Starting on the outside also suggests a digital quality, the content is broadcast to the reader even as they pass the shelf. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” This simple typographic trick gives the book both a certain modesty (saves on pages) and an urgency (no time to waste). Hollis starts the text of the first essay on the cover: “Seeing comes before words. It was published by the BBC Books under the Pelican Books imprint, a division of the venerable Penguin Press organized to publish books to educate rather than entertain the reading public.Įven more striking was the book’s design. Even more radical, the book was produced in black + white, reducing the famous art to mere notations on standard, uncoated paper of a trade book. In contrast Berger, Dibb and Hollis produced a slim paperback, 127 × 203mm, of only 166 pages. Clark had also produced a book to accompany Civilisation: a huge, lavish, full-color coffee table monster that must have weighted 10 kilos. The television program had moderate success but shortly after it aired Berger joined with producer Mike Dibb and graphic designer Richard Hollis to produce a printed version of the televised series. The idea that classic paintings could be decoded to reveal social facts - and in fact Berger compared them to modern advertising - was heretical and his work was met with incredulity and anger in the hallowed halls of University Art History departments around the country, But Berger’s position, especially his proto-feminist critique of female nudes, would grow to become the dominant form of art criticism in the years ahead.
As a critique of Clark, Berger created a popular reading of the icons of western art not as aesthetic objects, but deeply cultural artifacts that reveal, upon close “reading”, the limitation, prejudice, bias, and obsession of the culture from which they sprang.This form of cultural criticism was established in the Universities, especially Marxist leaning polytechnics, but had never before had such a popular airing. Berger was reacting specifically to the traditional connoisseurship of Kenneth Clark in the Civilisation series, another famous television program, which inscribed the canonical march of Western culture in heroic terms. Ways of Seeing started as a four-part television series on the BBC in England conceived of and written by art critic John Berger. I thought it was interesting to choose the reverse scenario: something that started digital but found its real audience in print. Everyone is talking about the way in which digital media is destabilizing print.
0 kommentar(er)
