‘John Berger defines a field’

What is John Berger's field?

Is this the field of chains, rings and soft canons? Of murmured and half-remembered songs and circles? Might we here follow the meandering, ritornello weave of childhood, traversing ‘repeated lines of words and music’ through ‘grass not yet high’? Or is this a field of seductive – and gendered – ripenings, of ‘intangible jars of her pleasure’, within ‘easy reach’ upon a ‘shelf’, at once offering terrestrial and celestial plenitudes?

Perhaps it is the field of geometry and measure: of ‘surface’, ‘corner’, ‘edge’, field of wire horizons. Or perhaps Berger's movement through the field follows a different call, tracing the faint contour of an older trail, adjacent, ‘seldom referred to’; a winding, fading field path, beyond the idle chatter of hens, beyond even the ‘intense awareness of freedom’ it invokes; quite far now from our point of departure, and darkening where the grass has grown ‘tall in the field’; quite far, where ‘time and space conjoin’, opening on to a call more ‘immediately recognizable’ to the philosopher, ‘preverbal’, ‘nameless’ –

Or perhaps we might scrape away a little of the fertile topsoil, and heed Berger's epigraphic warning: Life, after all, is not a walk across an open field.

‘break the self-sufficiency of the field’

‘Field’ is not Berger's first foray into the field – nor, indeed, into the field of fields: this is to be found in the 1969 essay ‘The Moment of Cubism’, in which Berger traces the changing spatial relationships between man and nature in art across a series of five epistemological breaks, from the applied geometrics of the Renaissance to the dynamic reconfiguration of empty space characteristic of post-Newtonian metaphysics. Here, the functional unity of nature and geometry characterised by the multidisciplinary logics of Leonardo and Alberti is fractured by the eruption of Copernican subjectivity, cleaving science and art, and turning the latter towards the artifice of the theatre stage. In this new space, upon which appearances conspire to engender a ‘metaphorical model’ for art as constructive reality, Berger asserts that the artist ‘becomes primarily concerned with creation’, tracing a new ‘schematic’ relationship to nature.