產物，確實有潛力成為政治抵抗的工具，它們已經出現的一些使用案例，也讓人振奮。
郭 ＿＿ 從《Ways of Seeing》到《The Shape of a Pocket》（另類的出口），從您對資本體制下廣告影像的剖析與批判，到全球化經濟「新秩序」裡的野蠻主義、與它創造的全球勞動力的強迫性移動與買賣，您批判資本主義之「集權主義」邏輯的政治立場，從未改變過。台灣社會目前也以大量進口且剝削東南亞廉價移工而惡名昭彰，中國為經濟成長而剝削廉價勞工的血汗工廠，亦惡名遠播。您在許多作品中，長期書寫發生在歐洲地區的移民問題；華文作家或視覺藝術家，可以如何回應目前台海兩岸的這個現象？
1月2日，英國藝術評論家、作家約翰・伯格（John Berger）去世，終年90歲。攝：Imagine China
他是曾獲得英國文學界最高殊榮布克獎（Booker Prize）的作家，他是近半個世紀來最偉大的藝術評論大師之一，他的著作《觀看的方式》（Ways of seeing）是視覺藝術評論領域的必讀經典，他還是一名矢志不移的馬克思主義信仰者。1月2日，90歲高齡的英國作家、畫家、藝術評論家約翰・伯格（John Berger）在巴黎郊區逝世。
不少文化界人士對這位大師的離世表達哀悼，藝術家 David Shrigley 稱伯格是「史上最好的藝術作者」，作家 Jeanette Winterson 稱他是「這個枯竭世界中的能量泉源」。而最早發布訃告的導演 Simon Mcburney 則形容自己的這位至交好友為「聆聽者」（Listener）。
1972年，伯格迎來了其藝術及評論生涯的第一個巔峰——為 BBC 主編了解構藝術鑑賞的紀錄片《觀看的方式》。影片中，伯格對藝術作品的關注點不再僅限於傳統的風格、技法、真偽，而是將階級、性別、種族等社會架構引入藝術評論。伯格宣告藝術不僅僅是精英階層的消遣，他打通了藝術與普通民眾之間的關係，分析了藝術背後的權力、社會生產及文化結構。這部影片和隨後發表的同名書籍，深深改變了一代人觀看藝術的方式。同年，伯格的小說《G》獲得布克獎。
