John Berger: the poetics and politics of collaboration

June 11-13 International conference, Postdam university.

Collaboration is a leitmotif that runs through the multi-faceted work of John Berger. In his art criticism he consistently interrogated the deep-seated notion of the artist as individual creator, and instead propagated the insight that “every authentic painting demonstrates a collaboration”. In line with this, his own creative praxis as novelist, poet, script writer, essayist, translator is essentially collaborative, as demonstrated by his manifold cooperations with film director Alain Tanner, photographers Jean Mohr, Jitka Hanzlová, and Tereza Stehlíková, TV producer Michael Dibbs, typographer Richard Hollis, or novelist Anne Michaels, among many others. Collaborations like these indicate Berger’s deeply political understanding of aesthetics, leading to a sustained, indeed lifelong, commitment to socially engaged art. In this perspective, practices of collaborative production and reception were crucial for any attempt to overcome the individualising effects of the capitalist art circuit and to counter the constraints of the dominant literary business with its fixation on the individual author. […]

The conference has been organized by Dirk Wiemann (Potsdam) and Christian Schmitt-Kilb (Rostock), who are very much looking forward to a cross-disciplinary conversation with artists and scholars, poets and (graphic) novelists, filmmakers and translators.