Archive of A Seventh Man
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Art and Property Now
In tribute to John Berger, who died yesterday, on 2 January 2017, we excerpt 'Art and Property Now' from Landscapes, edited by Tom Overton. The 1967 essay of materialist art criticism fed into Ways of Seeing (1972), the influential TV series and book that changed our understanding of art and its private ownership.
"Painting or a sculpture is a significant form of property – in a sense in which a story, a song, a poem is not. Its value as property supplies it with an aura which is the last debased expression of the quality which art objects once possessed when they were used magically. It is around property that we piece together our last tattered religion, and our visual works of art are its ritual objects." — John Berger
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Good To Know You!
Andy Merrifield pays tribute to John Berger, who passed away aged 90 on 2 January 2017.
John died yesterday. I’ll remember his voice, his laugh, his charm and generosity. His words. Stripped-down words, mystical and carefully chosen words, earthy words, fierce words. They’ll always grab us, make us think, feel and act, piss people off. To weep for John is to weep on the shoulder of life. Remember him, gazing up at Aesop, in front of Velázquez’s great canvas?He’s intimidating, he has a kind of arrogance. A pause for thought. No, he’s not arrogant. But he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The presence of Aesop refers to nothing except what he has felt and seen. Refers to no possessions, to no institutions, to no authority or protection. If you weep on his shoulder, you’ll weep on the shoulder of his life. If you caress his body, it will recall the tenderness it knew in childhood.
John didn’t suffer fools gladly, either.
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Juridified Dispossession: Brexit, Migrant Workers and the Law
What are the implications of Brexit for workers’ rights? Gracie Mae Bradley examines how state power creates a paradigm of juridified dispossession where government immigration law and policy tacitly sanction the exploitation of migrant workers, while at the same time encouraging a ‘hostile environment’ extending into the fabric of daily life. Brexit’s legal challenges threaten the rights of migrant workers further, but where there is fragmentation and change, new possibilities for solidarity and resistance can emerge.
Gracie Mae Bradley is a human rights worker and sometime writer. She is a Project Manager at the Migrants' Rights Network and also helps coordinate the Against Borders for Children campaign.
When we talk about workers’ rights, which workers and which rights do we really mean? Legal rights are only one component of justice and the good life, and the law itself does not contain all that is meaningful about rights. But Brexit has pitched workers into a battle with the UK government to prevent it from rolling back long-held employment rights once Britain leaves the EU, and resistance must take into account the law as much as government policy, politics, or what is happening in the streets.
Theresa May has vowed to end the European Court of Justice’s (CJEU) jurisdiction in the UK: the Great Repeal Bill (GRB) is an historic proposal to end the authority of EU law and ‘take back control’. On ‘Brexit day’, EU law will be absorbed into UK law “wherever practical.” Of course, what is practical for the government is not necessarily practical for workers.
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Antiquarian and Revolutionary: Walter Benjamin
Leading radical writer on art, John Berger, celebrates his ninetieth birthday this week. We're proud to have published many of his books, including the just-published Landscapes: John Berger on Art,a companion volume to Portraits: John Berger on Artists, both edited by Tom Overton. We have 40% off all the books on our John Berger bookshelf until Sunday 6th November to celebrate!
In 'Antiquarian and Revolutionary: Walter Benjamin,' excerpted from Landscapes, Berger presents his singular engagement with one of his greatest enduring influences, the eclectic German critic and thinker Walter Benjamin. Widely considered to be the popularizer of the Benjamin's theories, Berger's seminal TV series Ways of Seeing made clear its relationship to Benjamin's influential 1935 essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.
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'I have to turn this prize against itself'—John Berger on accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction, 23 November 1972
In 1972, John Berger won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel G. He shared half of the proceeds with the Black Panthers, "the black movement with the socialist and revolutionary perspective that I find myself most in agreement with in this country". The other half funded A Seventh Man, his study of migrant workers in Europe.
Making a direct link between Booker McConnell's involvement in colonial exploitation of the Caribbean and the modern poverty of the region, Berger declared his intention, "as a revolutionary writer, to share this prize with people in and from the Caribbean, people who are involved in a struggle to resist such exploitation and, eventually, to expropriate companies like Booker."
On Berger's 90th birthday, we present the text of his acceptance speech for the prize at the Café Royal in London on 23rd November 1972.
All our books by John Berger are 40% off until Sunday November 6th to celebrate his 90th birthday.