He's a writer, painter, journalist and thinker, but storytelling remains central to John Berger's art, writes Aidan Dunne
The drawings in Marisa Camino and John Berger's exhibition Entries at the Vangard Gallery in Cork had a singular genesis. They were made collaboratively, but Camino lives in a village in northern Spain and Berger lives in a village in the French Alps near the border with Switzerland, so the drawings were posted back and forth between them, acquiring additions and alterations, until they each agreed a particular work was complete. Hardly surprising then that there is a fragmentary quality to what we see.
It's not the fragmentation of violent disjuncture though, more a dreamy, compliant space in which visions of figures, of animals, plants, details from art history and architectural structures can manifest themselves, flowing and blending and overlapping. In a real sense, the drawings are a record of the communicative space between the two artists. They have, Berger explains, known each other for perhaps 12 or 15 years, "though we've only been drawing together for the last seven. Marisa speaks very little English, and I don't really speak Spanish, so we have no real language in common. So the drawings are very much like an exchange, a privileged exchange, between us."
Looking remarkably youthful for his age - he was born in 1926 - Berger is a compact, energetic presence with a large, leonine head and piercing eyes. For at least the last 30 years or so, French has been the language of his daily life. It's the first language of his younger son. "When I go to England now people tell me that my English is very good." And his English is in fact strongly accented, and perhaps more towards Switzerland than France.
He probably remains most famous for two things: the book and television series Ways of Seeing and his novel G, which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In fact it wasn't so much that G won the Booker that made the headlines, as that he denounced Booker McConnell at the award ceremony and handed half his winnings over to a representative of the Black Panthers. But apart from G and Ways of Seeing he has done an immense amount of work across a huge range of disciplines including journalism, novels, non-fiction, plays and film.
Many of his projects have had a strong collaborative dimension. He has worked with photographer Jean Mohr on several justly-celebrated books (including A Fortunate Man), with film-maker Alain Tanner, with playwright Nella Bieski and with television programme-maker Mike Dibb (on Ways of Seeing).
"Since it has happened so often, collaboration is obviously something I like, but I don't have a theory about it. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I'm a storyteller, and storytelling is actually a form of collaboration with life. You're always listening, receiving." Storytelling he regards as absolutely central to everything he does.
BERGER WAS BORN in London. His father had served four years as an infantry officer during the first World War and had become involved in several different business ventures subsequently. The young Berger was dispatched to a public school, St Edward's in Oxford, which he loathed, leaving it to attend the Central School of Art when he was 16.
Conscripted in 1944, he was stationed close to Belfast. After demobilisation he continued his art studies at Chelsea where Henry Moore was among the teachers.
Although he embarked on a life as a painter, he decided, sometime in the early 1950s, to give it up in favour of writing. "Not because I was disappointed with painting, not at all." But living, he says, with what was then the real prospect of nuclear war, the notion of making paintings "seemed inadequate to the situation". He wrote for the New Statesman and for the Tribune, when George Orwell was still editor: "He was tough. Words had to be kept clean. Sloppy writing meant sloppy thinking and that wasn't just sloppy, it was dangerous." For various reasons, including the fact "it was a challenge and it interested me", he began to write about art.
Influenced by European thinkers like Frederick Antal and Ernest Fischer, his espousal of a realist, socialist art - not at all the same thing as official Socialist Realism - won him friends and enemies. The question we should ask in the presence of art, he wrote, was: "Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?"
His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958. He remembers it as being an enormous undertaking: "I was used to writing eight-page pieces." Once it was complete, his primary thought was that at least he knew he was "capable of finishing a book-length fiction".
Famously, within a couple of years he'd left England, a decision he has rationalised in different ways at different times. It seems to come down to the fact that Europe suits him.
He is very conscious that his paternal grandfather had moved to England from Trieste, that Europe is in his genes. In any case he has never been tied down anywhere. Not only has he travelled consistently - "but never long distances" - he doesn't even own the house he lives in. "I don't know . . . I've never in my life owned a house and never been tempted to. In some way or another that may be related to the business of travelling." He also harbours a lifelong passion for motorbikes.
The publication of G and Ways of Seeing both happened in 1972. "G took seven years to write." He was based for a time in France, then in Geneva, and latterly, "I worked four months a year for Granada Television in Manchester making programmes. The only time in my life when I had a fixed job. I even had an office." Ways of Seeing came about "because the BBC forgot about it. We had a little money and made it incredibly slowly over nine months."
A response to Kenneth Clark's lofty, patrician Civilization, Ways of Seeing is a cogent primer in the theory of visual culture, introducing ideas about feminism, the commodification of the art object and the ideological underpinning of supposedly neutral, aesthetic judgments. Its influence was vast, yet initially Dibb and Berger struggled to have it screened.
"They put it out late at night. We checked the figures." The audience was small, but hardly any of them switched off, so there was an argument for re-screening the programme in a better slot. Penguin, meanwhile, expressed interest in doing a book, and the BBC then came on board.
Despite such successes, Berger has shown no signs of fitting into the cultural mainstream, however. "After I'd written G, we moved to a village in the Alps." It's a working community, and, in relative terms, a fairly hard environment.
And it led to the production of his peasant trilogy, Into Their Labours. He was spurred by the gradual disappearance of peasant communities in Europe. "When I decided to write stories about mountain peasants, I had to find a different voice of narrative, one appropriate to their experiences. The narrative became . . . not simpler, it's more that there is a longer time between sentences. You know Twenty Years Agrowing? It has that incredible sense of time." While peasant communities continue to decline, the process is, he thinks, "slower than those observing it believe. That culture is incredibly obstinate."
THE SEARCH FOR a narrative voice is most dramatically embodied in his extraordinary book, King (1999), set in a camp of homeless squatters on the fringes of a contemporary city.
"Until you find a voice that's going to tell the story you write nothing, or you write a lot but it's very bad. I did that for about a year. I'd spent time in a shantytown, and noticed that dogs are a big part of life there, but it hadn't occurred to me that a dog should tell the story." Once it did, the book became possible. But writing it was in a way traumatic.
"It was incredibly difficult to come back from it. When you write, you're feeling your way along in the dark, and sometimes you find that you've gone further than you intended." The unnamed city resembles Barcelona and the book, he reckons, "is close to Spanish painting because, unlike any other painting, Spanish painting is at home with poverty".
Writing has always been hard work for him. "This isn't false modesty. But I'm not very gifted with language. I mean I'm not dyslexic, but writing has always been a very slow process for me. It's endless. I go through many versions until I get to one that satisfies me." As a journalist he picked out letters on a typewriter with two fingers, but now: "It's important for me to write by hand."
That he is so productive he puts down to his genetic make-up. "It is something to do with my DNA, I'm sure. By some sort of accident I have much more energy than the average person. It means I can get quite a lot things done." Describing the making and apprehension of paintings in an essay in 1985, he wrote: "The only inspiration that exists is the intimation of our own potential." His own writings have had a comparable effect, triggering an awareness of potential in numerous readers and even changing the course of their lives. That is gratifying, he admits, but at a distance. It feels curiously remote, that is to say, from "the effort and difficulty of writing the book".
Entries: Drawings 1999-2005, Marisa Camino and John Berger, Vangard Gallery, Carey's Lane, Cork, until Jan 21, 021-4278718. Berger on Drawing, an anthology of John Berger's writings on drawing, is published by Occasional Press