'An irresponsible flow of images’: Berger, Clark and the art of television, 1958-1988

Abstract

John Berger and Mike Dibb’s four-part 1972 BBC2 series Ways of Seeing is a landmark in British arts broadcasting: an polemical essay in deconstruction intended to clear the ground on which a truly ‘public’ art and criticism would subsequently be built. Although its format and style were very different, it was widely interpreted as a Marxist riposte to an equally renowned series, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (1969). This essay considers this creative dialogue between Berger and Clark, reconstructing a personal as well as intellectual relationship. At first glance the pair seem opposites, with Clark at the centre of the postwar cultural Establishment and Berger on the fringes. Along with such questions of patronage this essay considers the ways in which Berger and Clark understood landscape, the nude and television itself. It argues that Berger’s puritanism and particularism may have prevented the series from achieving Berger’s ultimate goal: a more participatory public for the arts. If this was a failure, however, responsibility lies largely with admirers’ misinterpretation of the series. They made Berger’s means into an end in itself

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ORCID for Jonathan Conlin: orcid.org/0000-0003-0394-4931

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