Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...essay "That Which Is Held," Berger contrasts sexuality and love in their relation to art. Berger describes Sexuality, as a source of renewal, "forever unfinished, never complete; it finishes only to begin again, as if for the first time." Love, however, is aware of a whole, it permits the reflectiveness and perspective requisite for art; "the artist's will to preserve and complete, to create an equilibrium, to hold--and in that `holding' to hope for an ultimate assurance--derives from lived or imagined experience of love...
Berger becomes frustrated with language, too, when it fails to rise above fragmentation. In the essay "A Professional Secret," he battles against language that loses its pictorial power, its signifying power: "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart; when this happens it can go straight to the cultivated mind, but it bypasses the thereness of things and events." Berger resists polish or slickness in art, even favoring imperfection if it reveals earnestness rather than perfection if it only presents glibness. Events which have been "really painted--so that the pictorial language opens up--[join] the community of everything...
Berger refuses to submit not only to the reductiveness of the commercial reading of art but also to the oversimplification of the "politically correct" reading of art. He is certainly willing to admit sociopolitical truths in his writing. He acknowledges in his essay. "The Erogenous Zone" that "the visual may play a more important role in the sexuality of men than women, but this is difficult to assess because of the extent of sexist traditions in modern image-making...
...articulation of the relationship between the city and the garden animates both books. Lionello Puppi's essay on "Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Garden" in Gardens argues that the Renaissance garden, which was defined as an imitation of nature in opposition to the city, developed into a venue for "artifice" of all kinds...
...class space--perhaps 60 percent--for Afro-Am and VES majors, while allowing for students with other interests and backgrounds to fill the rest of the slots. These students could be chosen by a random lottery or by a selection process requiring them to write a short essay about what they think they could learn from and add to the class...