Building a roof from the trees - 19/04/2020

The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station Viktor Y. Popkov (1960)

 These pieces were written during the lockdowns of 2020 and originally published via TinyLetter. 

The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station is an image that often comes to my mind. I first came across the artwork at Haus de Kunst gallery in Munich, as part of a labyrinthine exhibition entitled Post War: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945-1965.

We were visiting a friend in Salzburg and the others wanted to try their luck getting a touted ticket for Bayern Munich v Schalke, so I was just looking for a way to waste a few hours in a chilly Munich. Rather than a few wasted hours waiting around for the others, I was taken on a tour unlike any other of the 20th century via 350 artworks, but it was Popkov's painting that stuck with me.

Popkov, born in 1932, toured various sites in the Soviet Union, looking for subjects for his paintings, and whilst the State was looking for heroic emblems of Socialist Realism, Popkov produced something else. The nighttime setting of The Builders conceals the site on which the workers have been working, the focus of their labour, and instead, Popkov's choice of scene frames and focuses the eye on the details of the slightly awkward arrangement of workers in the foreground. It is intimate rather than heroic, weary rather than victorious. There is no labour in this scene, only the labourers. Compared to something like Alexander Samokhvalov's Parade of Athletes in Kirov, Popkov's Builders tells a more complicated story of Soviet life than mere propaganda.

Parade of Athletes in Kirov Alexander Samokhvalov

I had cause to recall Popkov's work as we hear the word 'key worker' over and over (those labouring without visibility and mostly without PPE), and we are deafened by the sound of thousands of Tory voters, banging on pans once a week at 8pm as if their voting record has been wiped clean by the emergence of the virus. And Popkov's painting pointed my thoughts towards how we may emerge from this crisis with a clearer view of social justice, and as you'll see in John Berger's Distance, how we may 'build a roof from the trees we run between'.

If like Popkov, we conceal the labouring of these workers, what does it leave? In commodity fetishism, the labour is concealed - but now the commodity is the maniacal urge brewed by the press, to be thankful for the key workers. This abstract, hollowed-out concept of gratitude, blurs, much like Popkov did, the conditions of that labour we are so grateful for. The feeling of gratitude is of course, not enough. It is trite to say, things can't go back to how they were, and we should not indulge in fetishising the Stakhonovite endeavour of carers, nurses and ambulance drivers - we should instead, as Brecht says, 'transform justice into a passion'.

But alas, you came for the poetry, and I've put politics up front. I could have brought you more blatant representations of labour via the poetry of Fred Voss or Philip Levine. But, as my mind so effortlessly returns to the images in that exhibition at the Haus de Kunst, my mind turns to the work of John Berger.

When I started thinking about this newsletter and about what to feature from Berger's work, I pulled his books from my shelves and lost most of this week (hence the late mailing of this email) searching for a single poem or pithy turn of phrase, anything, that I could pluck from his life's work and present to you all.

But Berger was and is a node, a processor of story and of telling, so I would seem wrong to plonk something down in front of you without something else positioned in relation to it.

So, instead, along with a poem from Berger, here's a bit from Berger's translation of a poem by Brecht that he translated with Anya Rostock, entitled An Address to Danish Worker Actors on the Art of Observation. The full thing is a chapter in Berger's Landscapes, but this is a splicing together of two of my favourite bits of the poem. I hope these words, Berger's and Brecht's, put things in concept and help us see, beyond this desolate state of the present, a route to a better world. Indeed, we should ask, as Berger does, 'tomorrow, where shall we go?'

I hope you enjoy. I promise next week's newsletter will rebalance the poetry-politics seesaw. Maybe.

Distance John Berger (from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos)

You have filled the thermos with coffee
packed our footprints if needed
to throw into the jaws
of the untestifying
eternal snow.

Together as carpenters with hammers
we have taught the distance
how to build a roof
from the trees
we run between.

In the silence behind
we no more hear the faraway
question of the summer house:
And tomorrow where
shall we go?

At dusk the harnessed dogs fear
there is no end to the forest.
And each night in the snow
we calm them
with our surprising laughter.

An Address to Danish Worker Actors on the Art of Observation Bertolt Brecht

Yet how to begin? How to show
The living together of men
That it may be understood
And become a world that can be mastered?
How to reveal not only yourselves and others
Floundering in the net
But also make clear how the net of fate
Is knotted and cast,
Cast and knotted by men?
[…] Here is where you
Acting and working,
Learning and teaching,
Can intervene from your stage
In the struggles of our time.

You with the intentness of your studies
And the elation of your knowledge
Can make the experiences of struggle
The property of all
And transform justice
Into a passion.