the other essay constitutes a eulogy LO an unofficial Soviet sculptor whom Berger has inexplicably chosen to venerate. Although it contravenes the author's intentions, essential to split the book down the middle. In his unhappy choice of Neizvestny, as his prototype of the revolutionary artist: a sculptor whose work is banal and derivative at best, turgidly sentimental at worst, Berger may well have guaranteed that own eminently coherent presentation of a possible politics of art, gets- nothing like the serious attention it deserves.
We shall ignore that "second essay' of Berger's - his discussion of Neizvestny discussing the book and concentrate on his more general theory.
Berger's views are vitally important to current controversies over political commitment in art, because they provide an antidote to the phillistinism into which Marxist art theory can so easily fall. Berger believes in the validity of art; hot art as ham-fisted propaganda, not art as psychotherapy; not art as audio-visual education, but art as the unique manifestation of a personal vision. He does not make the mistake of assuming that the need for public art precludes the possibility (or the necessity) of private experience. He reaffirms that art, even for the masses, must ultimately relate to individual consciousness; that internal freedom of consciousness is what liberation is about. He criticizes, for example, the over-simplified conception of the artist in early revolutionary Russia, These solely that of 'artist-engineer' also artist-philosophers." he points out, "The work of art and the machine product are not precisely the same. Yet their [early Russians] over-estimation the machine understandable enough in this context; the idea of industrialization had acquired a lyrical power, for it seemed to offer a way of avoiding, instead of suffering and enduring, a whole phase of history."
What, one wonders, could be the excuse for l Our current generation's infatuation with artistic engineering? By no stretch imagination can we maintain the illusion that industrialization is the key to liberation of the European worker. In our Marcusian era, successful technology is seen as the chief tool of repression by corporate capitalism. It should hardly be romanticized (as it presently is) by revolutionary The charitable explanation for this phenomenon is that it is a misplaced nostalgia for earlier revolutionary periods (e.g. Russia, circa 1919) in which technology was seen as a miraculous synthesizer of art and politics.
In his criticism of Socialist Realism, Berger undermines the two chief defences of this doctrinal tyranny. To the argument that its naturalism provides the most accessible form for communicating with the masses, he replies that "this claim ignores most of what we know about the process of perception, but even more obviously it is betrayed by child art, folk art and by the ease with which a mass adult urban population learns to read highly formalized cartoons, caricatures, posters, etc." To the contention that such 'realist' art is an effective means of educating the masses and developing their revolutionary consciousness, he counters that, if it were the case that mass consciousness was truly being educated and developed then the artistic forms and techniques would not have (could not have remained so static and unchanging over the last thirty years.
Berger attacks Stalin's stultifying effect on creative expression by ideological impositions on artists, and provides a distinction which is invaluable for our purposes in working out a political art. There are, he claims, two categories of revolutionary art works: "short-term works, which can justifiably KINGSLEY AMIS - A RECENT POSE subsumed under propaganda, [which] reveal in their structure and form their urgent but temporary function. They should be like orders of the day!' But if 'orders of the day' become permanent orders, he points out, they stunt natural progression and development.
The long-term" works which he opposes to these orders of the day, must take into account, and come to terms with, the far more ambiguous and complex areas of human land Penguin Books must experience. They must come to grips with the totality of man's situation and not simply be the interim statements of his momentary conditions.
Janet Daley photographs of Neizvestny's work: Jean Mohr. John Berger's Art and Revolution is published simultaneously by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.