John Berger

Begründung der Jury

★★
France /// Frankreich
★★

“À vol d’oiseau” brings together all of John Berger’s writings on artists. It is almost like a self-portrait, his own art history. A tribute paid to this impressive British writer and art critic.

The big, but very light volume with wonderful binding, almost melts in your hands. It lures you inside with a simple but brilliant cover. Once there – inside – a dense textbook, divided into three sections, awaits you.
The very subtle play of type invites every reader to use this book and enables your own way of reading it. Here nothing disturbs, nothing distracts – there is a decisive simplicity and yet, little graphic points of orientation, arrows and squares, guide you on your way through. Every small design-decision was made well.

This keen book is what it is. Nothing more – nothing less!
It does not matter that the book is not exactly a book by John Berger. It´s a re-composition by the publisher, constructed from hundreds of text fragments. That everything or almost everything in it has been torn out of its context, moved, shifted. That some pieces have been isolated, taken from a novel, others from a play, from a correspondence. That others are fragments of a larger monograph, or constituted fragments already edited, sometimes by John Berger himself or for other anthologies.

Creatively brought together, as if from a single source. Pick it up and become a part of it yourself.