Next week, I’ll be speaking at Monash University’s conference Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe. I’m also helping to organise the event with Andrew Milner, and I’m looking forward to meeting our esteemed guests, among them Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Red Mars I have been re-reading and enjoying all over again. My paper is on Wednesday, 1 September, part of a panel representing Pia Ednie-Brown’s Plastic Futures project at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University. The panel consists of Pia, myself and another SIAL/Plastic Futures colleague, Andy Miller.

My abstract is below. The title references my PhD subtitle from 2008, ‘J.G. Ballard’s affirmative dystopias’, and alongside François Roche, Greg Lynn and Ballard, I will touch upon the work of Nic Clear, Archigram, Bruce Sterling, Geoff Manaugh and Marion Shoard.

If you’re in Melbourne next week, please come along. Registration details are available here, and the full program is here. To whet your appetite, read Manaugh’s excellent interview with Robinson, which anticipates the key themes of the conference.

Simon Sellars: ‘Affirmative architectural dystopias: experimental relations between humans and the built environment’

In a time of environmental concern, architecture is dominated by the mantra of sustainability. This is the ‘new high priest of moralism’ according to François Roche, a ‘green wash’ cordoning off nature as a sterile theme park. But can alternative solutions be found within the archetypal dystopia, within the fraught intertwining of the human and natural worlds that negatively generates the utopian rhetoric of sustainability? In this paper, I explore recent architectural practice that explicitly deploys science fiction, utopia and dystopia to investigate experimental relationships between humans, the built environment and the natural world. Juxtaposing the SF texts of architects including Greg Lynn and Roche with the work of novelist J.G. Ballard, an influence on many practitioners within this new discourse, I consider the suggestion that the movement towards the ‘dystopian’ in these texts can perhaps be simply read as ‘embracing change’, a new relationship that generates a new outcome: ‘affirmative architectural dystopias’.

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “The Drowned World”. 2007. Digital montage. Dimensions variable.

Selections taken from Simon O’Carrigan’s body of work “The Drowned World”, a title taken in reference to a speculative fiction that inspired much of the imagery in this work: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

ARTIST STATEMENT

[Note: the quotes throughout, from Ballard's The Drowned World, were not included in the artist's original presentation -- SS].

“The Drowned World” is a body of work focussed on the making of images. Coming from a painterly approach to the construction of images, parallels are drawn between the layered nature of the oil paint medium, and the layering prevalent in digital imaging software. The premise of a fragmented nature of vision in a ‘deluge’ of visual culture leads to an image in tension: striving for the unity of traditional modes of painting but simultaneously embracing the fissures and tears embodied in the construction of the image. The flood became the keystone of the work’s subject matter in relation to several concerns: climate change, mythical creation floods, apocalyptic forecasts, inspiration taken from J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, and a certain atmosphere of unstoppable movement (a parallel with digital and wireless technologies).

Formally, the flood holds a unique form of surface: a surface that can shift and create unexpected combinations (by literally displacing debris, also by the nature of reflection on the surface). This surface that is temporary, mobile, and fragmented translates to the surface of the painted works. Many images in the body of work are sourced from photographs both found and newly made. The flat surface and particular characteristics of different kinds of lenses, cameras, and printing technologies are closely observed in the reworking of each image. Thus, some images sourced from 1970s National Geographic magazines have a slightly less saturated colour and a more grainy image than those taken in 2007 on a digital SLR and printed with advanced digital technologies.

The combination of the image fragments is often firstly a digital process, but always mimicking traditional knife-and-glue collage. In this way, the digital production uses the trompe l’oeil mode of painting. This is extended by the literal use of trompe l’oeil in some of the works, and the addition of neatly ‘cut’ projected video to act as another layer of montage, as if the projected light could be cut and glued into place.

Simon O’Carrigan. Iguana (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed media cel animation. 15 sec.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

The body of work depicts the flood both as peaceful, cleansing bodies of water and as destructive, apocalyptic events. The apocalypse figures in the final body of work only as an allusion or a hidden layer of meaning, though the research focussed largely on this apocalypse as a parallel of the ‘Death of Painting’. The ‘Death of Painting’ was prefigured by photography’s invention, and then more directly by the expansion of artistic practice to include found objects, installations and performances. In “The Drowned World”, the aim was to answer the question not of painting’s vitality (a question which is often asked, but to my mind misses the point) but of its ontology. Like any art form, painting can never completely die, but its modality can change and evolve.

Digital imaging and its collusion with marketing and consumer culture have greatly changed the methods and significance of image construction, and image transmission. This shift in visual culture is arguably as significant for painting as the invention of photography was: at a time when fewer artists work with images (choosing rather to focus on conceptual works, performance, or time-based mediums), the creation of visual representations are left to open for commerce to dominate. It is my feeling that those of us who choose still to paint, and to do so in a representational manner, have a responsibility to take the images back, and to investigate the ramifications of the changing modes of image construction and consumption.

Parts of my research focussed on a handful of texts – Rosalind Krauss and subsequent commentary on the ‘expanded field’ of arts practice, and Jacques Lacan on visuality and subjectivity. These lines of inquiry are not central to the finished work, nor need the audience even be aware of them, though they were central in focussing and clarifying what was being achieved in the work. The ‘expanded field’ discourse speaks of a ‘technical support’ as replacing the traditional medium – in this case, all the works may become resolved as oil on canvas, but the production method is a combination of traditional and digital ideas (composition, layering, colour theory, blue-screen and matting effects). The works that combine projection and painting most obviously fit this schema, though all the works shared a focus not on the materiality of one particular medium, but on the crossing points between different ways of working.

Simon O’Carrigan. Burnley Hotel (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed Media, stopmotion, & digital. 1 min 37 sec.

…this morning he found himself reluctant to leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite. He had spent a couple of hours over breakfast alone, and then completed a six-page entry in his diary, deliberately delaying his departure until Colonel Riggs passed the hotel in his patrol boat, knowing that by then it would be too late to go to the station.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Lacan’s notion of visuality and ‘geometral perspective’ clarified for me the reality of fragmented perception and questions the truth of the image. Just as much, it questions the truth of sight and the reliance on light. The projector inverts the usual working of viewing a painting, projecting out and onto rather then looking and ‘taking in’. The layers of imagery and the surface of the flood (or canvas) came for me to symbolise Lacan’s Imaginary, Real and Symbolic; the final painting taking the position of the Lacanian image-screen which shields the subject from reality. In this way, the works function as the tuché (the missed encounter with the Real) – a seemingly obvious parallel to the eking out of lives forever barraged by images which shelter us from objectively or literally experiencing their depicted events.

Finally, the notion of nachtraglichkeit (deferred action) taken from Sigmund Freud engages with a kind of deferred conclusion. Most explicitly referenced in the work Deferred Rapture, I took this notion of deferral to relate to a post- poned Apocalypse. I developed a sense of the ‘punctuational apocalypse’ – meaning that as a period at the end of the sentence, the Apocalypse gives meaning to what has come before. In this way, the end of painting, whether it eventually arrives as a final judgement or just as another deferral along the way, pushes forward the painter to create images of depth and significance as much as possible. The images finally displayed for assessment read quite clearly as images aimed at unity, aimed at a sense of the sublime, but falling short – rendered out of fragments plucked from the deluge, there is an impossibility of ever completing that perfect image, and possibly of ever recovering the sought after depth and significance of the image.

Simon O’Carrigan.

Simon O’Carrigan. Final Days. 2006. Oil on canvas. 120 x 160 cm.

Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which had possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero?

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Louisian Ha Long (3121). 2007. Oil & mixed media on canvas. 80 x 60 cm.

The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes, the British Isles was linked again with northern France. The Middle West of the United States, filled by the Mississippi as it drained the Rocky Mountains, became an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt carried southwards by the expanding rivers.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Surfacing (Cataract). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate. 76 x 51 cm.

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Acid Lake (Tidal Fold). 2007. Oil on canvas. 60 x 101 cm (two panels).

Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. After the Deluge (First Light Over Neo Atlantis). 2007. Oil on canvas & foamcore. 91 x 122 cm.

When the first of the storm-belts moved off the visibility cleared, and he could see the southern edge of the sea, a line of tremendous silt banks over a hundred yards in height. In the spasmodic sunlight they glittered along the horizon like fields of gold, the tops of the jungle beyond rising above them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Ef(fusion). 2007. Oil on canvas, digital lambda print, foamcore. 66 x 75 cm.

Only fifty miles to the south, the rain-clouds were packed together in tight layers, blotting out the swamps and archipelagos of the horizon. Obscured by the events of the past week, the archaic sun in his mind beat again continuously with its immense power, its identity merging now with that of the real sun visible behind the rain clouds. Relentless and magnetic, it called him southward, to the great heat and submerged lagoons of the Equator.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rip/Current (We’ll Burn That Bridge When We Come To It). 2007. Oil on canvas. 61 x 61 cm.

Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks, but fortunately the escaping waters had cut long pathways through them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Please Dump Garbage. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 40 x 60 cm.

As the sun rose over the lagoon, driving clouds of steam into the great golden pall, Kerans felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcasses. Huge flies spun by, bouncing off the wire cage of the cutter, and giant bats raced across the heating water towards their eyries in the ruined buildings. Beautiful and serene from his balcony a few minutes earlier, Kerans realized that the lagoon was nothing more than a garbage-filled swamp.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rain Dogs. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

With the reappearance of the submerged streets and buildings his entire manner had changed abruptly. All traces of courtly refinement and laconic humour had vanished; he was now callous and vulpine, the renegade spirit of the hoodlum streets returning to his lost playground. It was almost as if the presence of the water had anaesthetized him, smothering his true character so that only the surface veneer of charm and moodiness remained.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Alter-Piece (Flow). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate, projected video. Dimensions variable, 51 x 64 cm.

Down the side-streets they could see the great viscous mass lifting over the rooftops, flowing through the gutted buildings… Here and there the perimeter of the dyke moored itself to a heavier obstruction – a church or government office – and diverged from its circular path around the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Fissure (Under the Weather Projection). 2007. Oil on canvas, projected video. Dimensions variable (120 x 120 cm).

‘Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood – if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There’s little hope of standing up to the
rainstorms and the malaria’.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 30 x 60 cm.

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon #2. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargaso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

Behind the building was an enormous bank of silt, reaching upwards out of the surrounding swamp to the railings of the terrace, on to which spilled a luxurious outcrop of vegetation. Ducking below the broad fronds of the fern-trees, he raced along to the barrage, fitted between the end of the building and the shoulder of the adjacent office block. Apart from the exit creek on the far side of the lagoon where the pumping scows had been stationed, this was the only major entry point for the water that had passed into the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

With a dull rumbling roar of collapsing buildings, the sea poured in full flood.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 20 x 15 cm.

Too many of the other buildings around the lagoon had long since slipped and slid away below the silt, revealing their gimcrack origins, and the Ritz now stood in splendid isolation on the west shore, even the rich blue moulds sprouting from the carpets in the dark corridors adding to its 19th-century dignity.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon (from The Drowned World). 2008. Paper cut out & oil on acetate. 12 sec.

Slowly the interval of water widened to a hundred and then two hundred yards, and he reached the first of the small islands that grew out of the swamp on the roofs of isolated buildings. Hidden by them, he sat up and reefed
the sail, then looked back for the last time at the perimeter of the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

+ More info: Simon O’Carrigan

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard [NSFW]
+ The Office Park
+ Ann Lislegaard: ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’
+ Drowned London
+ Flooded London
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay
+ J.G. Ballard: the Visual Tribute
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World
+ Future Ruins

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

I recently organized an exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtynsky, bringing together 12 years of his imagery on the subject of oil at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Burtynsky, a Canadian born of Ukrainian heritage in 1955, is respected internationally for his 25-year focus on industrially-transformed landscapes. His photographs of quarries, factories, mining pits, and railcuts are extraordinary for their depiction of mankind’s organization of the land for resource-extraction and profit. Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes is an excellent portrait of Burtynsky, and I highly recommend a viewing of both the DVD and his great books, which include Manufactured Landscapes (2003); Burtynsky – China (2005); and Edward Burtynsky – Quarries (2006).

In organizing the exhibition, it occurred to me that Burtynsky is one of our most Ballardian artists. His intense concentration on the technological sublime; the precisionist geometries of his images; and his evocation of a rationalist (yet mysterious) automatism at the heart of the relationship between man and nature: all seem absolutely the inheritance of Ballard’s insightful understanding of our times.

In writing an essay for the book that accompanies the Corcoran exhibition, I adopted a style in overt homage to Ballard — in hopes that such a literary strategy might help illuminate this great body of work. I also wanted to honor Ballard’s legacy as the foremost imaginative interpreter of the world Burtynsky documents. The editors of Ballardian.com have graciously agreed to reprint the essay here as an extension of that homage. Readers of this site will recognize the tropes, the ideas, and the specific sources I’ve drawn from Ballard’s oeuvre; I hope they will forgive any lapses, or excesses, as my own error.

Paul Roth
Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art

To learn more about the Corcoran exhibition Edward Burtynsky: Oil: http://www.corcoran.org/burtynsky/index.php
To learn more about the book: http://www.steidlville.com/books/968-Oil.html
To learn more about the artist: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com

All images can be clicked to enlarge.

Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #2, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

The subject is not oil.

In these pictures, Edward Burtynsky shows the man-made world—the human ecosystem—that has risen up around the production, use, and dwindling availability of our paramount energy source. The mechanics and industry of extraction and refinement; the development, products, and activities associated with transportation and motor culture; and the wreckage, obsolescence, and human cost that lies at the End of Oil. These photographs are about man, and what he has made of the earth.

Burtynsky starts at the center of the subject, at oil’s source; then moves outward around the world, showing its use. By their arrangement, the photographs survey a life cycle. Each black drop follows a path; following the pictorial sequence, we can imagine ourselves trailing in its wake.

The journey is an unusual one. We have rarely seen images of these places. Some, we didn’t know existed; others, we never thought we’d see. Has any artist ever documented this manifold subject in such depth?

This is a new form of epic history painting. Turning his camera lens to a fever dream, Burtynsky forges a new mythology for the 21st century from the lexicon of realism. With stunning detail, from improbable perches, in strange and beautiful colors, these pictures show their subjects with clinical accuracy, and with definitive force. But they also tell a parallel and more inchoate tale: a critique of civilization, and a foretelling of human ends.

Extractions

Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #9ab, Westley, California, USA, 1999. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Some visual experiences test our capacity for explanation—our ability to extract meaning, or convey affect, through existing vocabulary.

In particular, photography can provoke this failure of translation. The old notion—that a picture is worth a thousand words—implies a trade. It suggests that we cannot have both image and meaning at once; possessing a picture, we must barter for its logic. When we are in the thrall of a photograph, we surrender its equivalent in language.

The most powerful photographs, in fact, steal our words. They resist explication or a resolution, refuse our comprehension, render us speechless. Stilling time, preserving the ghost of a moment to be revisited in perpetuity, photography conjures the past, feeds the present, and hints at the future. Mere words can hardly contend with the magic of its revelation.

Again and again, Burtynsky’s images of oil provoke this mute, uncanny exchange. Documentary scenes of crystalline description, of staggering scale and complexity, they nevertheless have a composed, unblinking authority. They resound with a perfect silence.

One might argue that the real force and meaning of these images is not readily apparent in the scenes Burtynsky photographs. Rather, it bubbles from beneath, emerging from an enormous oceanic swell: the remnant energy of a younger sun, compacted by eons of time and pressure into the geologic strata, far below the surface.

The Unseen Reservoir

Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

These places are curiously familiar, as though inscribed in our synaptic gaps.

You look down from above. Inscribed on the scene below are the shapes and contours of commercial organization. You look past machinery and roads, large tanks and angled pipelines, to see the ground: quickly you sense what lies embedded in the earth, the object of the activity above.

A river system, of black viscous streams and oily tributaries, extending in every direction, not on a single plane but dimensionally up, down, left, right, a surround. A hidden root system leading to a vast reservoir. Veins, spreading through a body. Not contained by borders. Flowing everywhere, touching everything, affecting all.

Among Burtynsky’s images of the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, in scenes of the surface mining that yields bitumen, vast pools of crude oil swirl and eddy: littoral zones of the apocalypse. They offer a strange double mirror, reflecting both the clouds floating above and the reservoir below. Astonishing, beautiful even, they are the discharge of abscesses, man-made sores in the skin of the earth. The ruptures of oil’s forced disclosure.

In this artist’s envisioning, oil derricks near Bakersfield, California become great mechanical mosquitoes. Standing obediently in rows, they suck at the earth, desiccating their surroundings in service of an unlimited thirst. Arresting the metronomic rhythm of these drilling machines, Burtynsky’s lens conveys an impassive threat: a slow-moving industrial vampirism, perhaps, or the glacial decline of a junkie, reaching deeper to hit a vein.

The submerged river of oil has its conscious match in the aboveground structures devised to prepare it for use. In his images of refineries, Burtynsky tracks the labyrinthine pipe systems that guide oil through its many intermediate process streams. Like capillary beds, or the neural pathways that fire our brains, these industrial tangles are oddly biological.

We cannot shake the sense that we have seen these places in our dreams. The details are of course rooted in reality; but they suggest a hidden psychology, a liminal space channeling between the images. A terra incognita—a boundless, technological biome—united by a psychopathology of oil. If these are visions of our shared subconscious, they seem to foretell the future.

Invisible Seer

Edward Burtynsky, Trucker’s Jamboree, Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

In these photographs, as in dreams, the viewpoint is a disembodied one. We hover out of sight, watching from a remove: our perspective, that of an invisible seer. Sojourning witnesses to extraordinary scenes, we are present at critical moments, in hidden places, from impossible positions. Each is revealed in broad scope, and with abundant detail both familiar and unrecognizable. The tone is bipolar—intense and dispassionate; disoriented, yet strangely taciturn.

Burtynsky’s overhead views of motor culture events reflect this schizophrenia. At Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats and South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, spectators mill about blankly: automata, dutifully performing their roles in a big budget film. Pictured at a remove, their reactions to their peculiar surroundings go unseen.

As a trucker’s jamboree in Iowa falls under dusk, visitors navigate a parking lot by the warm light of underbody neon, emanating from the tractor units. On the asphalt, yellow stripes radiate outward from a central line, guiding our eye from one shiny machine to the next. Positioned at angles and spaced for inspection, the semi cabs glow with sterile festivity.

The artist’s outlook assumes a cold authority, a depersonalization. Through the lens, we assume his viewpoint. Absent overt mediation, we are simply present, watching. We sense no filter, no interpretative voice to cloud our knowledge. No camera to bring us the view. Our insight seems total.

This is, in fact, a trope of landscape art. A naturalism of “view” offers the illusion of an unmediated self-presentation. Authoring itself, a place simply rises up before our eyes. (Burtynsky would also recognize this verisimilitude as a characteristic pretense of photographic documentary.) The implication is that our experience is definitive. Our vantage is that of an impassive bird, flying invisibly overhead, surveying the world with stately reserve.

The Overlook

Edward Burtynsky, AMARC #5, Davis-Monthan AFB, Tuscon, Arizona, USA, 2006. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Or is it a god’s eye view, the perspective of a deity or monarch?

Burtynsky’s photographs are often made from the sky. Lifts, cranes, and helicopters provide the perch; but his vistas have an aura of impossibility. Even when standing on the ground, Burtynsky’s perspective seems one from on high, ordering and immutable. The detachment of his view imparts a seductive, undeniable power.

Gatherings, interstate highways, landscape mutations: all unfold below like prophecy. Despite their physical remoteness, and their ambiguous mood of alienation, we feel we have seen them before; and now, passing overhead, we are revenants, returning to the scene with a glimmer of insight.

For example: homes, cars, and airplanes, parked in rigid alignment by the dozens or hundreds, recede into the distance, an inventory of shelter and transport. A tanker ship, floating by a refinery depot, tells the whole story of oil’s distribution in its massive bulk. In an industrial subdivision, sun-bleached rooftops appear like chips on a computer motherboard, captured from above by satellite imaging.

The photographs have an evidentiary quality, in the manner of crime scenes. Clues are embedded in the details. Looking down from above, we see the indicators of mastery and control. The land divided, the elements negotiated, resources marshaled: nature coexisting with the promise of its own destruction. An invisible grid overlays each locale—a diagram of exploitation, the vectors of progress.

Mapping the Unknown

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19ab, Belridge, California, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Like his progenitors, the great American expeditionary landscape photographers of the 19th century, Burtynsky surveys the territory. His camera is the instrument of a visionary cartography.

While Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson photographed an undeveloped landscape (the “American West”) in the early stages of its colonization, this artist maps a world that has already been radically shaped and ordered, rendered into submission. The place of his geovisualization is a psychological zone, previously uncharted—a vast, discontinuous “Petrolia” of the mind—encompassing events, locations, and people under the sovereignty of oil.

This visionary terrain opposes utopias we’ve seen before in landscape art. The painted vistas of the Hudson River School, for example, imply a permanent future of uncorrupted nature (“virgin spaces,” in the term of art historian Barbara Novak) despite the encroachment of mankind. A harmony prevails, between the transcendent beauty of nature and the civilizing development once thought to honor God’s creation.

Burtynsky’s atlas of dystopia exposes such fantasies. The deceptions of manifest destiny are revealed in the bright light of day.

In one image, we see a pipeline, directing recovery from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, through a clearing in a forest. Its sinuous channel follows the contours of the woods; only on second glance do we realize the tree line has been re-shaped, altered by the placement of the conduit. Honoring the herculean effort that brings energy to the surface, nature bends to our will.

The place being mapped is really a complex system, and its topography, a connective network. Burtynsky renders his Petrolia as a set of relationships, organized for production: an autopoiesis, the interlocking elements of a cybernetic organism. His images reveal the mechanisms of our world of oil.

The gridlines of this imaginary territory connect at the vanishing points evident in many of the photographs. They become a pivot for our vision, an axis on which our understanding turns. Hidden meanings become evident as we look from one image to the next: places, people, their transport and leisure, all are united by oil as it is taken from the ground, refined, used, and then filters back into the earth, leaving a sediment of scrap and offal.

We navigate Petrolia through the branching passages of a maze; even when our route is circuitous, it unfolds by a fixed logic. We slide into a labyrinth.

Vertigo

Edward Burtynsky, Highway #1, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

In many images, Burtynsky’s mapping evokes both the abstraction of remote sensing and the vividness of ground truth. As our eyes shift from distant elements to the startling clarity of the foreground, an imbalance takes hold. There is a vertiginous quality, a tipping-forward in our view.

The totality of the artist’s scope results in a kind of visual bewilderment, an insistent voiding of perspective. What is nearby, directly below, rushes toward us, as though we were falling into it; by contrast, the horizon recedes into the distance, as though we were backing away. This schism has a powerful effect. At first the eye trips up, abstracting subject elements into a field of patterns. Then, just as quickly, we experience a visual argument between foreground and background that evokes other more consequential debates: between near and distant, center and periphery, present and future, the known and unknown.

This is not unintentional, nor is it mere stylistics. Burtynsky’s technique consistently provokes a crisis of vision. The elevated and the lowly (a dialectic common to landscape art) collide in the warring of perspectives. There is a strange volume to scenes viewed from on high: real places flatten into forms, space recedes in diagonal lines, and ground and horizon oscillate a magnetic field, one that both attracts and repels the eye.

If the word “landscape” implies a remove, the polite framing of a scene, Burtynsky—by contrast—attacks with the vertical imbalance of his view. Leaning forward, falling back, we are in the grip of fate. Our vantage conveys a sense, a submerged realization, that what we see, and where it will lead, has been foreordained.

A Certain Lucidity

Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #1ab, Baku Azerbaijan, 2006. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

One historic purpose of landscape art is the representation of remote places. The landscapist—our visionary surrogate—ventures into the world, returning with scenes of faraway and inaccessible locales. The outside, if you will, is brought inside. The inhabitants of one realm, curious, experience another: a place of fascination outside their frame of reference.

Burtynsky’s photographs of unknown sites and obscure industrial activities exercise a startling authority. Remarkable scenes—vistas of junk, vast motorways, toxic labor conditions, tribal vehicular gatherings, strange colors loosed from the earth, and the wholesale reordering of nature—so irrationalize our sense of what surrounds us that they can hardly be believed. And yet there they are.

The artist’s images of derelict oil fields at Baku in Azerbaijan exemplify the uncanny means by which he depicts his Petrolia. Here is a place we were never meant to see: a remnant sea of oil, bubbling from the spend depths of a deposit. Ancient derricks cluster like dark herons, stuck in tar.

A whole new terrain emerges from the discards of the oil economy. Bluffs are formed from piles of densified oil filters, crushed fuel barrels, and the stamped cutaways of electrical system parts. In one diptych, Burtynsky confronts a massive wall of tires, rising up to form a new mountain range. Even this panoramic view can’t contain the astonishment of the scene; dark circles pile past the image edges, the strata of an automotive geology.

Burtynsky’s world of oil is beyond comprehension and outside our control. Industrial sites of extraordinary complexity and public works of remarkable scale severely test our suspension of disbelief. A profusion of detail overwhelms. The safe ground we normally stand on is pulled away. How is this possible, we wonder? Our minds strain at the shock of what we see.

The chief landscape tradition Burtynsky assays is that of the sublime. Edmund Burke, in his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), described the sublime as an evocation of anxiety in the face of nature, an exhilarating but fraught recognition of its illimitable power over humankind. When confronted by the sublime in the natural world—a raging flood, a hurricane, a precipitous cliff—man is overcome by an ecstasy of terror; thus awakening to the limits of his own dominion.

Many artists (most famously Caspar David Friedrich) have tried to represent sublime experience in the natural world. But Burtynsky draws his terrifying sublime from the world of order rather than the forces of the wild. The shock of his images derives from unimaginable scale, from crushing power; but not from God’s Nature. Rather: from the organization of resources for profit, from the plumbing of the earth to extract value.

Observing the machine, the electric light, the combustion engine, the dammed river, factory and city, airplane and car, we can imagine that man’s forward motion, from the Industrial Age on, has occasioned a new variation of the sublime. In the rise of modern technology, with its intimations of human mastery over time and space, the natural world has been rendered and contained; its force, dispersed; and our fear of God, tempered. The power of the environmental cosmos surrenders to the monstrous vacuity of science, mechanization, and progress. If, pace Nietzsche, God is dead; then it is man we must fear—and his creations.

In his book The Machine in the Garden (1964), historian Leo Marx describes 19th-century reaction to that era’s emerging marvels of industry and engineering: “The awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and later bestowed upon the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or rather the technological conquest of matter.” The rise of the machine— and its subjugation of our surrounding environment—has engendered a new “technological sublime.”

This modern form of sublimity is more complex than mere technophobia. It acknowledges our dependence on automation, its betterments and pleasures; our astonishment at its extremes; and finally, our creeping terror at its consequentiality. We see no simplistic villainy in Burtynsky’s pictures—no industrial Golem, no homicidal Frankenstein. Rather, we see the ordering force of man, and the chilling, corrosive, penultimate threat that lies at the black heart of our rationalism.

Precipice

Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

At the edge of the world, where the land falls inward and the sea drags at the sand, Burtynsky discovers an epic scene of industrial demolition: a portent of our coming extinction.

On a Bangladeshi shoreline, we see a netherworld of beached tanker ships, dismantled for scrap. The sky, a blank white, contrasts with the deep black of remnant oil, clinging to storage compartment walls. Workers cluster about their labors, their raiment stained a toxic brown. Looming up from the mud, jagged hulls tower like crumbling monasteries. We envision the dying-out of an old order.

In these scenes of shipbreaking, Burtynsky, with his mixture of awe and dispassion, his combination of wide-field view and dizzying detail— in short, his calm approach to the edge of the cliff—has marshaled all the elements common to representation of the sublime: obscurity, darkness, silence, vacuity, magnitude, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence. We are immersed in a shadowland. Overcome, in the words of J.G. Ballard, by a marriage of reason and nightmare.

We will never visit this place. But we sense that Burtynsky has led us, inexorably, to crossroads of insight. We stand transfixed. Exposed, implicated: haunted by complicity. We are not, as we once may have thought, passive observers. Rather, we are the co-authors of what we see. This is the world of our making.

Inexorable

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

A profound fate shapes human ends, and in turn we write that same fate onto nature. Destiny inscribes long scars on the earth. Our own undoing is visible in Burtynsky’s orderly grids of housing and cars, martial arrays of discarded planes, and highways that snake like asphalt rivers: the seeds of our self-destruction. Industry forges a new wilderness, and our civilization, a more efficient—and murderous—state of nature. We are not the fittest; humanity will be transcended over time; and we too, like our evolutionary forebears, will be obviated.

The gravitational pull of Burtynsky’s viewpoint derives from its revelation of consequence. The landscape is shown both as a source of wealth, and as a locus of overreach; oil, as the fuel of progress—and the dark promise of an ultimatum. The safe remove of the camera’s high perspective is mitigated by our near terror of falling. We back away from the edge, even as we realize that it is too late: we’ve already gone over.

The places Burtynsky takes us to are unfamiliar, obscure to our knowledge, but on some level they are no surprise. His images astonish largely because they give shape to our dread, to a suppressed realization of what our lifestyle has wrought. They articulate a secret truth.

These photographs suggest that what lies beneath the surface has far greater value than what lies above: to such an extent that the earth has been devastated to get at the black river below. Shaped not by time, erosion, or the weathering winds, but by the ordering force of the economy, the land has been etched by our avarice and our need. The lines radiate outward, a geometry of revelations, from where we stand at this place and time, to all places, and to our future.

Paul Roth
Senior Curator, Photography and Media Arts
© 2010, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009. pp. 5, 6-11. Reproduced with permission.

James Graham Ballard was one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. His writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture, and he pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without equal.

Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects, and his prophetic visions, made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. At a time when architectural discourse has become wholly subsumed by the moneymaking pre-occupations of the architectural profession, the writings of JG Ballard serve as reminder that architecture is about people, the things that they do and the places where they do them. Sometimes architecture will involve terrible people doing terrible things in terrible places, but the enduring nature of the human species is that we will always carry on; there is, after all, always the future.

Nic Clear, 2009.

Introduction: ‘A NEAR FUTURE’, by Nic Clear.

Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, p 5.[1]

Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

At Dan Hill’s always-impressive City of Sound, a recent post returns to Dan’s interest in Ballard’s Drowned World, positioning it as the middle panel of a triptych of novels (including Shute’s On the Beach and McCarthy’s The Road) that depict the planet ‘suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways…’, each representing particular aspects of ‘denial’ that are in orbit around current debates on climate change. Hill suggests that all three works are ‘post-nuclear’, but isn’t it the case that the world in Ballard’s book has transformed due to ‘gigantic geophysical upheavals’, ie solar radiation? While in The Road, the low rumble of the percussive strike remembered in flashback could just as well be attributed to a meteor as much as a nuclear hit.

It’s a really intriguing post, however, and it would be great to see Dan expand it into a fullblown essay one day:

Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that climate change denial is about “unknown knowns, the facts we know but push from our consciousness.” On The Beach is more about this form of denial than reconciliation perhaps. It’s closer to ‘interpretative denial’ than ‘literal denial’ or ‘implicatory denial’, in Stanley Cohen’s model from his States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering.
…
JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) concerns a form of attempted psychological adaptation, perhaps also as denial. Ballard’s vision depicts living organisms, including humans, regressing to a prehistoric consciousness, a form of long dormant lizard brain awaking and grappling for control of consciousness and subconscious, in parallel with the rampantly fertile flora of the Triassic era. This is hardly denial, consciously or subconsciously. Rather, a surely doomed attempt by the human mind to reboot itself into another mode more appropriate to the conditions, like DOS suddenly re-emerging from within Windows.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007) is shattering, and one of the finest novels I’ve read. Certainly one of the most emotionally affecting. The protagonists in The Road are further advanced along this destructive linear progression. Indeed, further on down the road. They’re far removed from any possible form of denial. Their ash-cloaked dead world is one of grim realisation and numb despair.

Happy new year, indeed.

ABOVE: ‘London after the Rain’, by Ben Olszyna-Marzys. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

While Le Corbusier appears to be (mis)remembered by history for supposedly self-important, grandiose plans to realise an architectural utopia that ignored the basic requirements of its inhabitants, Ballard, according to Manaugh, assumes increasing importance for the manner in which his work acutely analyses the ways in which the built environment can impact psychologically on its users and inhabitants. This includes, he elaborates, an identification of a ‘constant dissatisfaction with … architectural surroundings [that] becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst’. For Manaugh, the ‘psycho spatial’ nature of ‘Ballardian space’ is best articulated by Concrete Island, High-Rise and Super-Cannes, which he has utilised to varying degrees as the cornerstones of several BDLGBLOG posts.

Within the creative arts, the Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord exhibited a series of images that used imagery from Concrete Island and Ballard’s novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976) to examine the legacy of Brutalist architecture in Britain. Lord’s work explicitly critiques the utopian ‘social idealism’ of Brutalism, itself a descendant of the Le Corbusier school of architecture, and the fashion in which it disregarded ‘the communal, historic and surrounding built environment’. Yet Lord also successfully captures the sense of ambivalence that powers ‘The Ultimate City’, with its depiction of a far-future, ‘post technological’ world in which the harshness of the urban environment is rejected in favour of a ‘green’, sterile ecotopia, only to be fatally underscored by a lingering lament for the decline of industrial landscapes.

Academically, Ballardian Studies is an emerging discipline in architectural schools. Here, the website of the London-based firm, Azhar Architecture, is instructive, featuring a list entitled ‘What’s being recommended in Architecture Schools: A Sample’. High-Rise, tracking the breakdown of social order in a Corbusian apartment block, is included alongside works from Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Deleuze & Guattari and Guy Debord. At Columbia University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Professor Ursula Heise taught a subject entitled ‘Modern and Postmodern Cities’, in which depictions of ‘the metropolis and urban life’ were considered in 20th-century literature. One session was given over to two Ballard short stories, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and ‘Billennium’ (1962), which rank among the author’s most effective portrayals of the sensory overload of big-city life. Conceptually, the stories are at polar opposites, thematically they are of a piece: the absolute alliance of architecture with late capitalism. ‘Billennium’ is concerned with the complete contraction of public and private space by an overbearing architecture, while ‘Concentration City’ is based on the premise that the city is ever-expanding, without limits, its boundaries unable to be located by the central protagonist, who, no matter how far he travels, ends up where he started.

But the most ambitious academic program to date is almost certainly ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, which was taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2007-08. For Clear and Kennedy, the ‘speculative’ nature of Ballardian architectural space is all-important. The course, which utilised film and animation, video and motion-graphic techniques to devise representations of ‘synthetic space’, challenged students to examine architectural themes across the broad span of Ballard’s writing. The aim was to process the manner by which he deploys ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ environments to form a coherent analysis of the challenges inherent in a supersaturated technological world. Clear and Kennedy, like Manaugh, also point to the psychological effects of architecture, which leads on to their consideration of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film, London Orbital, as a text not only influenced by Ballard but also by the psychogeographical revival that Sinclair is closely associated with.

I recall in my interview with Manaugh, where I mentioned how I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine…’ You can understand my excitement upon learning of Unit 15! I decided therefore to contact Nic Clear, and pin him down about Ballard, architecture and the fabulous work created by Unit 15, as well as the new U15 program for 2008-09, ‘The Near Future Part II’, which questions whether the utopianism of the ‘corporate architectural complex’ is viable in a world riven by conflict.

Simon Sellars

ABOVE: ‘The Sound-Sweep’, by George Thomson, based on the story by J.G. Ballard. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenberg’s Crash and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun. We shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. In short, we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered BALLARDIAN.

Nic Clear & Simon Kennedy, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, Unit 15, Bartlett School of Architecture, 2007-08.

SIMON SELLARS: Nic, how did the idea for ‘Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future’ come about?

NIC CLEAR: I’ve been interested in Ballard’s writing for many years; I was a big Joy Division fan and read The Atrocity Exhibition simply because they wrote a song with the same name. More recently, it struck me that the themes in Ballard’s work seem to address the issues about the built environment that architectural discourse seems to avoid: namely, how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling, or have fallen apart. Architecture always seems to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails.

SS: How have your students responded to Ballard’s work?

NC: The projects have been very successful, and the use of a literary point of departure has been quite liberating. The Ballardian theme has allowed students to really speculate on what they are doing, but also, more importantly, why they are doing it.

SS: Besides Unit 15, it seems there are a few architects, architectural critics, architecturally-minded artists and architecture schools that are starting to take notice of Ballard’s work.

NC: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture — maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction — writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist — and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian’. Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Many people may think that Ballard’s characters face the scenarios he creates with an unbelievable stoicism, although Ballard has an advantage over us, as most of us have never had to face any kind of catastrophe. I think the experiences of life in Shanghai during WWII made Jim believe that the human race is able to endure — and inflict — almost any horror imaginable.

ABOVE: A film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: A wider, and resurgent, trend in film and literature, which Ballard seems to have anticipated, is the idea that on some level we secretly desire the apocalypse, that we welcome the chance to explore the farthest limits of alienation. This is something that Chris Nakashima-Brown articulates very well: ‘The persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level … the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.’

NC: Many people may fantasise about these scenarios, but when it comes to losing their own luxuries, people will vote for whoever offers the easiest way out — which most often involves blaming someone else. The most depressing part of how current economic and social structures start falling apart is that, instead of embracing the liberating potential of re-structuring and re-organising, politically things could start getting much more conservative. This is obviously another common theme in Ballard. I grew up in the 70s with the three-day week and the winter of discontent, with the parks of London used as rubbish dumps, but for me it was great power cuts and no school, and out of it came punk … yet the down side was Thatcherism. Obviously the next few years will be catastrophic for ‘big business’ (is that so bad?), and the fall out will be difficult for many, but we will adjust to yet another ‘new normal’. We may even in the long run be better off as a society for it.

Personally, this will be my third major recession, and they are always the most productive times: when no one has money, money stops mattering.

SS: High-Rise is the obvious book to cite when discussing Ballard and architecture. Which of his other works is relevant?

NC: It’s easier to say which one’s aren’t relevant, and the answer to that is probably none! Crash is a personal favourite, I like the perversity of it; it takes the whole modernist fetishisation of technology and mixes it with contemporary obsessions like celebrity cults. The problem with the film was that it was soft-core pornography — all those shots of Debra Unger’s stockings — when really the book is quite hardcore: the leaky orifices, the polysexuality and the car as augmented bodily technology. It’s a surrealist masterpiece up there with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’.

SS: When I interviewed Geoff Manaugh, he defined ‘Ballardian space’ as ‘psycho spatial’. I’d be interested in your take.

NC: If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city — especially London — then you are pretty close.

SS: Does this relate to Unit 15′s research into ‘synthetic space’?

NC: Synthetic space is the merging of the actual and virtual; writers like Ballard and Burroughs have been describing synthetic space for years. Within architectural terms, I see it as the inability to differentiate between spaces and their representations — where spatial representations are increasingly becoming spatial propositions.

SS: Ballard is famously obsessive about multi-storey car parks. What do they mean to him, do you think?

NC: The defining symbol of the 20th century is the motor car, and car parks are part palace and part mausoleum. They also tend to be quite ugly and boring, though often in a strangely beautiful and interesting way, and that sort of perversity defines Ballard’s aesthetic.

SS: For my PhD, I was researching contemporary attitudes towards modernist architecture and came across the critical reaction to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. I was completely shocked by Simon Jenkins’ response, which verged on demonic possession. He took particular exception to modernist architects, who he said were ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’, and equates them with Hitler. (But as Deyan Sudjic riposted, such a caricature misrepresents ‘the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression… none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went’.) Why does Brutalist architecture in Britain continue to provoke such rage?

NC: The British establishment, and the English in particular, still have a real suspicion of architectural modernism, seeing it as ‘elitist’, ‘European’ and ‘socialist’. Brutalism especially has become a scapegoat for the failure of that post-war welfare state optimism. Of course, this is rubbish: the real failure lies in the political and cultural failure to actually bring about a more egalitarian and democratic society.

SS: On the other hand, as the antithesis to Jenkins, Ballard said: ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton’.

NC: I always imagine that Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes was designed by someone like Manser. But lets face it, we can’t always trust such pronouncements by Jim, especially if it was for the benefit of the Guardian — imagine all that liberal angst and hand wringing.

ABOVE: A film by Peter Kidger, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: In his review of Davis’s City of Quartz, Ballard welcomes ‘unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride’. He suggests that architects and urban planners need to ‘make the most of this’, letting the environment guide them almost as if it is sentient, rather than conforming to the reverse, ie, the old ideal of the arrogant architect imposing his grand vision on the environment (in High-Rise, this was the downfall of the architect Royal). Do you agree with Ballard?

NC: ‘Unrestricted’ would be the key term; the brilliance of Davis’s analysis is to show how clearly urban planning follows such a narrow set of vested interests. Less planning, less controls, less regulation would only work if it also meant less greed, and what are the chances of that? It reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote on the free market: ‘it sounds like a great idea, maybe we should try it sometime’.

SS: Rem Koolhaas seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the architects in Ballard’s stories: the ego, the vainglory, the architect as self-styled eccentric…

NC: He probably likes to think he does. I like Ballard’s architects: they seem genuinely optimistic and have a faith, albeit misguided, in the power of architecture to change society for the good. They are of a much older generation — Ballard’s. I bet Robert Maitland would send angry letters into Building Design, the weekly British architectural newspaper, complaining about these new-fangled projects.

Rem’s recent work, especially in China, strikes me as cynical. His obsession with celebrity, especially his own, seems to be his main driving force, and like many ‘good’ Marxists of his generation, he has become a consummate capitalist. He is much more like Wilder Penrose from Super-Cannes — without the humour.

SS: Does architecture still have an image problem, then, in terms of this archetype of the arrogant, narcissistic architect imposing his vision on the people?

NC: Yes, because most of us are arrogant and narcissistic.

SS: In books such as Concrete Island and stories like ‘The Ultimate City’, Ballard depicts architecture as an instrument of oppressive capitalism, and architects as contributing to that oppression. For Ballard, it seems to me, no architect can be truly radical, or can truly think of architecture as ‘art’ when they are either carrying out the wishes of the State, mobilising state funds to realise their designs, or carrying out the desires of big business. Is this an accurate summation of architectural practice today? How would you reconcile that frustration with a pure creative spirit?

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.’

Little has changed since; in fact, things have got worse. Architecture is now synonymous with the architectural profession (or Corporate Architectural Complex), speculation is financial rather than intellectual, and architects have been complicit with the kind of greedy thinking and acting that has got us into the current global financial crisis. We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings — that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.

SS: Ballard says that ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us.’ Any thoughts on that?

NC: For novelty architecture, see my answer on Rem. A couple of years ago I used the phrase ‘Shapist Architecture’, taken from Tony Hancock’s 1961 film The Rebel, a satire on the art world. At one point he says, ‘I don’t paint the object, I paint the shape around the object’. Developments in the use of computer software have allowed architects to come up with a variety of three-dimensional forms, which has led to a whole raft of ‘blobby’ buildings, a lot of which appear to be self-indulgent and that confuse ‘looking interesting’ with ‘being interesting’ and ‘looking complex’ with ‘complexity’. We have an architecture of the image.

SS: In Ballard, architecture is often used as a form of social control. Did you perceive any similarities between the nature and cause of the banlieue riots in France in 2005, and the breakdown of society depicted in High-Rise?

NC: Not really. High Rise is about a rejection of convivial social structures and returning to a more ‘primitive’ social model. There is a brilliant French film from 1973 called Themroc
directed by Claude Faraldo, which seems to have a greater affinity with High-Rise, published two years later. In it, a blue-collar worker rejects his mundane life, knocks the front wall out of his apartment and starts living like a caveman. However, Kingdom Come, in many ways, does describes the type of anomie and alienation that dominates the urban periphery. Boredom and disenfranchisement brought about by simply being defined by what we consume are the most incendiary factors in the contemporary city.

ABOVE: A film by Dan Farmer, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Do you think Ballard has much at all to do with psychogeographical conceptions of urban space? He appears to have been co-opted into the ‘movement’, such as it is.

NC: It seems everyone’s a psychogeographer nowadays. Psychogeography was originally articulated by the Situationists as an experimental form of urbanism that attempted a critique of the hegemonic values of urban planning and zoning by emphasising the ‘transience’ of the urban experience. The political aspect of psychogeography has been diminished in favour of a ‘poetics’ of the city. I think Ballard in some of his writing retains a lot more of that political conception of psychogeography than many who have fashionably co-opted that term.

SS: What role does film, video, animation and motion graphics play in your course? How can film methodology help to illuminate architectural design?

NC: My main interest in time-based techniques is the ability to tell stories. However, at a pedagogic level, working with film, video and animation does teach a whole number of organisational and aesthetic skills, so despite my anti-profession rhetoric, I seem to be doing a very good job in equipping students to operate very successfully within the profession.

SS: In The Atrocity Exhibition, there are many scenarios in which mental patients are encouraged to make their own films as therapy. Without wishing to casting aspersions on the mental health of your students(!), were the many references to DIY film aesthetics in the book an inspiration for your decision to use Ballard and film as a way into thinking about architecture? (Recall that in Atrocity, these amateur films recast the media landscape and the built environment in ‘ways that make sense’.)

NC: The way I teach is very much geared toward helping students find a voice, whether that is therapeutic is unimportant (to me) — besides, I hate that psychoanalytic model of teaching, just as much as I hate the paternalistic model.

SS: Sure, but I wasn’t really referring to the thereaputic aspects, though, more the DIY angle and the mediation of the built environment.

NC: The main decision to start using film in the way I teach architecture, which I have been doing since 1999, was simply because it was what I was doing myself. The rise of CGI, animation and the availability of digital video made it a much more accessible and viable way of generating, developing and communicating architectural and spatial ideas and narratives. The influence of lo-fi (as opposed to DIY) artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Nauman or Burroughs was an attraction, but it was the availability of the technology that got me going.

SS: Do you think Ballard is an especially ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ writer?

NC: Yes, which is why the English literary establishment still treats him with suspicion since he is not a ‘literary’ writer. Ballard wants to create images and tell stories rather than impress with literary form.

SS: I think the films your students have turned out are simply stunning, especially considering they don’t have a ‘studio budget’ to work with — the filmmakers, as well as you and everyone involved, should be applauded. But besides making films, you also looked at feature-film versions of Ballard’s work. How can an analysis of these adaptations help in understanding ‘speculative, narrative architectures’ in Ballard’s writing?

NC: I have taken this particular position for two reasons: to engage with a critique of contemporary architecture, and because it’ s fun. The filmic analysis was just a starting point; out of all the films we watched, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition and Sinclair and Petit’s London Orbital were the most influential.

Architecture should not be left to architects — the whole discourse needs opening up. The reason why I earlier questioned whether architectural criticism exists is simply because architecture is an incredibly insular and hermetic discipline — no one dares criticise the Rems, the Dannys or the Zahas for fear of being locked out. Magazines need content and they publish pretty much anything and everything without questioning it; if they did question it, then the content would dry up.

SS: It’s good to see Jonathan Weiss’s film gaining recognition. What do you appreciate about it?

NC: The fact that he had the guts to take it on with virtually no budget. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most ‘Burroughsian’ of all Ballard’s writing and I think Weiss has captured that. The use of found footage and the dislocated time line have echoes in the literary character of the book, and bits of the film are extremely beautiful to look at. I can’t stand the criticism that it doesn’t make sense or is difficult: these criticisms seem to ignore the difficulties of the original text.

ABOVE: ‘The Knife’ by Mario Balducci, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Who else do you think would make a good fist of adapting Ballard?

NC: Taakishi Miike to direct High Rise as a total gore-fest, Michael Mann to direct Super-Cannes — and I’m working on an adaptation of ‘Motel Architecture’.

SS: Taakishi Miike? Good call! But tell me about your own adaptation.

NC: I’m going through the shower scene from Pyscho frame by frame to develop the analysis that JG alludes to in ‘Motel Architecture’. I’ve mapped out a rough script and hope to shoot something in the new year. Part of what I am doing for ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design I’m guest editing, will be based on this project (some sort of ‘House Of The Future’) — the other part is an essay/rant against the architectural profession.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978).

SS: The guest issue of AD was originally going to be explicitly ‘Ballardian, wasn’t it?

NC: The publication, in its current form, has changed from being explicitly about Ballard and Ballard’s writings to something more general: an antidote to the shiny ‘bigness’, ‘everything’s great’ vision of contemporary architecture presented by the mainstream architectural press. The guiding principles are still thoroughly ‘Ballardian’, even though I have opened the discussion up. I would still like to do a purely Ballardian book and will use The Near Future as a first step.

This is the blurb for the issue, which I think neatly sums up my aims for the whole Near Future project:

For the last 20 years, the architectural profession has been complicit with the laissez-faire ideology of late capitalism, assuming that the economic forces of growth and expansion are the only means by which society can develop and prosper.

The current economic crisis makes us question whether a future of unlimited growth is not only possible, but taking into account environmental factors, actually advisable. We have reached a moment of crisis — economic, environmental and technological — where we have to make choices about the type of future that we want, but also the type of future we can actually achieve.

It would appear that the Architectural Profession has nothing to say except ‘business as usual’, as it continues to produce bright, shiny renders of schemes that will sit empty for years. This proposed issue of Architectural Design offers a series of alternate voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and trying to find visions of the future, not simply images of the future.

The proposed issue offers a diverse set of ideas that explore a number of possible ‘Near Futures’ — futures that may be influenced the resurgence of gout in Swindon, or take precedent from an analysis of the political landscape of Southern Italy where in some areas a state of effective lawlessness exists.

The issue combines critical analysis with gorgeous graphics, and features work produced at the margins of contemporary architectural practice. Drawing on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, post-modern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, developments in neurology as well as the fictional writings of authors such as J G Ballard and William Gibson, ‘The Near Future’ will present a series of polemical blasts that are intended to rock the cosy world of architectural discourse.

Thank you, Nic Clear and Unit 15. ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic, will be published in September 2009.

ABOVE: ‘Nic’s right-hand talking to Evis, starring Nic Clear’. Video via archimaxx.

‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, screening at Autopsy of the New Millennium, Barcelona. Photos: Simon Sellars.

For you, I have unearthed a trove of information about ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’, Ann Lislegaard’s digital interpretation of Ballard’s novel. Recall that in my Barcelona report, I raved about it — as an undisputed highlight in an already outstanding exhibition.

The Light Project in St Louis, USA, recently staged this work as part of a series of site-specific commissions that illuminated the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts at Grand Center in St Louis, USA. By all accounts, the show was a great success and I only wish I could have seen this mesmerising work projected onto urban space; the Light Project has archived photos and background information of the setup and subsequent audience reactions, and there’s an interview with Ann, in which she discusses Ballard and the inspiration she drew from the book. (Also available are sound bites from the interview.)

Ann Lislegaard preparing the Light Project staging of her work, ‘Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard)’.

I fully agree with her view of the novel: it’s a ‘mental space, a state of mind’, and that is really emphasised by her iterative work, which constantly chases its own tail. It’s shown on two screens, side by side, and takes place inside a modernist hotel which residually succumbs to the crystallising process described in the novel. Scenes loop back and subsequently fade and buckle from screen to screen under supersaturation of light, forcing you to constantly question the veracity of what’s come before, and where you are in the loop. Mirror images from one screen to another split off into parallel worlds/scenes, the same but not quite. It’s simply beautiful.

From the Light Project interview with Ann:

ROBIN CLARK: What is it about this text that inspired you to create your installation?

ANN LISLEGAARD: I was fascinated by the scenario, by the jungle location, and by the notion of a place in a constant state of transformation. Ballard is very much a conceptual writer and I think his idea for this novel is related to entropy, since the crystals are completely taking over, creating a sameness, a sort of all encompassing world of light and mirrors. Also, I see the Crystal World as a mental space, a state of mind.

RC: In different ways, the novel and your installation both circle around the idea of light as medium, as a scientific phenomenon that also has psychological and conceptual aspects. How are you using light as a material in Crystal World?

AL: I’ve worked with light in my sound installations, but light has never been the subject matter itself. In the past I always used light as an element in relationship to ideas of space, narrative and gender. Crystal World plays with the notion of too much light. The crystallization of the environment is expressed through light that becomes so bright that it bleaches out and creates its own kind of blindness.

If you’d like a feel for the piece, watch the video above — I don’t know much about its providence, except that it was uploaded to blip.tv and is described thus: ‘Backstage footage from Ann Lislegaard’s “Crystal World” at SMK, Copenhagen 20.03.2007. Condensed and dreamy, electronic soundtrack from un escargot vide’. Now, while this footage is low quality and hard to make out, it does give you a sense of the incredible, dislocating sense of perpetual motion that Ann achieves through her work. But I really don’t think that soundtrack is part of the original piece — I saw it at Barcelona in complete silence, and in my opinion it was much, much more powerful that way for obvious reasons to do with the psychological autonomy of interior, inner space etc etc. For a taste of that experience, follow this link for a four-minute excerpt of the work over at New York Magazine (sneaky NY Mag have encoded the vid in such a way that I can’t rip it and embed it here on Ballardian, so a link will have to do).

Lislegaard’s Left-Hand of Darkness. Photo courtesy Murray Guy.

Ann recently staged a visualisation of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, along with ‘Crystal World’, at Murray Guy in New York. This ended today, sadly, but hopefully both works will exhibit again in the near future.

From Murray Guy:

“Murray Guy is pleased to present two major digital animations by Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), 2006 and Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008. These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited at Murray Guy in 2005.

This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into spatial perception and cognition and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it, because of science fiction’s potential to provide “something like an experimental variation on our empirical universe.” The works reference modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring of cognition in the digital age.

Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard’s 1966 novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard’s animation directly references the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and organic structures as a means of articulating nonlinear time.

Set in a similarly extreme climate, Left Hand of Darkness (After Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin’s 1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and in a state of constant flux; the novel’s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a fluid space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities—between interiority and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic—in an explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we would expect.

Ann Lislegaard lives and works between Copenhagen and New York. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) was recently on view as an outdoor installation in The Light Project at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, and was originally commissioned for 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006. Lislegaard has had numerous solo museum exhibitions, including presentations at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2004); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2002); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1999), among others. She represented Denmark at the 51st Bienniale di Venezia in 2005 and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle opening in May 2009.”

Over at the Transatlantis blog, there is an announcement of a new theme park patterned after Ballard’s work:

A new theme park is coming soon to Dubai. Named The Ultimate City, its theme will be the the world refracted through the many faceted crystal-like mind of writer J.G. Ballard. It will be distributed throughout the city to make it’s experience as much part of the urban fabric as possible. Some of the attractions will include:

• The Drowned World water park where guests can experience the rising sea levels of global warming as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
• As oil rapidly becomes a scarce commodity, Crashland will become the only place to partake in the visceral and intoxicating power of the internal-combustion engine.
• Get closer to the nuclear power of the sun over the ozone free Terminal Beach, or descend into the cool shade of vintage Bikini Atoll concrete nuclear blast bunkers scattered among it’s sandy dunes.
• In a special arrangement with the Burj Dubai, a large section of the world’s tallest skyscraper has been reserved for High Rise: a paint-ball arena where guests struggle for advantage as they try to reach the top of the building.
• Other attractions will include: The Burning World, Concrete Island, and more.

Of course, this is not the first Ballard Park. As Ballardian readers will be aware, the original in Egypt closed due to entropy:

Egyptian Ballard World, developed by loyal Ballard fans for loyal Ballard fans, had everything the discerning JGB fan could possibly require: abandoned water bodies; derelict technology; dead monorails hanging against the sky like guillotines; construction works half finished, as if some terrible disaster had wiped out all traces of human life; masses of rubble and twisted metal forming complex cryptograms, their meaning inscrutable and remote, as if they were designed not for man, but for man’s absence…

More recently, however, British and Chinese versions are being planned to fill the void:

Ballard World will be the perfect day trip for stressed out Londoners. Advertised as “Families exploring inner space”, there’s enough going on for every age group; The little ones play hide and seek in an abandoned Shanghai mansion and roam around the inevitable empty swimming pool. Dad fingers the dented side panel of Jayne Mansfield’s crashed 1966 Buick Electra, while mom has a pina colada in a cocktail party that’s permanenently on the brink of getting out of hand.

Another Ballard resort on the outskirts of Shanghai, expected to open its doors in 2009, will consist of a minute replica of the London suburb Shepperton, with the Heathrow Hilton atrium as an entrance building. Other cities as diverse as Detroit and Rome have shown interest in opening a Ballard Park…

With all of these Ballard Worlds in development, the future is looking not so bleak after all: dystopia as aesthetic pleasure of the highest order, indeed.

by Rick McGrath

ABOVE: Rick talking to CCCB Director-General Josep Ramoneda on opening night. Photo by Christian Mauri from Spain’s El Mundo newspaper.

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

I’m currently standing in the Carrer de Montalegre, a narrow street deep in the university section of Barcelona. Behind me is the university’s Dept of Philosophy, and I’m standing in the overbright sunlight, looking at an imposing 18th century building which is currently the home of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)… and even more currently the home of the very first museum exhibition ever dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard.

It’s a great place to be…

I’ve been here two days now, and have toured the show three times in different guises – as it was being finished, once with the Press, and finally at the Grand Opening with Barcelona VIPs – and to tell you the truth, I’m feeling a little late with this report, as I’ve already read all the various and sundry exhibition press releases you and the rest of the world’s media have published. And besides, I was out each Barcelonian night with a short story of fellow Ballardians, and one must follow one’s obsessions. So I thought I wouldn’t cover that ground again. Instead, I’d like to treat you to an overall taste of the experience – a sort of old-fashioned slide show with commentary – a visual tour of what visitors to this extraordinary exhibition will see and experience.

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

The first bit of irony comes quickly when you discover this building was first constructed as a hospital. What better place to perform an Autopsy of the New Millennium? Crossing the street we enter the building thru an archway – to the left is the Museum’s administration offices, to the right the ubiquitous gift shop. Ahead is a huge courtyard, empty save for a few trees and student-filled lounge chairs. The building retains its ancient decorations on three sides, and these walls face an angled wall of glass, which rises and tips protectively over the courtyard.

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

ABOVE: Spain’s longest escalator… a sort of Kingdom Come message to rise into the imaginary…

The trip into the exhibition itself is a Ballardian experience of corridors and obsessively angled floors. It’s a maze. You first walk along the left wall of the courtyard, noticing what must be medical slogans from the 1700s painted on the ornate tiles, then you’re suddenly at a hidden entrance. Turning right, you walk down a long, slow incline, mirrored on the right wall, to a set of hidden doors. Entering, you reverse direction and descend again down another long incline which empties into to a large auditorium with information booths, ticket sales, and a large screen showing the CCCB’s specially-made promotional video for the show.

You’ve already commented on this vid, Simon, so we’ll pass thru here and then climb a series of long, open stairs, which leads us into the new glass tower and onto Spain’s longest escalator – a three-story monster right out of Kingdom Come – which delivers us to the Exhibition’s entrance and a charming young lady who would like to see our passes, por favor.

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

We’re here. I’d suggest we put on our surgical masks and rubber gloves now. The first room we enter is actually not part of the Autopsy itself, but a sort of literary introduction to what follows. What we see is a video projection onto a wall that features a number of writers, English and Spanish, French and Catalan, extolling the influence and seductive qualities of Ballard’s work. John Clute, Martin Amis and Catherine Millet I recognized, and once your mind has been properly attuned and your Ballard glasses are in focus, it’s time to enter the Autopsy Rooms proper.

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

This section is called “Credo”, and it’s a multimedia effort with a wall of words and hidden, tiny mirrors, JGB’s dulcet tones, and three video screens repeating what JG says he believes in Spanish, Catalan and English. It’s a repetition of JG’s piece in the January 1984 issue of Science Fiction magazine, in which he summarises his obsessions and their often-disturbing logic.

If you stand in precisely the right spot, the words on the wall before you also reveal tiny mirrors reflecting the light from an electric candle. The words that appear on the TV screens also melt and fade, ebbing and flowing with the tidal resonance of Ballard’s musical speech. It’s a fascinating experience, and I noted both the press and VIPs were mesmerised by the incantory nature of this first cut into the body of our culture.

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

From Credo we dip back in time to JG’s youth in Shanghai and Lunghua camp where the Japanese interned JG and his family for three years. This display begins with a loop from Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, where young Jimmy attempts to bring the young Japanese kamikaze pilot back to life, and then settles into the real thing in a cleverly-constructed room which shows scenes from the camp on one wall, and opposite, separated by prison-like planking, scenes from the destruction of Shanghai.

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

Against the far wall runs a continuous vid of Shanghai Jim, JG’s BBC-produced return to Lunghua in 1991. The CCCB organizers (I’ll laud them later) have done a terrific job of assembling period photographs of Shanghai under siege, and many of these photos I’ve not seen before… but have unconsciously experienced in JG’s work. The camp is represented by a series of soft watercolours, in stark opposition to the black and white photographs of war, and I was pleased and surprised to see the image of Lunghua camp survivor Irene Duguid in two of the photos – I had the pleasure of sitting and talking with her at her home in Surrey just four days earlier.

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

This is one of my favourite autopsy rooms. It begins with a short quote from Miracles of Life printed just inches from the floor on a black wall: “At the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges I was hesitating to cross.”

This room contains just three exhibits, but powerful ones they are: a photo of JG in his home at Shepperton in front of his Delvaux painting, a new version of the painting specially done for this show by Brigid Marlin (it’s dated 2008), and the piece de resistance, an incredible surreal image generator! As the CCCB press release says: “His writings not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies – superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations – in order to explain the profound structure of the real.”

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

These strategies are all visualised in this very clever display: ten or so sheets of thin, white muslin cloth have been suspended from the ceiling, approximate three feet apart. At each end a projector illuminates a slowly changing series of images from famous surrealist paintings onto the cloth. Walking back and forth and up and down between the sheets reveals an endlessly-changing collage of images from the likes of Dali, Ernst and Delvaux, spinning endlessly thru impositions and mutations. I spent a lot of time in this room. You will, too.

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

Now we’re moving into more familiar territory – this section deals with the ramifications of JG’s 1962 New Worlds editorial, “Which Way To Inner Space?” Visitors are treated to wall-projected vids of JG’s favourite SF movies (Alien, Alphaville, Barbarella, Close Encounters, Dark Star, Dr Strangelove, Forbidden Planet, Silent Running, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and The Road Warrior) and opposite these imaginary images we move to the real with vids from Cape Canaveral space program projected upon the opposite wall – but in reverse… then you note the large central display case is mirrored and the visuals magically right themselves.

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

In this display case are souvenirs of JG’s 1969 trip to Rio for the International Festival of Cinema, and, oh look – some items from my collection have made an appearance: early SF pulps from the 1950s, various magazines, such as Interzone, and literary newspapers such as Bananas. The only thing here I had not seen is a rather Hollywood-inspired photo of JG, looking young, round-cheeked and rather smug in his pressed white shirt and cool shades.

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

This exhibit begins with a series of small exhibits of clever homages to The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World and The Crystal World, and leads ultimately to one of the exhibition’s strongest images: a huge room filled with sand, out of which protrudes the top of a sun- and rust-ravaged car. The effect is enhanced with off-centre lighting, and this startling image of The Drought is one you’ll remember, and think about, long after you leave.

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

Now we move into another of my fave pieces of the dismembered millennium… very cleverly organized with each mini-exhibit separated by the white sheets of medical privacy screens. The original use of the building as a hospital is reflected in the ancient arches overhead, and the visuals are pumped up with the addition of a heartbeat-like bass drum slowly thumping in the background. Half of this exhibit is literary, with displays of JG’s “Advertiser’s Announcements”, a copy of the Doubleday Atrocity Exhibition, a facsimile of the “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” handout distributed at the Republican Convention, copies of the Warren Commission Report and the book of car crash injuries (which I must get).

ABOVE: Rick in front of the ‘Project for a New Novel’ (photo: Joanne Murray).

The most fascinating object in this section is the original two-page spreads JG made in 1958 or 1959 which he called “Project for a New Novel”. JG gave it to Ambit editor Dr Martin Bax, who had it framed in two sections, and as far as I know this is the very first time the complete piece has been shown outside the Bax home. As you know, parts of it have been reprinted by RE/Search and New Worlds, but this is the only time all of it has been made available for public viewing. Interestingly enough, they have the pieces in the wrong order.

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

The rest is video, with each examination room showing excerpts from Cronenberg’s Crash, a fragment of Jonathan Weiss’s movie of The Atrocity Exhibition, with real footage of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and finally, a huge room showing multi-vids on two walls, with all reflected on a third wall. The effect is startling and cumulative, and on both times I visited both the press & VIPs just stood there, captured by the strength and variety and perversity of the visuals…

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

Here the exhibition features the realist phase of JG’s writings, starting with Running Wild and ending with Kingdom Come. The visuals are split into two – the main effect created by a long corridor, mirrored on one side and at both ends, with the symmetry punctuated by overhead text generators which feature copy from Millennium People. On the unmirrored wall are four TV screens, set at child-height level, and they display a series of looping visuals, such as adverts for gated communities in Dubai, and Disney’s fake town of Celebration, Florida. The whole thing is drenched in a dark blue light, and the mirrors reflect all to infinity in both directions. Very cool.

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

OK, here’s where the bulk of the books the CCCB borrowed from me reside, so I won’t go on at length. Suffice perhaps to say this is the first time they’ve been out in public, and I hope they behave themselves. As well as these excerpts from my collection, this area features a series of computer monitors that allows visitors to replay all the videos shown in the prior exhibits, and three tables contain softcover editions of JG’s work which have been translated into Spanish and Catalan. The public is encouraged to pick up and read a little JG for themselves. Good idea. This section also contains filmmaker Solveig Nordlund’s very important interview with JG – “Encontro con o escritor JG Ballard” – and whoa, let’s not leave you out, Simon, as this is where your outstanding, exhaustive and brilliantly commented selection of Ballardian music can be heard. Great job!

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

The end wall contains a fascinating series of photographs taken in 2006 by Donovan Wylie, which were never published, and they reveal JG at home at approximately the same time he received his unfortunate diagnosis. The final part of this particular autopsy report is the staggeringly honest “Answers Given by Patient JGB to the Eyckman Personality Quotient Test”, from Sam Scoggin’s film The Unlimited Dream Company. In it JG quickly and steadfastly answers “yes” or “no” to a series of rapidfire questions while the camera slowly zooms in on his face, finally settling on an extreme closeup of his left eye. Sixty minute zoom, indeed. This video was very popular, and continually elicited grunts, titters and the odd chittering from its always-large audience.

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

The Exhibition ends, fittingly, with four rooms of art influenced by Ballard and the concept of “Ballardian”. We’re first treated to a wall of unsettling and disturbing photos by Ana Barrado, she of RE/Search publications fame, then a captivating video of sunlight changing the perspectives of two rooms by Ann Lislegaard, photos of Michelle Lord’s miniature models of stacked cars, TV sets, and washing machines…

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

…and finally, Simon, the Ballardian cellphone home videos you commissioned last year, cleverly set up so you watch them on a cellphone.

And that, amigo, is the Exhibition. All in all, around 90,000 square feet of Ballardian bounty. We leave the same way as we arrived, by taking a long escalator ride back to the main floor, reminding me in a curious way that we have traveled “up” into the realm of the unbridled imagination, and are now returning “down” to the reality of convention and habit.

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

This is an excellent, thought-provoking, informative exhibition, Simon, and one I’m sure which would have pleased JG had he been well enough to attend. Can you give it greater praise? Yes, those responsible should be dragged out and severely congratulated:

Jordi Costa: The Curator.
Hip, intense, knowledable, and an accomplished writer himself, Jordi’s vision and leadership has created the first, and most impressive overview of JGB, his work and influence. Super job, Jordi!

Marcial Souto: The Advisor.
Marcial has translated 10 of JG’s novels and short story collections, plus many other classic SF, outsider and popular writers. He’s an extremely pleasant and knowledgeable man, and is so interesting I’m going to interview him for you later.

Miquel Nogués: The Coordinator.
He’s the man who tracked down and organized all the various elements of the Exhibition, including the original flats for “Project For A New Novel” from Dr Martin Bax, the news Delvaux painting by Brigid Marlin, all the photographs and videos, and more. Basically, he’s responsible for the body that has been autopsied.

Dani Freixes & Pep Angli: The Designers & Assemblers.
These two gentlemen are responsible for the show’s brilliant visual appeal, the use of colour and music and light. It’s a retinal circus, and they deserve lots of credit.

Mariona Garcia: The Designer.
With the assistance of Anaïs Esmerado, she developed the textual look of the show, relying on understated, clean fonts and all the show’s peripheral print, such as the catalogue, posters and handouts.

Cristina Giribets: The A/V.
She is responsible for all the exhibition’s marvelous audio-visual work, and, it should also be noted that the Large Wall of compelling images found in the Technology and Pornography exhibit was created by Andres Hispano and La Chula Productions. Good eye, everyone!

All in all, a most excellent adventure into the mind of JGB… thank you, doctors, for all your hard work.

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

All quotes excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by JG Ballard. All photography by Rick McGrath, except where noted.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

Here is the press release with fuller information on JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, opening today at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

EXHIBITION AT THE CCCB: J.G. Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium

CURATOR: Jordi Costa
DATES: 22 July–2 November 2008
ADVISOR: Marcial Souto
SPACE: Gallery 2
PRODUCTION: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB)
DESIGN: Dani Freixas – Varis Arquitectes, with the collaboration of Pep Anglí
COORDINATION: Miquel Nogués

The CCCB presents the exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium”, from 22 July to 2 November 2008. The exhibition features the English writer of novels and short stories, considered one of the most intelligent, seminal voices of contemporary fiction.

The literary work of James Graham Ballard (Shanghai, 1930), the paradigm cult writer, has for some time now been looking ahead to dissect the world in which we are now living. His visionary imagination grew in the realms of dreamlike, subjective science fiction and gradually came to embrace an aseptic hyperrealism. Deep down, the themes are always the same: the keys of contemporaneity and the pathologies of our immediate future, as though he were carrying out the autopsy of a stillborn future.

J. G. Ballard has constructed a body of work marked by recurrent themes and obsessive symbols that is capable of transcending generic codes to decipher the present and propose plausible views of the future. This exhibition sets out to offer an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his themes and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic anti-utopia and disaster.

The exhibition uses a whole range of supports to introduce visitors into the Ballardian world: stage sets, audiovisual installations, the complete library of Ballard’s writings, works by Ballardian artists and miscellaneous documentation.

The exhibition “JG Ballard. An Autopsy of the New Millennium” coincides with this year’s International Literature Festival, Kosmopolis 08. It is therefore included in the festival programme, which devotes a special section to Ballard.

K08 includes two sessions about the work of this English author and his influence on the contemporary cultural imaginary. The first looks at the influence of Ballard’s body of work on Hispanic writers, and the second centres on the English-speaking world, in the form of a dialogue about the various ways in which Ballard’s literature has struck a chord with new generations of writers who identify with the visionary aspect of his work. Participants: Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo and V. Vale.

Alpha Channel devotes a further section to Ballard, exploring the audiovisual production inspired by his literature.

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

The French magazine Science Fiction, edited by Daniel Riche, commissioned a text from J. G. Ballard in which he summed up his personal and artistic credo. The result, published in the January 1984 issue of the publication, was “What I Believe”, a summary of Ballardian poetics which synthesises the obsessions of the author and the ability of his writing to decipher the secret keys of the contemporary world, as well as its disturbing evolutive logic. The canonic version of the text in English appeared in the summer 1984 issue (number eight) of the British magazine Interzone. Below are some excerpts:

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

Despite being fantasy fiction, the literary work of J. G. Ballard handles a repertory of images and obsessions that are closely linked to his own life. These early experiences were to mark his worldview and find a particular form of sublimation in his later literary output.

Son of chemist and textile entrepreneur James Ballard (1902-1967) and of Edna Ballard (1905-1999), J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930 and spent his early years in the comfortable surroundings of the international colony in the west of the city. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the outbreak of World War II brought to an end the hitherto peaceable existence of a British community that ran its everyday life under the aegis of a nostalgia for Victorian society. Between March 1943 and August 1945 the Ballard family was held captive in the Lunghua internment camp.

In semi-autobiographical works such as Empire of the Sun (adapted for the cinema by Steven Spielberg) and The Kindness of Women, the writer revealed the origin of many of the obsessions running through his work. The atomic bomb on Nagasaki, how he adapted to life in a concentration camp and the series of deaths that marked his life (victims of bombings in the streets of Shanghai, the Chinese soldier killed by the Japanese at a train station, the first corpse he dissected in his years as a medical student, the Turkish pilot presumed dead during his years as a pilot at a Canadian base, the premature death of his wife and the death of a close friend) have a correlate in some of the most shocking scenes of his literary work.

The creation of his imaginary world has its epicentre away from the literary circles and bustling cultural life of London, in his home in Shepperton: a territory that the writer considers not as a soulless suburb but as a magical space whose inner light can be freed by imagination, as he illustrates in his novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s formative years were marked by the attempt to reconcile his incipient literary vocation with the articulation of a voice of his own. His initial contact with psychoanalysis and Surrealist painting opened the door to the construction of a unique and totally distinctive artistic identity. As he saw it, explorations of the unconscious in the fields of science and art offered the most precise reading of the spirit of the time and had predicted some of the more obscure pathways of the 20th century. In the dreamlike, desolate landscapes of Surrealism Ballard recognised the images of his own inner world. His writing not only recreates many of the visions of Surrealism, it also reproduces some of its aesthetic strategies⎯superimpositions, mirroring, false perspectives, mutations⎯in order to explain the deep structure of the real.

INNER SPACE

JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’ for Ambit magazine. Scan via Mike Holliday.

After discovering science fiction as a reader during his years in Canada as an RAF pilot (1953-54), J. G. Ballard encountered in the genre the ideal framework for his literary creation. From the very first, his sudden emergence in the medium entailed a break with tradition and the dominant currents of the time. To his contemporaries’ technological optimism and fascination for the exploration of outer space, Ballard counterposed an immersion in inner space.

Ballard theorized his singular contribution to the science-fiction genre in an article published in 1962 in New Worlds magazine. “Which way to inner space?” represented a turning point in the evolution of the genre with consequences that only much later became evident. With his theory of inner space, Ballard established a distance between himself and science-fiction forerunners and many of his peers as he sketched out the future direction of the genre. Ballard conquered a new territory for the genre, highlighting the role of science fiction as a mirror of the present and a means to self-exploration.

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

The idea of disaster underlies Ballard’s entire body of work though it finds its maximum expression in works such as The Drowned World and The Drought. In the face of disaster, typical Ballard characters do not act like characters in a 1970s’ disaster film. Far from trying to re-establish order, Ballardian characters see cataclysm as a focus of attraction and seem ready to accept the rules that this new reality imposes, though this may mean renouncing their own identity, wisdom and, inevitably, survival. In this process, the characters will discover a number of hidden truths about themselves. What is happening is not so much self-destruction as the seduction of change and the tortuous path towards psychological plenitude.

The idea comes from Joseph Conrad, and in Ballard’s hands it becomes the basis for his particular conception of science fiction: a literature that speaks to us of radical changes in mindset, fundamental transformations in perception—in short, of the constant evolution of inner space.

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

J. G. Ballard’s career entered a feverish state of change in the mid-1960s, following the premature death of his wife Mary Ballard from pneumonia in San Juan (Alicante). His traditional interest in the avant-garde and in experimental literature completely intoxicated his writing, which exploded in a radical switch to fragmentation, technical language and a taste for the abstract. The Terminal Beach (1964) blazed a trail that the later books The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and Crash (1973) were to take to the limit. The author focussed on a form of contemporaneity marked by the death of feeling and a shift from a physical to a mediatic landscape in which reality and fiction are blurred. The more classical High Rise (1974), Concrete Island (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) and Hello America (1981) continued to develop this vision of an essentially psychopathological 20th century in which pornographic imagery, technological fetishism and dehumanised architecture converge in a traumatic cosmology.

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It is significant, and deeply disturbing, that J. G. Ballard’s literature has moved from science fiction to the realist register without abandoning its main themes. The most recent passage in Ballard’s narrative work⎯opening with the novella Running Wild (1988) and for the moment closing with Kingdom Come (2006)⎯tours the aseptic architecture of gated communities, residential areas, technoparks, holiday villages and shopping malls in order to extend the terminal diagnosis of a humanity disconnected from its primary instincts. According to the writer, only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible.

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

Here, the exhibition presents the first editions (in English) of the 42 books written by Ballard and offers visitors the chance to consult modern editions published in Spanish.

The Wind from Nowhere. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1962
Billenium. Berkeley, New York, 1962
The Drowned World. Gollancz, London, 1963
Passport to Eternity. Berkeley, New York, 1963
The Terminal Beach. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964
The Burning World. Berkeley, New York, 1964
The Drought. Jonathan Cape, London, 1965
The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1963
The Crystal World. Jonathan Cape, London, 1966
The Impossible Man. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Voices of Time. Berkeley, New York, 1966
The Terminal Beach. Penguin, London, 1966
The Disaster Area. Jonathan Cape, London, 1967
The Overloaded Man. Panther, London, 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition. Jonathan Cape, London, 1970
The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, New York, 1971
Chronopolis and other stories. Putnam, New York, 1972
Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. Grove Press, New York, 1972
Vermilion Sands. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Crash. Jonathan Cape, London, 1973
Concrete Island. Farrar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1974
High-Rise. Jonathan Cape, London, 1975
Low-Flying Aircraft. Jonathan Cape, London, 1976
The Unlimited Dream Company. Jonathan Cape, London, 1979
Hello America. Jonathan Cape, London, 1981
News from the Sun. Interzone, London, 1982
Myths of the Near Future. Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
Empire of the Sun. Gollancz, London, 1984
The Day of Forever. Gollancz, London, 1986
The Day of Creation. Gollancz, London, 1987
Running Wild. Jonathan Cape, London, 1988
War Fever. Collins, London, 1990
The Kindness of Women. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1991
Rushing to Paradise. Flamingo, London, 1996
Cocaine Nights. Flamingo, London, 1996
A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Picador, New York, 1996
Super-Cannes. Flamingo, London, 2000
JG Ballard. The Complete Short Stories. Flamingo, London, 2001
Millennium People. Flamingo, London, 2003
Kingdom Come. Fourth Estate, London, 2006
Miracles of Life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An Autobiography. Fourth Estate, London, 2008

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has revelations in store for his readers.

On the one hand, Ballard functions as an oracle who is proved right with every day that passes.

On the other, he exerts an enormous influence on creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music.

J. G. Ballard forms part of the small group of creators capable of inspiring an adjective. Collins English Dictionary defines the adjective Ballardian as “1. of James Graham Ballard (J. G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.

Proceeding from the most diverse realms of creation, artists who accept the adjective as a badge of honour are increasingly numerous. To identify oneself as Ballardian is to form part of a widening circle of initiates aware of the central role played by an author who is a stranger to labels and resists any attempt at classification.

At this point, the exhibition immerses us in the work of various authors to have been described as Ballardian: Ana Barrado, Ann Lislegaard, Michelle Lord and creators of home cinema using mobile phones.

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

TIMES
From Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursdays: from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Closed on Mondays except public holidays

PRICES

Admission: €4.40
Wednesdays (except public holidays) and group visits: €3.30
Free admission: under-16s, the unemployed, Friends of the CCCB and every first Wednesday of the month.
Concessions on Wednesdays (except public holidays) for senior citizens and students: €3.30

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

CCCB PRESS OFFICE
Mònica Muñoz – Irene Ruiz – Lucia Calvo
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
93 306 41 23 / 93 306 41 00
premsa@cccb.org

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

ABOVE: kode9. Photo by Georgie Cook.

Last Wednesday DJ Rupture hosted DJ and dubstep producer kode9 (Steve Goodman) on WFMU 91.1 fm 90.1 fm (you can listen to the show via the embedded playlist above). Goodman played a live set of typically tasteful and deliriously immersive beats, of which I am reluctant to assign any genre tags to as these things change so quickly and often (plus I’ve been out of the loop for quite some time). Goodman has been associated with the dubstep form in recent times, although as he clarifies in the interview following the Rupture set, he is no longer excited by dubstep or grime and instead has been listening to instrumental hip hop from LA and percussive pirate music coming out of the house scene (‘not straight 4/4′, though). I wonder what this melange will bring forth in Goodman’s future music? I have been more than inspired and impressed with kode9′s broken, tangential and swampy beats, and the other acquisitions to Goodman’s Hyperdub stable, like the ubiquitous (and anonymous) Burial, have only added to the aura of a true original forging his own conventions to build a convincing new scene.

Goodman is a lecturer in Music Culture in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and is currently writing a book about ‘sonic warfare’ due for release by MIT Press in 2009. I’m very intrigued by Goodman’s ideas in this capacity, specifically about ‘the role of sound in an ‘echology of fear’. Is it similar to the way piped music has been used as an instrument of control, I wonder? I’m thinking of an example like this:

All unwanted noise raises the blood pressure and depresses the immune system. A survey of 215 blood donors at Nottingham University Medical School in January 1995 found that playing piped music made donors more nervous before giving blood and more depressed afterwards than silence. In February 2005 piped television was introduced on some trains in Essex. Passengers hated it so much that they barricaded themselves in the toilets in protest.

The question is, then: besides locking themselves in the toilet (or replicating Mangon’s sonovac in Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’), what other guerrilla tactics can embittered consumers employ to fight back? I hope Steve’s book will provide an answer.

Also, Goodman’s theoretical examples puts me in mind of Noriega when he was coaxed from his hideout by the high-volume blasting of Billy Idol and Guns ‘n’ Roses by American troops; more recently, American forces have tortured prisoners with the repeated playing of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’. Out of today’s crop of rock and pop stars, I wonder, whose music would be the most appropriate for breaking the iron will of a hated and feared dictator deep in the bowels of a hideous place that most likely resembles Abu Ghraib, and why?

Goodman’s book includes, so I’m told, a chapter on Ballard, which is appropriate given that in the guise of kode9 he has acknowledged Ballard as an influence on his music. In 2006 Goodman gave a talk on ‘J.G. Ballard’s Sonic Fictions’ and at one stage I was going to interview him about all of this, but it never happened due to his busy schedule (here, though, is an earlier interview I did with Steve in 2003; there wasn’t much on the net about kode9 at that stage, so it was all very mysterious and exciting).

Rupture, however, did manage to pin Goodman down on Ballard, and here’s the relevant transcript from their interview:

DJ RUPTURE: This is a totally left-field question, but I was reading about your influences: J.G. Ballard. What books do you like? And does that manifest in your music in any way?

KODE9: Well, I’ve read a little about musicians who’ve been influenced by Ballard, and it always seems to be Crash, that’s the one. I think that’s an amazing book, but it wasn’t the one that got me. In the mid-90s, when jungle was just coming through and early drum ‘n’ bass, I read The Drowned World, set in London underwater, a kind of tropical London, most of the city’s flooded. The creatures undergo this sort of weird negative evolution, so that there are pterodactyls flying down what used to be streets but are now lagoons. And the humidity and clamminess of that idea of London, I was kind of hearing it in jungle.

DJ RUPTURE: Interesting. A swampy sub-bass?

KODE9: Yeah. But also just the atmospherics of jungle. And also there’s a short story by Ballard that I love called ‘The Sound-Sweep’, which is set in a city in which sound doesn’t dissipate, it just builds up. And there’s a guy who’s like a refuge collector for sound, and he drives around with this truck, with this machine called the Sonovac, and he basically goes around cleaning up spaces, sucking sound. And it’s like, this was written in the early 60s, so it’s like musique concrete or just sampling, generally, in this story. It’s just an amazing, prophetic story about noisy cities — and sampling. So, they’re the two Ballard things I’m influenced by most, I think.

In 2007, Burial’s last album was a hot topic in certain areas of the blog world, with Burial, as an entity, often bracketed with kode9, many thinking the two producers were one and the same — hence the photo heading this post. People really were straining to find the appropriate terms to describe this strange, otherworldly music, and often the conclusion reached was: it’s Ballardian. I became interested in tracking this meme because, as Steve suggests, Crash would invariably be the book that got referenced, yet I couldn’t really hear Crash’s themes in the music of either kode9 or Burial. It seemed that Crash was beginning to function as a default Ballardian reference, like 1984 standing in for ‘Orwellian’.

But as I was hunting this meme down, I came across an interview kode9 did with k-punk, in which k-punk asserts that the ‘strangely lulling, hydroponic humidity’ of Ballard’s Drowned World is etched in kode9′s work. This book does feel like a good fit, and its theme of overlapping time tracks appears especially relevant to the kode9 and Spaceape album Memories of the Future. The Drowned World, at its core, features a devolutionary time-loop, the ancient/modern city rising up to take its place among the prehistoric/future London, and this seems similar to Goodman’s claim that his music is about the ‘ominous anticipation of the future in the present’.

Regarding ‘The Sound-Sweep’, I too have been very influenced by the musique concrete aspects of this story, and I have to thank Paul Williams for turning me onto the noise in Ballard’s work. Once I looked for it I found it was everywhere in his writing, and Goodman’s views on this have inspired me also. Given Goodman’s interest in this story of Ballard’s, and the fact that in the Rupture interview he said he is also listening to lots of non-dance music, I also wonder if one day he will produce work in beatless, psychoacoustic, macrocosmic, musique concrete idioms. I think those results would be very interesting indeed.

Also related to ‘The Sound-Sweep’, I can’t help but think that when Steve said he wanted to work with the vocals of Spaceape because he wanted to ‘problematize the too-easy drift towards a purely instrumental, colourless, technoid aesthetic in the [dubstep] scene,’ that this is in fact a mission to reinvigorate the potential of vocals, similar to Mangon’s attempt to fight the flattened influence of ‘ultrasonic music’ in ‘The Sound-Sweep’. In Ballard’s story Mangon was, after all, trying to revive the career of the opera singer Madame Giaconda, with the telling statement that ‘Ultrasonic music is great for atmosphere, but it has no content. It can’t express ideas, only emotion.’ Substitute ‘ultrasonic’ with ‘dubstep’ and that could almost be a kode9ism!

Brought about through no fault of her own, Madame Gioconda’s decline was all the harder to bear. Since the introduction a few years earlier of ultrasonic music, the human voice — indeed, audible music of any type — had gone completely out of fashion.

Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.

Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960).

But back to the broken beats: I thought I would do a tour of some of the more interesting Ballardianisms that were floating around the kode9/Burial orbit in recent times.

ABOVE: kode9 & the Spaceape. Photo via Zoopersound.

First up, Jonathan Fletcher at Playlouder brings the occult into it:

For ‘Memories of the Future’ then, we can assert that Kode 9 is the music machine while Spaceape invokes modernist viral ‘fictions’ as a Ballardian stoned mystical preacher. His words continually repeat and rematerialise across each of these 12 songs, as well as the Burial album and Dubstep Allstars Volume 3 (a defiantly studio-bound DJ mix) inducing an occult-like mantra.

…while Warren Ellis nails the Drowned World connection:

[Burial's] GHOST HARDWARE EP was as Ballardian a record as I’ve ever heard: the sound of a drowned London. “Ghost Hardware” is on UNTRUE, but UNTRUE is an attempt to turn away from the watery cemetery of the EP, to make a “glowing, buzzing” record. I’m not so sure that he achieved that. Like his eponymous debut, like GHOST HARDWARE EP too, it’s head music, it’s contemplative. The textures of the thing are incredible. The beats come from under the road, the breaks come from three rooms away, and some of the vocals come from over your shoulder and thirty years ago. People sing with the crackle of dusty old vinyl. The ghosts of old musics.

Loki @ An Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming reiterates the motorway scenario, and scores points for the accompanying image, a reproduction of Ballard’s favoured Ernst, ‘Europe After the Rain’:

I keep hearing Cranes, especially Cranes as heard under hash and bio-yogurt; Cranes as de Clerambault syndrome. The same smeared vocals, child-like echoes, the sound of calpol sliding onto a spoon in the middle of the night…

Which then led me to the image of the cranes flying overhead at the beginning of Lautreamont’s Maldoror – Burial inhabits the same kind of world as Maldoror; half-real, half-imagined, schematic and partly skewed, sidereal. The same world transposed to a resolutely urban environment (one thing with Burial, it’s impossible to imagine greenery when listening to it, the colours that are synaesthically beamed in are almost all shades of blue and grey and black – like some vaguely Ballardian motorway junction or conference centre that never ends).

Tom at Sparks House scores for the most original conflation, bringing together Dominika Oramus’s writings on JGB with the music of Burial:

Late night listening to the new Burial release Untrue on the Hyperdub label, reading the introduction to a book by Dominika Oramus on the slow decline of Western Civilization viewed through the literature of J.G. Ballard… Burial’s release Untrue is a small masterpiece of the ethereal electronic post reggae dub know as DubStep. It makes an appropriate sound track to the ideas of Oramus. Quoting Arnold Toynbee from his book A Study of History, Oramus sets the stage for a brilliant introduction to the dystopian world view of J.G.Ballard;

“The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not these of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds that have proved incurable (Toynbee 1949: 135).”

Ballard and Burial make for a well matched pair. I recommend Untrue and the writing of Dominika Oramus, maybe have a glass of Calvados as you listen and read.;)

Appropriately, given that Dominika Oramus is from Poland, here is a Polish perspective… I get the hauntological connection; can anyone translate the rest, please?

polecam ostatnie wymiany tekstów w blogosferze na temat Joy Division n(fascynujaca lektura chwilami). czy o Burial, “hauntology” i “Ballardian connection” (nie próbuję nawet tego tłumaczyć). nie chce mi sie szukac linków ale jest to naprawde kawał mięsa dla każdego kto tęskni za pisaniem rozintelektualizowanym

Elsewhere, k-punk explains it uniquely well, engaging John Foxx, Joy Division and architectonics to support the comparison:

One of the reasons that I and others found the comparison between Burial and Martin Hannett’s productions for Joy Division so irresistible is that both producers’ sounds are architectural… This brings out the point I was trying to make in my Fact piece on Metamatic about the Ballardian being essentially architectural… Whereas Foxx — and the virtual populations that Metamatic projected — found a new kind of jouissance in brutalism’s angular arcades and the disassembling of the self into neo-Surrealist collages (‘he’s an angle/ she’s a tangent’), it was as if Joy Division were seeing Ballard’s high-rise Britain through the eyes of a neurasthenic Romantic. At the same time, they foreheard — and were a forehearing of — the No Future that would ensue once rock ran aground on the terminal beaches at the End of History, where depression amongst the young is normal…

ABOVE: ‘J. Mourinho, kode9 and Burial in a press briefing. Not pictured: Burial’ (according to Deeptime).

Richard Kovitch chooses to weave in another Ballardian luminary, Chris Petit, into the orbit in a review of Petit’s film Radio On:

It is interesting to note that the anomie that haunts every frame of ‘Radio On’ can currently be detected in the pioneering sounds emulating from London’s Dubstep scene, particularly the music of producers such as Burial and Kode 9. Despite thirty years segregated, they share the same Ballardian vision of Britain – a perverse romance for the urban and disconnected. Thanks to Plexifilm in the US, Petit’s film has finally been restored and reissued on DVD, so a whole new generation can catch up with his dark, Post Punk vision. It has been a long time coming.

…while Dorian Lynskey at the Guardian, in a post on Ballard’s influence on musicians, disavows the attention-grabbing antics of the Klaxons and instead defers to the subterranean beats of our subjects under discussion:

Perhaps Klaxons are trying to revive post-punk’s ostentatious I-read-books-you-know intellectualism, but it’s hard to discern Ballard’s DNA in their glowsticks-aloft optimism. His true disciples can be found on the dubstep scene. Burial’s “underwater-London” conceit might have been based on 1962′s The Drowned World, a once-outlandish prophecy made disturbingly credible by climate change, and Kode9′s Memories of the Future album is up to its eyeballs in JG.

ABOVE: Burial. Photo via The Wire.

And for balance, here is John Mulvey at Uncut:

My … hunch is that dance music, thanks to its notional futurism and its frequent lack of subtext, often attracts writers who are interested in constructing a progressive agenda which can accommodate a bunch of records they like at the time. This seems particularly true of dubstep, which is something I’ve never quite developed a taste for, in spite of many friends proselytising about stuff like the Burial album. It strikes me that this is music which is gagging to be theorised about: lots of urban dystopia, grimy Ballardian futurism, a potentially intriguing mixture of dancefloor codes and morbid alienation etc. But to be honest, it all seems a bit corny and obvious to me, reminiscent of those studiously bleak “Isolationist” comps from the early ’90s, when someone (Kevin Martin from Techno Animal, if memory serves) worked out that the paranoia-inducing aspects of dopesmoking could be aligned to dub.

…while Fire in the Mind expresses similar, though more temperate, views:

They may, as I have written in the past, remind me of certain Ballardian landscapes, but I will never go as far as to call Kode9 or Burial Ballardian artists. Nor will I call Will Self a Ballardian writer because he writes about a submerged island. Maybe it does sound impossible/improbable but every day again I try to be a blank sheet, a tabula rasa. To quote The Spaceape, I try to let music “stimulate the audio nerve directly”. This is not to say that this approach will always work out as I intend it, but I have to try or most of the true meaning will escape me.

As for me, I enjoy all of these perspectives, and I probably sympathise a little with John Mulvey, too (although he clearly doesn’t like the music, whereas I do), but more so with Fire in the Mind. I enjoy reading about Steve’s influences very much and I am very interested in how that filters into the creation of sound and music, but I am not sure it is directly possible to discern Ballardian themes as such in the music of kode9 and especially Burial without knowing the context of its creation (as far as I know, in the few interviews Burial has done he has never declared Ballard as an influence). That said, I throughly enjoy basking in (and, ultimately, can’t live without, despite my sympathy for the tabula rasa gambit) the grid of context surrounding the work: the theory inspires me and expands the listening experience. Someone like k-punk, for example, who can explain the architectural similarities between Burial and Ballard is therefore invaluable; this provides infinite levels of meaning, wormholes to undifferentiated matter, as does Tom @ Sparks House, with his reminder of the delicious possibilities inherent in a marriage of Burial and Oramus. To someone interested in the theory and the influence informing a piece of music, should it matter whether that raw material is clearly ‘audible’? Or is it important, rather, that there is simply an end product, of whatever shape and form, derived from the raw material (in the case of kode9) or that there is a mass of raw material, omnidirectional flows, informing the end product, the body, intentionally or not (in the ambiguous case of Burial). Whatever the case, all the above quotes I’ve cited clearly indicate that the Ballardianisms of kode9 and Burial, however they are generated, are far preferable to an endless parade of Crash-influenced songs featuring metallic car-crash sounds and groaning sex noises!

Still, in my un-interview with Steve Goodman, there was one burning question I wanted to ask. In a previous kode9 chat, Steve said, ‘While a lot of what has been said about grime and dubstep being influenced by its place of origin is real, I think that it can also become a tedious cliche.’ By cliche, he means ‘Croydon’, a borough of London, supposedly where dubstep originated, but also another label that keeps popping up around the genre (Paul from the deeptime blog wrote that ‘people act like there are dubstep spores in the Croydon water supply.’)

Given this and also taking into account Goodman’s Ballard influence, I was reminded of this quote from Ballard’s story ‘The Enormous Space’:

Crusoe wished to bring the Croydons of his own day to life again on this island. I want to expel them, and find in their place a far richer realm formed from the elements of light, time and space.

Therefore, my burning question to Steve Goodman is this: ‘You have DJed extensively overseas, seen how dubstep translates beyond Croydon and London, yet people still keep tagging it as a London thing. Therefore, after having to explain the Croydon connection in a thousand interviews, do you now also want to expel Croydon, as Ballard did, in favour of something more universal?’

ABOVE: kode 9 and Spaceape. Photo via kode9.

ABOVE: Flooded London, by Squint/Opera.

You don’t need me to tell you what these images evoke…

‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked after a pause. ‘The name of this city?’ When Kerans shook his head he said: ‘Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters…’

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Via De Zeen:

Film and media studio Squint/Opera has created a series of images depicting imaginary scenes in London in 2090, when rising sea levels have inundated the city. The Flooded London series depicts the city as a “tranquil utopia”. Five images will be on show at Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell, London from 20 June for a month, during the London Festival of Architecture. Exhibition details are on the festival website.

His name still echoed faintly in his ears as they began their search of the building. He took up his position at the stairwell at the centre of each corridor while Riggs and Macready inspected the apartments, keeping a look-out as they climbed the floors. The building had been gutted. All the floorboards had rotted or been ripped out, and they moved slowly along the tiled inlays, stepping warily from one concrete tie-beam to another.

Most of the plaster had slipped from the walls and lay in grey heaps along the skirting boards. Wherever sunlight filtered through, the bare laths were intertwined with creeper and wire-moss, and the original fabric of the building seemed solely supported by the profusion of vegetation ramifying through every room and corridor.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

Fifty yards away the first of the roofs broke surface, a blunted rectangle smothered with weeds and algae, across which slithered a few desperate fish. Immediately half a dozen others appeared around it, already roughly delineating a narrow street.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

ABOVE: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The photography of Troy Paiva treats us to canted visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases, aircraft ‘boneyards’, abandoned desert towns. The scenarios are all shot at night and the work is presented straight out of the camera, mostly untouched by Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques. Troy uses available light, such as moonlight or sodium light (the latter of course plentiful in the modern-day archaeological ruins he haunts), but he also uniquely marks the shots with his light-painting skills (the introduction of hand-held, hand-applied light during the exposure) and the unearthly effects of red, green and blue-gelled strobe flashes. The cumulative effect is startling: like stills from a David Lynch film in a parallel universe in which Lynch, instead of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart for his twisted desert noir masterpiece, had chosen Ballard’s Vermilion Sands instead.

Simon Sellars

NOTE: Although I have tried my best to include a representative selection of Troy’s photos, I found it almost impossible to do justice to the scope, beauty and sheer volume of his work. If after reading this interview you find yourself wanting more examples, my advice is to start either at Troy’s official site or his flickr page and work your way from there.

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again… I found a shallow basin among the dunes… The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, first published in 1967, collected in Vermilion Sands (1971).

SIMON: Troy, when we first talked about your photos, you said, ‘People constantly refer to my photography as “Ballardian”.’ I can certainly see the connections, especially with Vermilion Sands and its sense of decadent ruin, a lurid, near-future civilisation lost in the desert sands. But is Ballard actually an influence on your work?

TROY: No. I came to him much later. I enjoyed the Vermilion Sands stories very much when I read them a couple of years ago and I can see why people connect my work with his writing. There is that sense of desolation and isolation, the fetishism of decay and destruction and a general sense of being outside the realm of normal society, as well as the melancholia of straggling on after everything has ended.

Same thing happened with Kerouac’s On the Road. After reading it recently I thought, ‘Wow, no wonder people keep saying that to me.’ Much of my photography stems from massive, epic road trips that criss-cross the southwest, where I cover thousands of miles in a couple of very surreal days. The mythology of The Road figures in a lot of my work. I guess these similarities show that human experience is roughly the same for all of us, we just have different ways of expressing it. See also Philip K. Dick.

The books of my formative years were George Stewart’s pastoral apocalypse classic Earth Abides, Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealist freak-out, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Stand, Stephen King’s pop-epic story of The End. Those three books kinda say it all about where my approach to the road, abandonment and the ‘post-everything’ world lies. And the movie Vanishing Point – that encapsulates my own road-trip mythology perfectly.

HENRY: ‘And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The last American hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West.’

TROY: ‘And beans, lotsa beans.’ Man, I love that movie. It’s totally what the desert is about for me.

ABOVE: ‘Color Television’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Behind an abandoned restaurant in the sleepy Mojave Desert town of Yermo, CA. The density of the sky was caused by the October Fires in SoCal. You could taste every breath. Night, full moon 2 minute exposure, natural, yellow and red-gelled strobe and flashlights. Composite of 2 images.’

HENRY: There are other things your work brings to mind, like the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.

TROY: Love it. Wish I’d had a chance to shoot it! I got lost on a series of endless dirt roads trying to find it, many years ago. Almost got stuck and had to give up. It’s been gone for at least five years now.

SIMON: What exactly is it about the desert that appeals?

TROY: I just love the expansiveness and isolation – it’s primal and uncompromising. I love that you can go for days without talking to anyone. It’s a land of outcasts and oddballs, where non-conformists can thrive. An incredible volume of American mythology is based on the desert and Western expansion, from the Gold Rush to Route 66. I’ve even heard my photography described as an epitaph for the mythology of the American West.

Dr Paul Ricci was thinking: So this is New York – or was. Greatest city of the twentieth century, here you heard the heart-beat of international finance, industry and entertainment. Now it’s as remote from the real world as Pompeii or Persepolis. It’s a fossil, my God, preserved here on the edge of the desert like one of those ghost towns in the Wild West. Did my ancestors really live in these vast canyons? They came on a cattle boat from Naples in the 1890s, and a century later went back to Naples on a cattle boat. Now I’m making another stab at it.

Still, the place has possibilities, all sorts of dormant things might be lying here, waiting to be roused.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Your bio says your work is about ‘the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during this country’s 20th century western expansion’. How did it come to be this way?

TROY: It’s simply who I am. When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic ‘wild west’ ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the centre of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

ABOVE: ‘Texaco Marine’ by Troy Paiva. ‘North Shore Marina, Salton Sea, 2001. Most, if not all, the letters are gone by now. Night, 100% full moon/star light, 8 minutes, f5.6.’

SIMON: I understand it’s your Salton Sea work that gets most of the Vermilion Sands comparisons.

TROY: Yes. The Salton Sea is an enormous, accidentally created salt lake in a remote corner of the SoCal desert. In the 50s developers built elaborate resorts and golf courses around its shores and the department of interior stocked it with game fish. By the 60s it had become an idyllic combination of Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs, half outdoorsman’s paradise, half retreat for the Hollywood elite. By the 70s, however, two years of record rain caused massive floods and the lake, which has no outlet, began to fester and decay. The smell became unbearable as massive algae blooms died off. Anyone who could afford to move away did. By the 90s fish and birds were dying on a biblical scale – in the millions – triggered by the algae blooms. It’s a horrible, filthy place rimmed with rotten modernist resorts, marinas and trailer parks (most of which have been torn down now), and decaying dead fish and birds. Today the Salton Sea feels very much like the epicentre for the end of the world, a poster child for mankind’s failure to tame nature.

Ballardian for sure!

Ronnov-Jessen: [In your novella 'The Ultimate City'] one could say that the dynamism represented by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

Ballard: No, I don’t accept that. The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same — except he attempts to do it on a continental level.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Against Entropy’, a 1984 interview with Peter Ronnov-Jessen.

ABOVE: ‘Precis’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A flipped Mitsubishi Precis, run over by a tank, in the abandoned base housing at George AFB near Victorville, CA. There were several smashed cars left in strategic lines of sight used for infantry cover during wargames exercises. The engine block in this thing was crushed like an egg. Shot March 2001, 160T film. Night, about 8 minutes, full moon, but overcast, yellow and purple-gelled strobe-flash.’

HENRY: Do you think your photos suggest a cryptic ‘signs of passing’ of American Culture from the world stage?

TROY: I suppose it can’t help but be interpreted that way‚ but I must also say the rest of the world has more ruins and debris left behind than America does. The internet is overflowing with amazing photography shot in the abandoned places of the 21st century. Spend an hour Googling ‘urban exploration’ and you’ll see that the culture is exploding worldwide, so whilst you got the concept right, it’s important to see it as a human, post-industrial thing rather than purely American.

UrbEx is as old as mankind. Humans have always been obsessed with both building and exploration. I’m sure primitive man explored the abandoned caves of his ancestors too. We’re drawn to ruins. It’s just how we’re wired as a species. Whereas the 20th century saw an unprecedented worldwide explosion of construction, by the dawn of the 21st century much of this expansion had failed or become obsolete, leaving the world littered with an amazing array of every type of ruins imaginable. Today we are experiencing a true golden age of abandonment.

SIMON: You describe it as a ‘culture’. That suggests it’s more than simply the illicit thrill of sneaking into abandoned or forbidden territory.

TROY: Yes. UrbEx, or Urban Exploration, is the pastime of visiting TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces), but not for scientific, anthropological or nefarious purposes. It’s about absorbing the atmosphere and wabi sabi soul of these places. A ‘finding beauty in decay’ aesthetic. I visit these lapsed spaces for several of the same reasons that normal people visit a serene mountain glen: the soul-cleansing quietude and the sense of feeling very small in a big universe. But ultimately it is an entirely different sensibility. Where most people see waste and blight in TOADS, Urban Explorers see elegant devolution and the weight of time.

Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him … He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project — unstated — but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island … In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing …

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

HENRY: Ballard has a strangely acute, Triassic sense of ‘deep time’ in his fiction‚ especially in short stories like ‘The Terminal Beach’. Similarly, in your book Lost America, you wrote, ‘The stars pinwheeling overhead and clouds smearing across the sky mirrored the compression of time created by the relentless pace of the trip.’ You said you were seeking to ‘heighten the unreality’ of these bizarre, spectral non-places.

TROY: It is a different reality. UrbEx night photography is very far removed from normal life, and my goal is to accentuate this surreal, otherworldly atmosphere in the work. One of the big attractions of night photography is this weird time-space distortion thing. Most of the night shooters I know are philosophical about the process. The exposures are minutes long, giving you time to sit in the dark and absorb the scene. Regardless of whether you are shooting cranes in an abandoned shipyard, or you’re on the top of a windswept mountain shooting thousand year old trees, it’s a wonderfully zen, contemplative experience.

ABOVE: ‘Hot Seat 2′ by Troy Paiva. ‘Shot at the abandoned Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, CA. I recently learned that most (soon to be all) of the barracks and entire laundry have recently been bulldozed. Hundreds of buildings. Gone. Night, full moon, pink and green-gelled strobe-flash, 3-4 minute exposure.’

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

TROY: I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves, rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy, desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.

Doing this is a whole lot of fun, but there are a lot of very real ways to get hurt or killed. The dangerous aspect of UrbEx night photography is just not something I dwell on. If I did I’d never leave the house.

SIMON: In Lost America you wrote about coming across a sacrificial altar used in an occult ceremony.

TROY: Yeah, that was nasty. They had sacrificed a sheep on a makeshift altar in an abandoned Air Force fire station in a remote corner of the Mojave desert. Blood and entrails were smeared everywhere, lots of evil graffiti about how much fun it is to kill. It was a miserable sight. Sad.

SIMON: You said it was part of the ‘growing evidence of downright creepy stuff’ you’ve encountered. Are you implying that this kind of activity is on the rise?

TROY: Is it on the rise, or has it always been there, bubbling away under the surface? I don’t have the answer for that. Remember what I said earlier about the desert being the last place where oddballs can thrive? Some people are just bigger oddballs than others, what can I tell you?

HENRY: I enjoy reading your interior highway dialogues [Troy wrote 12,000 words to accompany the photos in Lost America]. You should definitely do more existential travel essays – you seem to have a feel for it.

TROY: Thanks, but I clearly don’t have as much to offer as a writer that I do as a photographer. Urban Exploration needs a new young writer, this generation’s version of Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson, who can bring it into a modern pop-culture context. I’m not that writer, but I’ll gladly play the photographic role of Ralph Steadman.

ABOVE: ‘Danger Zone’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Building 4900, abandoned. Decommissioned Fort Ord Army Base. It’s all in the details. Shot 1/07, night- totally dark space, red-gelled strobe and ungelled strobe through fenced room.’

SIMON: Do you know about the recent hysteria in Britain, with people being questioned and harassed by police for using a camera in public places under suspicion of terrorism? There has been a huge backlash from ordinary people demanding the right to take pictures in public without being branded a terrorist.

TROY: I’ve heard rumblings about that sort of thing here too, especially in big cities. No question, the climate for photographers has changed since 9/11. The police have all of us on a shorter leash. Here in western America everything is spread out though, so it’s much easier to fall between the cracks if you get out of the big cities. That’s why I like shooting in rural locations. You are a lot less likely to be hassled by the police or unsavoury characters.

HENRY: Ballard has described Shanghai as ‘cruel and lurid, polluted and exciting’. Except for ‘cruel’ this seems an apt description of your photography (I find your work too surreal to be genuinely malicious). Do you feel this same kind of frantic, otherworldly rush as you travel the land in search of… of what, exactly?

TROY: Ghosts. Not Hollywood movie ghosts-actors under sheets waving their arms, but the ghosts of technology, a slice of amazing human history that is already being forgotten as we rush headlong towards… whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards. I don’t believe in ghosts in the traditional sense, but these places carry a spiritual weight that is unlike occupied places or nature. The stillness and atmosphere, especially alone at night, can be an emotionally overwhelming experience. No question, it is a rush.

ABOVE: ‘Canted’ by Troy Paiva. ’1959 Buick at a nameless high desert junkyard near Lake Los Angeles, CA. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon purple and green-gelled strobe-flash. Big and rusty.’

SIMON: Is America really changing as rapidly as your work suggests?

TROY: Yes, it’s changing faster and faster. America is all about speed and ‘the new’ so we’re always replacing things that don’t really need replacing. It’s interesting how the places and objects I find have changed over the years. Twenty years ago it was all about the debris left behind by the finned atomic-age, but now the focus has shifted to the debris of the 70s and 80s: junkyard minivans and wide-body airliners are replacing the big-finned station wagons and 707s. Disposable plastic replacing chromed steel.

Who knows where it’s headed? Surely we’re into another period of contraction in the West as gas tops $4 a gallon, which only means junkyards filled with giant SUVs and more abandonments to explore, but I have no idea where it will ultimately end up.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain the people in the future — long after the automobile has been forgotten — will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them. In the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty — we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

TROY: In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the artistic fulfilment I was originally getting from the job. The last thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became totally obsessed and consumed by it.

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

SIMON: Do you see any similarities with your brother Tom’s work?

TROY: When we were both learning the ropes in night shooting we frequently shot at night together. Now Tom lives in Los Angeles and he has a commercial photography business shooting large format architectural and industrial work. Living 500 miles apart, we seldom get the chance to shoot together anymore. Tom’s aesthetic is the complete opposite of mine; he doesn’t light paint, he doesn’t do the UrbEx-style locations, and his complex and meticulous – and ultimately gorgeous – large-format work is the exact opposite of my quick and dirty, guerrilla-style shooting. My compositional style tends towards a pop-surrealist, melodramatic and cartoony look, whereas his is a more stately and formalist style. His work is cool and elegant, mine hot and visceral. Yes, we’re both night photographers, but our styles couldn’t be more different. We’re very careful to avoid doing similar work specifically because we are both named ‘T. Paiva’ and we both make a conscious effort to avoid stepping on each other’s artistic toes. One way we’re similar though is that we’re both loners, but I think that is a trait that runs strong in most night shooters. It’s funny to watch a group of night photographers descend on a location – they usually say something like ‘meet you here at 1am’ and head off in opposite directions.

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

TROY: Jan Staller, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and Steve Fitch for sure. Studying the lighting work of O. Winston Link, William Lesch and Chip Simons back in the late 80s was really important for me, too. I’d sit there for hours, deconstructing their images trying to figure out how they lit their subjects. But maybe I owe more to David Lynch, Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Juan Ruiz Anchía, Emmanuel Lubezki, Tim Burton and a trillion other movie artists. I watch a lot more movies than I read photo books.

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

TROY: I shot on film from 1989 to 2004 using cheap, outdated flea-market 35mm gear. It felt right for me to be shooting this forgotten junk with junk. This old work has a Holga-esque, toy-camera lo-fi quality that many find endearing today. I guess I was unintentionally ahead of the curve there too. I stopped shooting for a year in 2004 as the film era fizzled out, frustrated by lab closures, the lack of quality film processing and the low yield of acceptable work with my ancient equipment. In 2005 I moved to digital once I saw that camera technology had advanced enough to allow me to do noise-free time exposures. I now shoot with a Canon 20D and a 12-24mm Tokina zoom lens. I use a heavy, solid Slik tripod because I do a lot of work in wind and rough conditions and I need as stable a platform for the camera as possible. Regrettably, I was forced away from the ‘shooting junk with junk’ ethos by changing technology, but with the 20D already being superseded by several newer models in the past few years, maybe the 20D is already ‘outdated junk’ gear too.

ABOVE: ‘Speedlines’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Mid ’70s Chevy Monte Carlo at the Pearsonville, California Junkyard. This is the last of the Pearsonville work, I wanna try to head back soon tho. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon, blue and green-gelled flashlight.’

SIMON: You’ve described your technique as ‘low cost/high impact lighting’. Is it therefore accessible for amateurs and people beginning to experiment with photography?

TROY: Absolutely. The advent of digital photography and the ability to chimp the shot on the back of your camera as you work has revolutionized night photography and light painting. In the film era you could shoot a whole roll of film and not know that the leader on the film never got picked up by the sprocket, let alone that your exposures were incorrect or your lighting was not bright enough.

All my lighting is done with a single 20 year old Vivitar 285 strobe flash and a collection of flashlights from a tiny keychain LED to a 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight. I have a set of theatrical lighting gels cut to small swatches that I just hold over the light source. Because the exposures are minutes long, I have plenty of time to do multiple flash pops and take my time with my flashlight work. Observers are often surprised by my low-tech lighting technique, asking ‘Is that really all there is to it?’ I have to keep it simple because this is frequently a guerrilla-style of photography. Travelling light is critical, so all my gear except the tripod fits in a small daypack, allowing me to get in, set up, shoot and get out quickly.

You can buy a flash like mine second-hand for $50. All of my flashlights could be bought at any drugstore like Target or Walmart. Every halfway-large city has at least one theatrical supply store where you can buy gel material. It costs about $10 a sheet. The reason for not trying light painting is not because of cost! Look at any of the myriad night photography or light-painting groups at a photo-sharing site like flickr and prepare to be overwhelmed with amateurs doing this kind of work in all sorts of locations. It’s everywhere now. I seem to have created a Frankenstein.

SIMON: Do you work fast?

TROY: I work incredibly fast compared to other night shooters. A lot of that is a product of having almost 20 years of experience, but I am a seat-of-the-pants type of artist in any media. The less thinking and planning and fussing over the piece, the more relaxed and natural it will be.

It’s kind of like a pianist playing a song with thousands of notes without sheet music: if they think about every note, they can’t possibly play the song. Rather, they turn off the conscious part of their mind and just let it flow. Same for painters and other artists. It’s no different for photography. The more you think, plan and try to get the shot, the more likely it will elude you.

ABOVE: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva. ‘The YESCO sign boneyard, Las Vegas, NV. Shot May, 2000. Night, 160 Tungsten film, full moon, sodium and mercury vapor lights, red-gelled strobe flash. That’s the Luxor hotel spotlight. Legendary location seen in many TV shows and movies containing hundreds of old signs. Almost everything here was donated and moved to the Las Vegas Neon Museum across town shortly after I shot here, this lot was turned into more manufacturing/warehouse space.’

Had they any idea that Las Vegas was defended by a rag-tag army of children? In an attempt to blind their camera lenses, Manson continued to turn up the electric power flowing into the city. The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incandescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Funnily enough, given that your signature style is this unnaturally vivid primary-colour palette, I always picture purples and reds when I think of Vermilion Sands, more so Ballard’s Hello America. The gels you use irradiate your scenery – for me it really does evoke the near-future sheen of Hello America‘s abandoned United States, in which whole cities are buried in the desert, a vast continent paved over with accreted hyperconsumerism. But in photography at least, this seems an unusual approach to take with urban ruins – many would rather focus on the grey, rusting aspects of abandoned towns. Perhaps, like Ballard, you are breathing new life into these ruins, recombining them in new and unexpected ways.

TROY: Yes, you nailed it. Most UrbEx photography is a pure documentation of locations weathered to dreary and monochromatic greys and browns, but I’m taking it someplace else entirely by reanimating these places with light. Some say I’m bringing a festive, circus-like atmosphere to these dead places. It’s done in a sort of Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ spirit. My colour choices are usually predicated on the actual colour of the subject and location, not because of some premeditated ‘I must use green tonight’ mentality.

I see it as embracing the idea of death rather than fearing it. It’s about accepting it and having fun with this darker side of the human condition. My work tends to inspire melancholia, especially in older people, because they remember these places from their youth. It reminds them of their own mortality, but I think that palpable sense of transience and loss in these places is actually exciting and inspiring rather than sad or futile. I suspect that feeling runs strong in many urban explorers.

Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution – I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions and overpasses and multi-storey car-parks ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most of them are structures of great beauty.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

HENRY: Ballard has said that his fiction is the ‘dissection of a deep pathology’. Do you also see your own work as a kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscapes of the USA in all its mythical glory? Or is it more intimate, personal and emotional than that?

TROY: Jeez, these are hard questions. It is a very personal and emotional process for me. It is an artistic process more than an intellectual one. My photography is about these places as they are now, not as they were. It’s not socioeconomic commentary, an anti-technology or anti-military-waste rant, or a warning about rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, though it has been interpreted as such by others. Put simply, I love these places. I am laying bare this rotten underbelly, but I’m doing it because these places simply move me, not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they are now. It’s all about the atmosphere and feeling, and I try to enhance this surreal vibe with my time exposures and light painting.

ABOVE: The cover of Paiva’s Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration, published by Chronicle Books.

SIMON: I see that Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has written the foreword to your forthcoming book, Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. As we’ve previously seen, Geoff shares a Ballardian approach to architecture and urban exploration.

TROY: My editor at Chronicle Books introduced me to Geoff. He was a last-second addition to the project when my original essayist fell through at the 11th hour. Geoff immediately ‘got it’ and wrote a very eloquent and flattering forward, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition among several other books. I enjoy Geoff’s blog tremendously, especially when the subject of ‘the philosophy and aesthetics of abandonment’ comes up.

Paiva’s images of airplane graveyards, in particular, are all the more evocative and gripping when you consider that his father was a flight engineer, hopping planes from country to country. In his book The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard describes a surreal landscape of crashed bombers, abandoned air warfare ranges, and disused runways. He refers to such images as ‘the nightmare of a grounded pilot,’ or ‘the suburbs of Hell,’ a ‘University of Death,’ across which people wander, stunned by the ruins all around them.

Geoff Manaugh, foreword to Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

TROY: It’s broken down into five chapters: ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel’, about an abandoned early 20th century resort; ‘16th Street Station’, about a derelict Beaux Arts inner city train station; ‘Decommissioned’, which covers over a dozen various abandoned military and industrial complexes; ‘Desert’, about the abandoned roadsides of the desert southwest; and ‘Boneyard’, a high-desert graveyard comprised of hundreds of junk aircraft.

While it’s as similar to Lost America as you’d expect two volumes of ‘light-painted night photography in abandoned places’ to be, this new one is about specific locations rather than general overviews of types of places. I have the first production copy sitting on the desk in front of me and it really looks sharp. It’s a much higher-quality piece than Lost America. The layout and design is much more sophisticated and refined and the print quality is a vast improvement. I’m frankly floored by it and I’m my own worst critic, so I’m pretty optimistic that other people are going to be floored by it too.

SIMON: What sort of research do you do, in terms of finding out sites to visit and photograph?

TROY: I drive around in the desert and scout locations. I have a collection of old road maps from the 50s, which I’ve studied at length. It’s fascinating to see whole towns on those maps that no longer exist. In the last few years I’ve had a lot of email from people telling me about great locations and I’ve been acting on some of these tips with great results. I’ve also been shooting with a lot of local UrbEx photographers who have introduced me to some spectacular spots very close to home.

ABOVE: ‘Wind Slice’ by Troy Paiva. ’1930s airliner in storage at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled flash. 2-3 minutes.’

He welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him… Who were they, these strange twins – couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them…

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1970).

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

TROY: The aircraft boneyards are still my favourites. I’m an airline brat so I grew up around planes. There is nothing that can prepare you for walking up to half of a 747 laying on its belly in the sand. It’s just epic. I shot the derelict ocean liner ‘S.S. Independence’ earlier this year, days before it left to be towed to the breaker beaches of Asia. That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

SIMON: Do you have a desire to shoot outside of America?

TROY: Oh sure: the abandoned industrial cities of Eastern Russia, Gunkanjima – that completely abandoned island city in Japan – the half-finished hotels of the Sinai, the abandoned Formula 1 racetrack at Reims, France… the list goes on and on. Realistically, though, there is more than enough in the American Southwest to shoot for a lifetime.

It’s mainly a money issue. Being a freelance artist in the 21st century is a low-budget lifestyle. Still, with a few deep-pocket patrons I’d be happily winging my way across the globe next week!

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is shipping on 2 July, 2008 and is available for preorder via Chronicle Books and Amazon.com.

ABOVE: ‘Clipped and Headless’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A mutilated Delta 727 fuselage on its belly at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. 2-3 minute exposure.’

..:: MORE INFORMATION
+ Troy’s official site
+ Troy’s Lost America site
+ Troy’s flickr stream
+ Design Shed, Troy’s freelance design and illustration site

The last time I read Wind, I was struck by the James Bondish flavour towards the end. Why, there’s even a supervillain, Hardoon, holed up in his secret lair, surrounded by paramilitary goons wearing the insignia of the villain’s secret army, ready to prove a point to the world. It can’t be denied that this is in fact the exact modus operandi of Blofeld, Goldfinger, Hugo Drax and the entire pantheon of super-rich, criminally minded megalomaniacs in the Bond universe.

In fact, have a look at this passage from Ballard’s book: where the name ‘Hardoon’ appears, I’ve replaced it with ‘Blofeld’, the archetypal Bond villain; where the protagonist’s name, ‘Maitland’, appears, I’ve replaced it with ‘Bond’.

Chapter 8: The Tower of Blofeld

As he woke his head was swinging like a piston from side to side.

A dozen arteries pounded angrily inside his skull, rivers of thudding pain. He opened his eyes and focused them with an effort. A powerfully-built guard in a black plastic uniform, a large white triangle on his helmet, was leaning over him, slapping his face with a broad open hand.

When he saw Bond’s eyes were open, he gave him a final vicious backhand cut, then snapped at the two guards holding Bond in his chair. They jerked him forward into a sitting position, then let go of his hands.

Gasping for air, Bond tried to control himself, spread his legs apart and pressed his shoulders against the stiff backrest of the chair. Above, fluorescent lighting shone across a low bare ceiling. In a few seconds his face had stopped stinging, and he lowered his eyes slowly.

Directly in front of him, across a wide crocodile-skin desk, sat a squat, broad-shouldered man in a dark suit. His head was huge and bull-like; below a high domed forehead were two small eyes, a short stump of nose, a mouth like a scar, and a jutting chin. The expression was sombre and menacing.

He surveyed Bond coldly, ignoring the red-flecked saliva Bond was wiping away from his bruised lips. Dimly, Bond recognized a face he had seen in a few rare magazine photographs. This, he realized, was Blofeld.

J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Many’s the time Ian Fleming’s Bond has awoken from a beating by guards in a dingy room only to stare into the eyes of Blofeld/Dr No/Goldfinger. Note, too, Ballard’s attention to Hardoon/Blofeld’s cruel and menacing features, a classic Fleming trademark; I remember a description of Blofeld in Bond, for example, that zoomed in to the exact shape and texture of the man’s truncated ear lobes.

When I canvassed these thoughts elsewhere, Raymond replied:

I have thought that there are similarities between the early Ballard novels and the James Bond novels for a long time. It may be partly a period thing but it was mostly the role of the villain that made me think this and Strangman in The Drowned World always comes to mind in this respect.

But I’m convinced there’s more to it than a period thing, more than simply Ballard indulging in the shared action idiom of the times. OK, granted, at the time Ballard wrote Wind, Blofeld had just been introduced by Fleming in Thunderball (from the same year, 1961). But Dr No and Goldfinger had already firmly established the template. In fact the scene I’ve just quoted seems identical — in its air of casual, glamorous sadism — to the scene in Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953), where Bond is getting his nads thrashed by Le Chiffre’s carpet beater.

Sounds like Ballard had an Ian Fleming novel or two at hand when he embarked on that famous two-week holiday that produced his first book. (Funnily enough, I was also reminded of Fight Club. As Maitland and his crew watch Hardoon’s tower collapse, and the wind meekly dies down as if it was never there in the first place — or took place entirely within his head — I half expected Maitland to turn to the girl and say, “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”)

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ The Wind from Nowhere is now a wind from somewhere

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment, Future Ruins is a photographic critique of the urban planning of the 1970s and Ballard’s novels of the same period.

Image from ‘The Drowned World’
by Jon Cattapan

I suppose it’s got two points of genesis. The first is that it came from a body of work I started in the early 90s which has become known as the City Submerged and that body of work came about literally because I was thinking very much about the idea of the city as a place that was deluged with information. So it was the start of that framework that’s been in my work for some time. The second genesis of the title is that I’m a complete JG Ballard nut, and the curator has known that and he also is a very big fan, and Ballard’s book The Drowned World actually…it was for me a fairly seminal text in a lot of ways and it pinpoints a lot of the ideas that I’m kind of interested in.

Image from the Metro-Centre website
by the Harper Collins design team

A site for the book Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard.

‘Matteo Bittanti’s Crash’
by Matteo Bittanti

I love the idea of gamics, but I’m not really interested in storytelling, so for my first experiments, I decided to cut-and-paste various popular artifacts. “CRASH” is what happens when you play too much Burnout while reading JG Ballard’s stories…

‘High-Parkade’
by Rick McGrath

Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, sponsored by the kind people at Harper Collins. Picture an alternate universe where Jim Ballard achieved his early goal of becoming a screenwriter, becoming so successful that he relocated from Shepperton to Hollywood. The task: write an imaginary 500-word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky and Hutch…as written by J.G. Ballard.

J.G. Ballard Flickr Pool
various photographers

And finally: here’s a slideshow that loops images from the incredible J.G. Ballard pool over at Flickr — over 2000 photos and counting. Click an image for photographer details etc.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

..:: FURTHER
+ J.G. Ballard: The Visual Tribute, Part 1

This gallery is in two parts: 1) Work that hasn’t been featured on this site (below); 2) and work previously featured.

‘Crystal Forest’
by Maia Valenzeula

Based on the book “The Crystal World” by JG Ballard.

‘Crash’
by Marie Meier

A little tribute to J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg.

‘The Drowned Giant’
by Shafeen Alam

This is a story moment I chose to illustrate in which the main character, a young librarian, sees the Giant for the first time, days after it had washed ashore and the excitement over it had died down. I submitted my work on ACME and have gotten some really helpful comments from the pros. So here is my revision as a result.

Illustrations by James Nicholls

ABOVE: ‘The Terminal Beach’ by J.G. Ballard.

LEFT: ‘The Drowned Giant’ by J.G. Ballard. RIGHT: ‘Billennium’ by J.G. Ballard.

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction at Monash University. The conference, spread over three days, was intensive and impossible to digest in its entirety (of the 76 papers, I attended just 15 including my own), but various themes emerged. Terry Eagleton was a keynote speaker, meaning that, as another attendee (who goes by the very academic name of ‘Superdave’) has noted, ‘A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests.’

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

The work of Kim Stanley Robinson seemed to be a focal point, from what I gathered from some of the papers and from many of the conversations I engaged in. On the first day, keynote speaker Tom Moylan, in his talk entitled ‘Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction’, took up Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the ideal expression of utopian literature, in that it presents multiple possibilities for utopian expression and moves between them in a state of flux. As Moylan said, this type of work ‘nominates and explores new alternatives, not to find immediate answers, but to alleviate and enlighten political strategy.’ As I tried to tease out in my own paper, I see Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise as fulfilling a not-too-dissimilar function, my conclusion being that this book (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of what I term Ballard’s ‘Pacific fictions’) is both uniquely Ballardian and exquisitely Jamesonian.

Moylan’s presentation basically served as an introduction to current utopian thought in literature. Again echoing Jameson, it concluded that the form, rather than being associated with the nasty stench of various dictatorships that have co-opted utopianism in the name of genocide, should be reclaimed and thought of as ‘a device to cut through quotidian reality and open up a gap through which we can see a better world.’ There was an interesting question from the audience, in which Moylan was asked, ‘If utopian writing should be conceived as a disruption, an alternative, should it therefore embody disruptive, ie, experimental, form?’ Moylan’s answer was, ‘Perhaps, but the virtue of SF is that it’s both immediate and accessible’, and this exchange immediately made me think of recent conversations in which people have wondered why Ballard abandoned the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition for more conventional structures and narratives. My feeling is along similar lines to Moylan, that the subversive value of Ballard’s later work lies precisely in the fact that it is ‘immediate and accessible’.

As Iain Sinclair has said, Ballard ‘has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.’

My paper, ‘Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, was in the early afternoon and I was pleased that it was well received. Thinking back I wish I’d included footage or slides of A-bomb tests and perhaps some photos of the WWII aircraft I found abandoned in the North Pacific jungles. Still, my paper seemed accessible enough, even though, disappointingly, I was asked just half a question (directed to me and the other speaker on my panel, who also referenced Ballard). That paucity would normally be a sign of audience incomprehension, but to my relief a few people told me in the break that they enjoyed my presentation. And to also tell me that they love Ballard but can’t stand Rushing to Paradise. Well, I don’t think it’s Ballard’s best work at all but the ideas are most intriguing and underexplored compared to the rest of his canon. I’ll refrain from further comment as I think I’ll post my paper here in the New Year.

The question asked of myself and the other speaker was, ‘If Ballard is essentially writing the same story over and over again, does that therefore spell the end of the concept of utopia as a historical concern?’ The audience member used Ballard’s ‘Ronald Reagan’ piece from Atrocity (as prefiguring anti-celebrity culture) and Crash (as prefiguring cyber- and virtual sex) and their temporal location in the late 60s and early 70s as examples of the writer mining a prophetic wave of inspiration and then revising and refining that template to the present day. I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of this question, so my rambled and thoroughly non-academic answer was that Ballard, of course, is out of time (or ahead of his time, if anything), and if he has been writing the same thing since the 1960s, that simply means to me that the rest of us are still yet to catch up. As to the utopian angle, to my understanding Ballard has never been especially concerned with the past or the future, or any sense of historicity, focusing instead on a collapsed present, and that in any case it’s arguable as to whether his work is utopian (or rather, dystopian) at all. Instead, as I tried to make clear in the paper, the notion of an ‘affirmative dystopia’ is the key to his work, an oscillation between the poles that is neither one nor the other, but that plays on the elements of both. Actually I was a little surprised that Ballard was so under-represented in the rest of the conference: like I say I don’t classify him as a straight utopian or dystopian writer, but his work very definitely plays with the conventions in an innovative and provocative fashion.

With my paper out of the way, I made it to an afternoon panel featuring Kate Rigby, whose paper, ‘Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?’, was rooted in reality, in an acceptance of the parlous state of climate change and the notion that things are only going to get worse. What role, asked Kate, can utopianism serve in the face of such a dire state of affairs? Looking to the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, she examined ‘non-human’ life and called for a ‘radical extension of hospitality towards more than only human others’ as a means to mobilise action in a world in which the utopian impulse seems to be well and truly exhausted as we slide downwards into eco-disaster.

Now this was a very stimulating presentation, with issues you could really sink your teeth into. Of course, what I wanted to ask Kate was, informed by Ballard’s early eco-disaster novels, how does one account for the fact that there actually might be a certain strata of the populace that would welcome the catastrophe for whatever reasons: psychological, psychopathological, aesthetic, evolutionary, etc. But I was beaten to the punch by another attendee. In response to Kate’s assertion that ‘If we see the apocalypse as a purifying event, that almost legitimises inaction’, he said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), ‘There’s an unwarranted belief that eco-disaster can be averted. The world will run down of its own accord anyway, so why bother prolonging the inevitable for our children and grandchildren, who may only grasp a habitable world for just a few generations’.

Kate’s response was that for her it’s an ethical question, it’s ‘about allowing life to flourish, for however long that may be’. I wish I’d had the insight to follow this up along Ballardian lines, but I was still mulling all of this over as this exchange was talking place. Unfortunately I’m a bit slow like that. Interestingly, Geoff Manaugh asked something similar of Kim Stanley Robinson in their recent BLDGBLOG interview, and Robinson’s answer is perhaps similar to how Kate may have responded:

Robinson: The crash scenario that people think of … as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

After Kate’s presentation I sat in on the Comparative Utopias workshop (overheard before I went in: ‘What on earth is a utopias workshop? Lessons in how to build a utopia?’). This was useful in that it extrapolated the utopian impulse beyond Western culture, although, as Jacqueline Dutton asserted, ‘There’s no real tradition of utopias outside the West’. But for me, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas‘s paper, ‘Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique’ was the standout, with its fascinating account of the role cannibal cultures have played in the Western mythos, as a composite cut-out, symbolising and embodying the insecurities and ambitions of the West.

And that was it for me for the first day. On the train home, I sat next to a retired chap who’d been at the conference. Funnily enough, he wasn’t even remotely involved in academia — instead, he was your archetypal sci fi ‘fanboy’ who told me he has worn Star Trek outfits at conventions. He’s a smart and engaged chap who came along to gain a different perspective on science fiction, and this to me was a sign of the conference’s success.

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I missed Day 2 as I had to work, but I was informed that Eagleton’s presentation, ‘Utopia and the New Testament’, was like stand-up comedy. See Superdave’s blog for info on Day 2 and for some Eagleton hot gossip… (he calls it ‘Day 3′ on his blog but he’s actually talking about Day 2).

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Australian SF and fantasy author Lucy Sussex was the keynote speaker for the third day. As Andrew Milner noted when introducing her, ‘Lucy, unlike those of us in academia with our tenure, actually lives off her writing’. And she’s very good at it, too. Lucy’s presentation, ‘A Tour Guide in Utopia’, for me was the highlight of the conference. Her style was witty and imaginative, taking the time to explore the absurdities of her subject matter.

Lucy took us through the history of utopian literature in Australia, from 100 years ago to now. The early account was fascinating as I had no idea there was such a strong utopian tradition in Australian writing — it’s something ‘official’ histories never discuss. Early Australian utopias, as Lucy explained, were propelled by a stew of influences, including the threat of Western Australia seceding, the advent of Federation, the prospect of New Zealand becoming a state of Australia, and from elsewhere, the advent of Freud, electricity, Einstein, Marconi, Wells, suffragettes, you name it.

For Lucy, Australian politics today cries out for the form to be revived and she pointed to some examples that take up the call, with the caveat that dystopian literature has replaced the utopian mode in Australian writing, fuelled by the Howard government and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. She referred to an Australian novel that sounded most intriguing (unfortunately I’ve lost the author’s name), with its vision of terrorists beheading their victims, and via some weird technology, forcing them to live on in a kind of half-life as headless slaves. I can’t quite get that image out of my head and I must seek out that book. If anyone knows of it, let me know. Lucy also mentioned Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground, which depicts Canberra wiped out in a jihad attack. Imprisoned in Parliament House, the protagonist has nothing to read but Hansard — a vision of hell if ever there was one.

Lucy finished up by relating the answers she was given when she asked some prominent writers about the need for utopian writing today. Ursula Le Guin said (and, again, excuse my paraphrasing from memory), ‘How can anyone draw up a blueprint for utopia when science and technology today are changing so rapidly?’ While for Dorothy Porter, ‘The Howard Government’s years were a literal dystopia. I didn’t need to write about it.’

That was a wonderful note to end on.

At lunchtime I got chatting to a chap who informed me that he identified as a Marxist but that his university department was all Derridean; the way he told it, it was like he was a black man who had wandered into a Klu Klux Klan meeting. When he asked what I identified as, I was stumped and eventually answered, ‘a Ballardian?’, which was very lame, I know. Then he was stumped too. And then we had some more wine and talked about something else.

In the afternoon I chaired a panel on utopian themes in film. Both papers were uniformly excellent. Julia Vassileva’s paper, ‘On Imagination, Energy and Excess: the Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias’, was a deep examination of the manner in which Eisenstein, like Freud, sought to ‘represent the non-representational’. Julia made the excellent point that for Eisenstein, the use of montage generates a parallel narrative that makes ambiguous comment on the main narrative, a stimulating concept with vast utopian potential. As Julia explained, for Eisenstein who ‘dreamed of a classless society’, utopian ideals were simply not able to be realised in the time in which he lived. However ‘it is the very insistence on utopian ideals despite a knowledge of their impossibility that creates the inner spring’ — or an energy that can be realised — a similar conclusion reached by other speakers examining other writers and artists at the conference.

Rachel Torbett’s paper, ‘The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”‘ focused on Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup”, with its post-apocalyptic world in which the catastrophe is never explained and which is alluded to only in the most oblique of terms. Rachel played an edited copy of the film behind her, timed to finish when her paper finished, a fabulous touch that really enhanced her presentation. For Rachel, ‘Speculating on the human opens up a space of indeterminacy’ and she noted that this film accomplishes that, with its vision of ‘gross inhumanity’ and the barbarism that people descend into when their technological safety nets are stripped away (a Ballardian theme too, as it happens; earlier Rachel had told me she had originally considered a paper on Ballard’s High-Rise). Weaving Lyotard into this argument, she explored the concept of the ‘sublime’ and how the film presents ‘the threat that something will happen in this void; that it’s not over’. I hadn’t seen the film, but with the video behind her I clearly saw how Haneke, with his use of darkness and snatched, whispered dialogue fully explores this idea, as characters lose themselves in the landscape which is shot in fading, natural light.

For Rachel, the problems raised in the film ‘linger because they go unresolved’. Withholding vital information from the audience, then presenting a final scene in which a train passes through a countryside that is beautiful once again, Haneke promises pleasure emerging from the terror only for it to be deferred as we realise that we don’t know who is on the train, where they are going or what they intend to do. The endpoint, I believe, was that we ultimately come to question the notion of ‘humanity’ itself and whether it is to be desired at all. This paper made me want to explore Haneke’s work in more detail, and watching the extracts from the film, I couldn’t help but compare that ending with Children of Men’s, in which the humanity is virtually rammed down your throat.

After this I caught Andrew Milner‘s paper, which he co-wrote with Robert Savage. The paper derived from a great central conceit: what would happen if the German philosopher Ernst Bloch had included the Golden Age of science fiction in his ‘magnum opus’ The Principle of Hope? (Originally Milner and Savage had planned to write a short story exploring this idea; that would have made a great paper.) Bloch wrote of ‘the colportage novel, the circus and the fairy tale’, but ignored the SF pulps, which were being produced at the same time he was working. Milner then took us through an examination of utopian themes in the pulps. All in all an engaging paper. Andrew is a hyperactive speaker, almost tripping over his own words in his enthusiasm for his subject matter, an infectiousness transmitted to the audience.

And then the conference, for me, was over (there was another workshop but I had to leave).

That night I was having drinks with some friends when someone I didn’t know wandered into the group and heard me talking about Ballard, Baudrillard and the conference. Immediately he began attacking me, saying that Baudrillard (and Ballard) believe that nothing is real, and that they are wrong and irresponsible. He kept saying that the body is real, that if someone attacks you on the street then you will bleed, you may even die, and you will then know that your corporeal self is very very real, and not part of some fantasy virtual reality theory. None of which I’ve ever argued against. Weary from too many beers and suddenly being put on the spot and forced to defend theory in the middle of a packed and noisy pub filled with steroid heads and Paris Hilton clones, I tried to explain that my interest in media landscapes, informed by Ba(udri)llard, lies in the way advertising and media has changed to become nomadic, fluid and omnidirectional, rather than top-down, hierarchical and sticky, and that because the so-called spectacle is so complete and so enveloping, this renders traditional notions of ‘authentic’ behaviour obsolete. (Behind me, as if to emphasise my point, one of the Paris clones threw up on the pavement). But this doesn’t mean I believe that nothing is real, even though I may feel overwhelming ennui and deflation, even something approximating fear, from time to time because of it. It’s purely a mode of enquiry into something that’s basically unanswerable, but still worth questioning for anyone remotely interested in the forces of cultural production in the early 21st century. In fact, the idea of the mediated ‘spectacle’ is so ingrained now in popular culture that it — in and of itself — has become a tedious marketing cliche in films and advertising (cf. the Matrix, with its pop-cult take on Baudrillard, and hyperware and self-reflexive ads that consistently ‘break’ the frame), so it was somewhat surprising to hear someone argue that there was no such thing.

Even more shocking, I couldn’t believe this guy was dredging up a stock argument against Baudrillard, an argument over 10 years old in fact, regurgitating the whole ‘Gulf War Did Not Happen’ gambit and using that to discredit him. I mean, honestly, this is such an old and tired argument. After all these years I don’t think you need me to explain that Baudrillard was not claiming that the physical event of war didn’t happen, but that the war was the first to be almost entirely mediated by technology and therefore was not ‘real’ according to traditional theatres of warfare. And that that notion is very applicable to today, in the midst of our pervasive and all-invasive FaceSpace culture. But this just didn’t wash with this fellow, and he kept pushing and pushing until I finally asked him what he studied at university. Surely nothing French?

And he said: ‘Derrida. I’m a Derridean, of course. A realist’.

Derrida? A realist? That’s a new one on me.

(By the way, see the blog Obscene Desserts, in which Anja relates a similar scenario — only in reverse, and in Germany).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

Antarctica. Photo by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Geoff has posted a fabulous interview with monumental SF/utopian author Kim Stanley Robinson over at BLDGBLOG. Robinson responds to Geoff’s fresh perspective, and we are treated to many provocative thought bubbles, some of which was echoed at the recent Utopias conference I attended at Monash University (I’ll be posting a review of the conference soon).

All that, and a Ballard reference, too:

BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would be considered a work of science fiction, even surrealism, today; but that same book, in fifty years’ time, could very well be a work of climate realism, so to speak. So if climate change is making the world surreal, then what it means to write a “realistic” novel will have to change. As a science fiction novelist, does that affect how you approach your work?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

William Viney, © 2007.

III. Ultimate Waste: Crash and Empire of the Sun

Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader. Towards the beginning of the novel, Ballard records James’ thoughts on the sexual possibilities of the everyday [1]. James imagines plane-crash victims whose minds have become a ‘brothel of images’ [2]. This phrase neatly draws together the union of sex and destruction that is the novel’s obsession: not only does it suggest the perversions that lurk in the hidden transcript of daily life, but also an attendant destructiveness built into the etymological roots of ‘brothel’. The word originates from the Middle English; broðen, ‘ruined, degenerate’ the past participle of breoðan; ‘to go to ruin ‘ [3]. This intense and paradoxical portrayal of generative destruction is arguably the novel’s central preoccupation, as Ballard himself has noted, the car crash is where the ‘twentieth century reaches its purest expression [...] Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction’ [4]. The crash is inconceivable without laying waste to both man and machine.

With its brutal collision of violence, technology, and desire, Crash represents a distillation of imaginative obsessions, characterised by some as uniquely Ballardian [5]. Nowhere else in Ballard’s oeuvre is the human body treated with such sustained, clinical, and graphic representation. The raw violence of the car crash allows the secret or forbidden aspects of the body to become visible. The corporeality of Crash might seem unrelated to ideas of rubbish and refuse, but, as I hope will become clear, Ballard’s bodies are defined by their waste; made flesh by their vulnerable viscosity.

The definition of the human body through its constituent fluids has a long history. Since Galen (A.D. 130-200?), people have believed our physiological complexion to be the product of four fluid humours: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The letting of one or more of these fluids can directly affect an individual’s health. In this ancient conception, the body is borderless, neither bounded nor defined, a state of continual flux predicated upon the extraction and renewal of fluids. For Dalia Judovitz, Descartes reversed this process, making the body rigid; a machine inhabited by the ghost of consciousness [6]. Ballard’s Crash finds itself at the very juncture of Galen’s and Descartes’ theories of the body. The novel catalogues the body’s oozing fluids with meticulous detail, they are, in fact, often the only physical attributes of what are, in the general, rather hollow characters. On the other hand, Ballard’s bodies incessantly threaten to become machines, blending into the cars with which they collide. The wastes of body and car are frequently commingling, confusing the relations between human and machine, natural and synthetic.

Vomiting proves a regular reaction to a car crash. James vomits across his steering wheel after his crash with Dr. Helen Remington and her husband (C, 14), whilst Catherine and Vaughn both vomit after separate collisions (C, 3, 8). It is well known that one of the body’s instinctive reactions to shock, trauma, or disgust, is to vomit; a seemingly involuntary act that can appear to envelop ones entire being. For Kristeva, the importance of bodily fluids relates to the threatened individual, a safeguard against both a loss of self and a loss of affect. Rather than signifying loss, the excretion of bodily fluids can register a means to ‘compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside [...] Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its ‘own and proper self’ [7]. From a more anatomical perspective, vomiting is a sign of the sympathetic nerve at work: the aspect of the nervous system that autonomically regulates the body’s organs. The sympathetic system is closely associated with a primitive ‘fight or flight’ response to bodily trauma [8]. From either the psychoanalytic or the anatomical standpoint, vomiting is a clear signal of bodily threat; to excrete is a powerful statement of corporal vulnerability.

James vomits again when in hospital, the beginnings of a series of illuminating passages that deal with the body’s propensity to excrete various solid and viscous waste materials. This propensity, luridly and voyeuristically imagined by James, becomes an obsession: ‘did small grains of faecal matter still cling to [the nurses'] anuses as they proscribed some antibiotic for a streptococcal throat, did the odour of illicit sex acts infest their underwear [...] traces of smegma and vaginal mucus on their hands [...]?’(C. 19). James becomes transfixed by the lurking filth beneath the sterile exterior of the hospital staff. In the same way, he realises that the nurses are also constantly preoccupied with the ‘unclean’ aspects of his body: ‘all these women only seem to attend to my most infantile zones [...] commissaries guarding my orifices’ (C .22). James’ subjection to the maternalistic waste management of his nurses finds direct parallel in the creation of the body’s boundaries during infancy. Kristeva has argued that the mother has a primal role in mapping the body, using her maternal authority to order the child’s body into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, ‘waste’ and ‘want’: ‘[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted’ [9]. James has this process rehearsed in the hospital, his orifices, points, lines, surfaces, and hollows are again placed under the ‘commissar’ of female prohibition, giving him a sharpened view of his own body, and a fresh perspective on its waste. Sensitised to the processes of self-creation that the body’s waste inspires, James describes how he ‘saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit.’.. (C, 9). With an ironic allusion to Narcissus, James realises that the body’s waste can hold up a mirror to the self.

Vaughn’s car is always described as dirty. Its first appearance in the novel is anonymously described as: a ‘dusty American car’, as Vaughn watches James and Catherine through his ‘mud-spattered windshield’ (C, 43). Elsewhere, it seems Vaughn’s car cannot appear in the text without the presence of accompanying filth: ‘dusty Lincoln’, ‘unwashed windshield’ (C, 68, 86). The dirt that constantly attaches itself to Vaughn’s Lincoln comes to mark the dangerous and unpredictable character of his obsessions. However, it is the bodily residues that most indelibly mark Vaughn’s car: ‘with mucus from every orifice of the human body’ (C, 111). Vaughn’s brutal obsession with the car crash and the eroticisation of wounds is intimately bound to the residues left on the crashed car: ‘the perverse logic of blood soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue’ (C, 5). Later in the novel, James discovers a ‘black gelatinous material’ that covers ‘the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre’ (C, 129). These ‘gummy residues’, perhaps evidence that Vaughn’s has been actively hitting pedestrians or animals, remark upon the often ambiguous circumstances by which waste material attaches itself to another surface, and by doing so, competes for fresh meaning and significance. To avoid suspicion from the police, Vaughn suggests they clean the car, an act that provokes one of the most ruthlessly powerful scenes of the novel. The episode becomes a ritual in cleansing and defilement, a sardonic automobile-baptism.

James sits passively whilst his wife and Vaughn copulate on the rear seat, giving way to a series of dramatic yet playfully ambiguous juxtapositions: ‘the white soap sluiced across the roof and doors like liquid lace. Behind me, Vaughn’s semen glistened on my wife’s breasts and abdomen. The rollers drummed and battered at the car; the streams of water and soap solution jetted over its now immaculate body’ (C, 134). Elsewhere, Catherine is also described as having ‘immaculate cleanliness’, ‘as if she had reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore’ (C, 89–90). She appears so clean to James, so untainted, that he wonders whether ‘her whole identity was a charade’, leading him to deliberately inspect ‘every orifice’, to find some trace of dirt or filth that will verify her existence (C, 90). The central question is this: is Vaughn’s semen analogous to, or at odds with, the soap that jets across the body of the car? Who, or what, is being cleaned? Semen, here and elsewhere in the novel, is entirely divorced from its generative potential. In a similar episode James and Catherine have sex that is ‘empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue’ (C, 97). Ballard prevents any association in Crash between semen and its common life-giving properties. New associative arrangements are therefore fostered. With the car-wash context in mind, we might question William Miller’s argument that semen is ‘the most polluting of male substances’, its contaminating power rising from its sticky fecundity, misogynist threat of instant feminisation, and a complex process of defilement linked to post-coital shame [10]. Miller’s overtly heterosexual reading of the body’s fluids emphasises the possessive or polluting aspects of the body. In contrast, Crash is decidedly neutral in its response to both bodily fluids and the sexual acts that provoke them; no clues are given to guide our response. We are left guessing as to whether the cleaning of the car is an ironic metaphor for the ethical degeneration of the central characters, or that, by having sex with Vaughn, Catherine is actually being cleansed of her corporeal unreality. However morally ambiguous these passages are, the corporeal residues nevertheless provide provocative and arresting images, the reader is allowed an uncompromising vision of the body’s waste.

By repeatedly commingling the fluids of humans and cars, Ballard achieves a certain hybridity of waste, a union of the organic and synthetic that perfectly encapsulates ‘the nightmare marriage between sex and technology’ [11]. As James and Helen have sex in his car for the second time, the equivocal use of pronouns exaggerates the possibility of this marriage:

The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image if an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of thisderelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant (C, 61)

The key aspect of this passage is the structural position of ‘this derelict vehicle’, the obscure reference to talc, and the fragmented interaction between ‘her’ and ‘my’ that blurs the object of dereliction. Because engine oil and radiator coolant so easily correlate with fluids of the human body (blood and sweat), the themes of sex, technology, and destruction are precisely rendered in a single ambiguous sentence. The commingling of human and technological wastes, becomes the principal image that draws together the novel’s ambitious thematics: ‘[t]he passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, and engine coolant’ (C, 63). In the mixing of fluids, death, sex, the body and the machine become inextricably linked.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

When blood, semen, and vomit are mixed, the novelty of the image dulls our familiar reflexes. The blurring of the organic and inorganic undoes our ability to clearly see the abject material, obscuring the relationship between the wastes of the body and the violent event that produces them. Some have tried to argue that the ‘death of affect’ Ballard’s characters experience is due to a media-drenched Baudrillardian hyper-reality [12]. Although this might explain their apparent affectlessness, it does not fully explain our states and levels of abjection; our responses to a book that is often uncomfortable to read. And yet, several things numb the senses when reading Crash, the most obvious being stylistic. Crash lacks Kristeva’s ‘crying-out theme‘, what she goes on to define as ‘the theme of suffering-horror [that] is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation’ [13]. The repetitiveness of Ballard’s narrative tone, with its endless brothel of images, never reaches this state of hysteria; Crash has, as Luckhurst has noted, a ‘remorseless monologism’ [14]. It is because Ballard’s prose style is so clinical, so obsessively repetitious, and so immersed in the idiom of the scientific, that it fails to conform to Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Moreover, Ballard’s refusal to employ a lurid vernacular idiom places a clinical filter between image and revulsion. It is through this clipped and distant narrative tone that Ballard can allows the body’s waste to be so wholeheartedly examined, as if dissected in an urban operating theatre. Ballard has described his studies in medicine as ‘minutely paring away the skin and muscles and nerves, carrying out this extremely detailed study of what was once a human being’ [15]. In a similar way, he pares down the descriptive flesh of conventional narrative, leaving a disparate littering of waste material. Crash sees Ballard at his most ambiguously provocative. The obsessive descriptions of organic of inorganic waste serve as both a voyeuristic invitation to share in these gruesome fantasies and a warning against the psychologically deranging combination of technology and late capitalist individualism. The novel was always intended as a ‘cautionary tale’ [16], but a cautionary tale to be voyeuristically enjoyed. The moral ambivalence of the narrative, and the explicit commingling of fluids, prevents our full and unreserved revulsion. Crash allows us to view the body’s waste without the distraction of disgust or the perversity of hedonistic acceptance.

Empire of the Sun is a novel of indeterminate ends and beginnings. It inaugurates Ballard’s partially autobiographical account of war-torn Shanghai (continued in The Kindness of Women). As such, it creates the opportunity to map the abandonment, dereliction, and half-empty swimming pools that recur throughout his fiction, marking the psycho-literary genesis of the Ballardian idiom, an enlightened vantage point from which to reread his entire oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

Jim’s confrontation with death is irrevocably intensified by the war. Corpses begin to appear to him as litter, just another object made derelict by bombing: ‘[t]he verges were littered with the debris from the air attacks. Burnt-out trucks and supply wagons lay in ditches, surrounded by the bodies of dead puppet soldiers, the carcasses of horses and water buffalo’ (ES, 291). As the occupation begins, Jim observes: ‘[b]odies of Chinese lay everywhere, hands tied behind their backs in the centre of the road, dumped behind the sandbag emplacements, half-severed heads resting on each other’s shoulders’ (ES, 76). Ballard’s matter-of-fact tone, so reminiscent of Crash, remarks upon the self-evident nature of death: through the eyes of a young boy, death is without mystery or terror.

Jim’s proximity to death has always been a close one; corpses are a regular sight even in peacetime. At the beginning of chapter three, Jim plays on a burial tumulus, peering and poking at the sun-warmed skeletons inside: ‘Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying there in this peaceful field within sight of the aerodrome’ (ES, 29). Jim’s intimacy with the deceased allows his imagination to erode the barrier between the dead and the living; he positions himself within rather than beyond the grave. With ‘the rotting coffins project[ing] from the loose earth like a chest of drawers’ (ES, 29), these re-emerging corpses have an implicitly symmetrical relationship with the novel’s numerous others:

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers.Carried away on one tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront ofShanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city (ES, 41).

Here is a theme that will literally haunt the reader throughout the novel: the uncanny return of the dead. In fact, the novel ends with a vision of inevitable return:

The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud- flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city (ES, 351).

It is as if the dead, like memory itself, have an unpredictable capacity to powerfully revisit the living. In the camp graveyard Jim observes: ‘[h]ere and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts’ (ES, 205–206). Burial is a deeply contingent form of waste disposal; a change of weather conditions is all that needed for the discarded to reannounce their presence. Just as a change of wind can bring an unpleasant smell, so heavy rain can exhume the dead. As long as they refuse to be out of sight, the dead continue to ruthlessly occupy our minds.

The ritual of mourning often involves an intricate process of objectification, once the body has been made object it can be made absent, discarded, making death’s absence complete. This is not done purely for emotional reasons. Just as food waste can become hazardous to one’s health if it is not discarded, so the rotting corpse presents a threat. So when Jim drinks from the river, with the corpse of a Chinese woman only fifty yards away, he ‘[c]autiously, [...] decanted a little water from one palm to the other, then drank quickly so that the germs would have no time to infect him’ (ES, 90). Nevertheless, the corpse also poses a threat to the psychological health of the living. For Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the absolute essence of the polluting abject, the ‘decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic-the corpse represents the fundamental pollution’ [17]. In a similar vein, Françoise Dastur has argued that ‘the corpse occupies a disconcerting intermediate position between persons and things and, on account of its corruptibility, is regarded as a source of pollution’ [18]. If the cadaver is the ‘fundamental’ object of abjection and pollution, then it follows that it must represent a form of fundamental or ‘ultimate’ waste, an act of disposal that maintains both the physical and psychological health of the living.

Flies swarm and buzz about them about the corpses that fill the final chapters of Empire of the Sun, greedily profiting from the lack of organised burial or disposal. As both prophets of and fanfares for the physical presence of death, flies enjoy a structurally integral position in the novel’s unique taxonomy of waste. When Jim first meets the wandering Kamikaze pilot he observes: ‘[t]he flies hovered around the pilot’s mouth, tapping his lips like impatient guests at a banquet [...] the Japanese made no move to brush them away. No doubt he knew that his own life was over .’.. (ES, 280–281). When he meets the pilot for the second time, dead on the riverbank, Jim must see him through a ‘swarm of flies’, one of whom ‘drank from [the pilot's] pupil’ (ES, 339). Counterbalancing this sense of enormous waste, Ballard’s flies are ferocious feeders. The corpses encourage ‘a plague of a thousand glutted flies’, flies who devour the very air (ES, 309, 336). In a scene that undeniably contains echoes of the 10th floor swimming pool in High-Rise, Jim returns to Lunghua camp to discover that ‘a cloud of flies enveloped him [...] Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies piled across the bunks [...] like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse’ (ES, 302). Flies profit from the decay of humans. As detrivores they are dependent upon on our discards: one creatures waste is another’s want, and disturbingly, flies will not let us ‘go to waste’. Our carefully constructed divisions between clean and unclean, waste and want, become sullied under the promiscuous attention of the fly. More than simply disrupting categories of value, flies wield the power to locate waste and, most unsettling of all, the capacity to identify humans as waste. As Steven Connor has written: ‘[f]lies and humans are asymmetrically deterritorializing [...] Flies and humans are each other’s parasite or interference. Each gives the other its unbeing’ [19]. If the human corpse announces a form of ultimate or essential waste in Empire of Sun, then flies, the very species that profit from this waste, constitute a means of conceptualising a form of ‘impossible’ waste. The fly is one of the few species that remains entirely intractable to human mastery or design: ‘for humans, there is no disposing of or dispensing with flies’ [20]. The fly ridden corpse provides a consummate image of human powerlessness, expressing the essential transience of human life; the waste we all become in the Christian burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

IV. Conclusion

As Jim lies in the stadium with Mr Maxted’s corpse, he makes an implicit judgement about exactly when Maxted’s body becomes waste: ‘[l]ong after Mr Maxted had grown cold, Jim had continued to massage his cheeks, keeping away the flies until he was sure that his soul had left him’ (ES, 272). We have already been told that Jim is an amateur soul-spotter, ‘[h]e often watched the eyes of the patients as they died, trying to detect a flash of light when the soul left’ (ES, 207). When Maxted’s body becomes vacant, the flies are permitted to feed. In a profound way, the ‘flash of light’ that announces the moment when Maxted’s body becomes waste resonates with the consequences of the atomic age. The phrase is tellingly repeated when Jim sees the atomic flash from the Nagasaki bomb: ‘a flash of light filled the stadium’ (ES, 276). If a ‘flash of light’ is all that prevents Maxted from becoming waste, then Ballard emphasises how the whole human race teeters dangerously on the brink of absolute destruction, in one flash of light civilisation can be laid waste.

In this way, Empire of the Sun marks the beginning of the atomic era, inaugurating the possibility that the human race can come to a sudden and violent end. With their shared interest in abrupt and unexpected renegotiations of value, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash all share this revelation of potential apocalypse. The minute and the enormous, the antique and the everyday, the built environment and the natural, the organic and the inorganic; Ballard allows every aspect of modernity to be transferred into waste. Ballardian waste is so ubiquitous that what we ordinarily view as secret and hidden becomes the abundantly normal, a permanent feature of our lived environment. Far from being a useless nuisance that we would prefer to discard as our past, the figure and the figuring of waste provides the central metaphor for our present. Ballard’s work stands in the indelible afterglow of the flash, the flash of waste creation that is the very hallmark of our age.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

Endnotes

[1] To avoid confusion between J. G. Ballard the author and James Ballard the central character of Crash, I will refer to the character as ‘James’.

[2] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1975; London: Vintage, 1995), 19. Hereafter, cited in the text as C.

[3] Interestingly, there is an additional sense of abandonment and worthlessness, see ‘Brothel’, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, 2002).

[4] J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: Flamingo, 1997), 262.

[5] See Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 119–50, for an account of Crash‘s place in the long thematic and narratalogical development of Ballard’s fiction.

[6] Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2001; Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004), 67-82.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.

[8] See Henry Gray, Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (1858; Bristol: Paragon, 1998), 546-56.

[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 72.

[10] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 103, 103-104.

[11] J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, Crash, n.p.

[12 For two excellent overviews on the relationship between Ballard and Baudrillard, see: Emma Whiting, ''Abject Literature': Disaffection and abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, ' unpublished essay, 2007; Roger Luckhurst, 'The Angle Between Two Walls': The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

[13] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 141.

[14] Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 123

[15 J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[16] J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109.

[18] Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (1994; London: Althone, 1996), 8.

[19] Steven Connor, Fly, (London: Reaktion, 2006), 182, 183.

[20] Steven Connor, Fly, 183.

Bibliography

Primary

Ballard, J. G. Concrete Island. 1973. London: Vintage, 1994.
—. Crash. 1975. London: Vintage, 1995.
—. Empire of the Sun. 1984. London: Panther, 1985
—. High Rise. 1975. London: Flamingo, 2000.
—. Interview with Melvyn Bragg. The South Bank Show. ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.
—. ‘The Ultimate City’. The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo, 2001.
—. A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Secondary

Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 3-63.

Brigg, Peter. J. G. Ballard. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985.

Connor, Steven. Fly. London: Reaktion, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gaytatari Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. 1966. London: Routledge, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972

Gasiorek, Andrzej. J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

Hawkins, Gay, and Stephen Muecke. ‘Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste’. Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. ix-xxvi.

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 1977. London: Academy, 1989.

Joedike, Jürgen. Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions. Trans. J. C. Plames. London: Pall Mall Press, 1969.

Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. 2001. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004.

Kolnai, Aurel. ‘Disgust’. On Disgust. 1929. Ed. and Trans. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. 29-92.

Kopytoff, Igor. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’ The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 64-91.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. 1980. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Fredrick Engels. Vol.1 .1954; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Luckhurst, Roger. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997.

Rathje, William, and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. 1992. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001.

Rubin, William S. Dada and Surrealist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’. The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. 1998. Abington: Routledge, 2006. 37-57.

Short, Robert. Dada and Surrealism. London: Octopus, 1980.

Scanlan, John. Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New Studies in Aesthetics 37. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Whiting, Emma. ”Abject Literature’: Disaffection and Abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash‘. Unpublished essay, 2007.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

William Viney, © 2007.

I. Waste and Value.

Waste undeniably concerns notions of value and meaning: what is retained and preserved is valued; what is discarded, banished, and abjected is devalued [1]. Waste therefore marks implicit boundaries, articulates dynamic categories, and stratifies objects into orders of value. Yet these orders of meaning and significance are by no means static. Rubbish, refuse and litter are expressions of complex systems in perpetual motion: representing different things, to different people, at different times. This semantic contingency is the product of an aesthetic, economic, biological, and socio-political “discursive constellation” [2] that is forever in flux. The subject of waste requires therefore an interdisciplinary approach. We must adopt a critical apparatus flexible enough to trace the intricately intersecting discursive nodes that generate and maintain value.

Though cultural order and taste might at first appear to be rigid and long established, it in fact requires endless renewal and recreation, re-enacted through individual and collective forces. From a structural anthropologist’s point of view, rubbish is a dynamic social force. For Mary Douglas, it is the clean and orderly that represents the static and immobile, whilst dirt, rubbish, and refuse contain a covert revolutionary potential, harbouring a power to contest the static stability upon which order depends. As Douglas has noted, “[d]irt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment” [3]. Waste or rubbish (synonyms of dirt for Douglas) maintain order, through the binary logic of the devalued Other. Simultaneously, waste contests that order, as it threatens to become a valued object. As this brief theoretical excursion illustrates, the value of waste is far from absolute. The changing values given to objects lend them tumultuous life, making possible a “cultural biography of things” [4]. If we begin to think about J. G. Ballard’s cultural biography of objects, we are immediately struck by his unerring focus on the final chapters, the closing pages that mark the transition into, and out of, the category of ‘waste.’ Even more peculiar, Ballard’s ‘biography’ of things never fully ends, his waste frequently returns as want, merging end and beginning, creation and destruction.

Michael Thompson, one of the earliest theorists of waste, has divided objects into two categories: ‘transient’ objects (e.g. a car) with a finite life span which decrease in value as time progresses; whilst ‘durable’ objects (e.g. antique furniture) have prolonged life spans, and their value increases as time progresses. Our attitude towards an object greatly depends on our ability to place it into one of these categories; our financial energies will be thrown into the conservation (through insurance, maintenance, presentation etc.) of the durable object, whilst we will happily destroy or discard the transient object. Thompson goes on to argue that there is a shadowy and covert third term: ‘rubbish.’ Although a transient object may fall into the ‘rubbish’ (or waste) category it may, by good fortune, fortitude, or human intervention, re-emerge with durable credentials. Waste as a social category of value is therefore intimately bound to fluid transfers of value, a category of flexibility and mutability [5]. Most notable in Ballard’s fiction is the absence of Thompsonian durability, to borrow another phrase from Thompson; Ballard’s world is a “world of transience.” For Ballard, waste registers a process, a cycle, a movement, and system in transition: durability and permanence have no place in a fictional world that revels in the power of waste to negotiate and renegotiate value.

II. Architectures of Waste: High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”

The changing character of the city, and the casual effects these changes have upon the individual and collective psyches of its populace, are powerfully rendered in High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”. All three contain familiar visual landscapes: the high-rise apartment building, the roadside waste ground, the empty Central Business District. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories. Unexpected reversals propel each narrative on unknown trajectories: the brand new high-rise becomes derelict, the waste ground becomes habitable, the abandoned city centre thrives once more. In each case, values and priorities transform themselves, giving way to new orders of social organisation and new systems of commerce. What is considered rubbish finds itself similarly reconfigured, as radical new ecologies of consumption and rejection are tried and tested. Waste hovers at the fringes in a ubiquitous and deeply ambivalent manner, at all times it threatens to upset traditional categories of value. As waste becomes accepted, even loved, Ballard shows how our environment conditions notions of waste, want, and value.

In High-Rise, Ballard questions the bold ambition of high modernist architecture. These building projects implicitly communicate concepts of cleanliness and waste management, furthering a techno-modernist form of social engineering [6]. At the core of post-war redevelopment were notions of reclamation and redevelopment. Progressive ultramodern housing rose from the derelict slums and industrial wastelands. This is a context with which Ballard’s fiction patently interacts:

Together [the apartment blocks] were set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river [...] The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation in the bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation [7].

Dominating the architectural scene of 1960s and 1970s Britain, the Brutalist school confronted inner city decline, bombed-out post-war dereliction, and industrial decline, with a clinical rationalism. As Jürgen Joedike has made clear, the Smithsonian-Brutalist movement privileged ethical and social architectural principles over the aesthetic. Precise geometry, ‘honest’ (i.e. visible) use of materials, and a dedication to the striking ‘image,’ were seen to create buildings both progressive and pure, in function and form [8]. The ultra-rationalist/behaviourist ideals that the Brutalists inherited from architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe meant that the high-rise was intended as a means to cleanse post-war Britain of its social ills, literally cleaning up the neighbourhood through a minimalist economy of space. A utopian relationship with technology fostered a correspondingly technocratic architecture:

for the machine supported present-day cities, only a live, cool, highly controlled, rather impersonal architectural language can deepen that base-connection, make it resonate with culture as a whole [9].

Peter Smithson’s Futurist aesthetic becomes playfully inverted in Ballard’s high-rise. Whilst the building begins as “a huge machine designed to serve [...] a never-failing supply of care and attention” (HR, 10), the ‘machine’ comes to a shuddering collapse, taking with it the moral stability of its residents. The absolute failure of the high-rise permits the exploration of previously repressed psychological phenomenon: tribal violence, sexual promiscuity, and open vandalism.

The high-rise’s aggressive environment encourages a competitive decadence that allows valuable objects to become transformed into waste – shows of wealth, irresponsibility, and indifference gather around acts of disposal. Drinking “a brand of expensive imitation champagne” in the morning, and throwing a full bottle, “still with its wired cork and foil in place,” off the balcony, powerfully demonstrates the violent waste-making of the affluent classes (HR, 11, 12). It is this self-conscious creation of waste that is endlessly paraded throughout the novel. Laing’s mild annoyance towards his inconsiderate neighbours is far less interesting than his decision to dispose of the remnants of the champagne bottle in an identical manner as the revellers above, by throwing it over his balcony’s balustrade. Individual waste becomes socialised, the category of waste is contagious.

Fittingly, Laing’s first altercation with a fellow resident is over a blocked rubbish-disposal chute. He and Steele soon unite however, as they unblock the chute and discuss the peculiar waste disposal habits of the upper floor residents. At this early stage in the novel, the presence of waste is already expressing the transient relations people hold with their refuse:

Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing’s arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. ‘Still no doubt we’re all equally guilty — I hear that the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment door’ (HR, 39).

The telling manipulation of language here suggests a deliberate, perhaps ritualistic, negotiation and renegotiation of waste values, and this merely marks the beginning of what becomes an obsession. Ballard’s incessant cataloguing of rubbish becomes a towering feature of his narrative. A careful balance is struck between waste avoidance (clearing the chute and steering round the beer can) and waste acceptance (parcels of rubbish left in communal spaces), a balance that will steadily break down through the course of the novel. Any quaint delicacy that “small parcels” might suggest becomes obliterated as the rubbish heaps up, inside and outside the building. Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, observes from his top-floor apartment a “sea of rubbish that spread[s] around the building like an enlarging stain” (HR, 76). This spreading sea, for Royal and the reader, is a “visible index of the block’s decline,” a physical measure of “the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion” (HR, 76). At first tolerated, then accepted without acknowledgment, and finally embraced as a truer state of being, the residents’ changing relations with rubbish is an important barometer of social change; a mirror that reflects the collective mental health of the high-rise.

The steady accumulation of rubbish is symptomatic of an eroded boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ The high-rise retains an inexplicable hold upon the psyches of the residents, they reject the outside world entirely. For example, despite growing hardships, Royal observes: “they would not be leaving either the following morning or any other” (HR, 78). He dreams of an architecture with “no possibility of escape” (HR, 81). In their rejection of the outside world, Royal and his fellow residents testify to the success of self-containment. The waste and dirt of the high-rise insulate the residents against an outside that has become increasingly unattractive, detached, unreal. After attempting to go to work and getting only as far as the car park before turning back, Laing realises he will never again try to leave (HR, 104). Coupled with the bizarre psychological control the high-rise holds over its residents, the physical properties of the high-rise means that waste cannot escape either. An architecture that prioritises the vertical over the horizontal means that spatial boundaries are reordered. The high-rise has no discernable centre, or rather, the whole building is a giant centre. Similarly, each apartment has no discernable periphery, the front door simply leads further into the main building. The “small parcels of garbage” left outside the apartment door speak of the contested nature of private space in a high-rise apartment block. With this space contested, the sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become similarly obscured. With a clearly identifiable ‘outside’ lost, the boundary between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ is blurred, complicating the spatial distinctions implicit in ‘throwing things out.’ Even though the residents might try to throw their rubbish off their balconies, Royal still observes waste that appears as a “sea” and a “stain.” Both words express the impossibility of disconnecting the building from its waste: “[a] greasy spray hung across the face of the building, the residue of the cascade of debris now heaved over the side without a care whether the wind would carry it into the apartments below” (HR, 97). Laing tries to clean his flat only to discover that “all he was doing was rearranging the dirt” (HR, 100). With its complication of spatial divides, the high-rise renders waste uncanny – in perpetual circulation, forever threatening to return to sender.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

If waste defines space (and vice versa) through the generation of physical and conceptual boundaries then the sense that refuse has lost its ‘correct’ place registers the renegotiation of these boundaries, and perhaps the renegotiation of waste categories in general. The most intimate and domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and bed, become unexpected rubbish tips. In fact, Laing finds himself in his kitchen bedding down on bags of rubbish:

[H]e realised how derelict it had become. The floor was strewn with debris, scraps of food and empty cans. To his surprise, Laing counted six garbage-sacks — for some reason he had assumed there was only one [...] Reclining against this soft bed of his own waste he felt like going to sleep (HR, 100).

Laing’s indifference to these heaps of rubbish are neither the signs of laziness or the failure of the buildings’ technology, but rather, proof that his values are at a considerable remove from those that prompted him to throw the broken wine bottle off his balcony. His dramatic change in attitude towards waste is “to be welcomed [it] helped to expose a more real vision of himself” (HR, 100). Similarly, Royal observes the unwillingness of his residents to dispose of their sacks of rubbish:

Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attentions of the outside world than from the need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic (HR, 137).

It is difficult to say when exactly our waste ceases to belong to us. The residents believe that by throwing their rubbish over the rails they lose an aspect of themselves. In this sense, when we discard an object we in fact give birth to, or create something, that we can cherish, creatively expressing an aspect of ourselves. Put simply: a truer connection with one’s waste offers a truer sense of the self, a reversal of the unreal disposable society that dominates the metropolis beyond the buildings’ limits. The logical conclusion of this attitude is a richer relationship with one’s own bodily wastes: “the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body” (HR, 107). As will become clear in Concrete Island, Crash, and Empire of the Sun, Ballard uses the body as a site and object of ‘ultimate’ waste — the Alpha and Omega of the discarded. High-Rise has its own peculiar twist on this theme, a twist only fully appreciated if, bizarrely, we go via the swimming pool.

Perhaps the most Ballardian of images, the declining status of the swimming pool is a dependable measure of narrative progress: it provides a flexible and mobile metaphor that leaps from narrative to narrative. Almost all of Ballard’s novels contain a swimming pool in one form or another. In Cocaine Nights the crowded swimming pool is symbol of violent regeneration. The empty pools of Hello America powerfully represent the shortage of water that has left the twentieth century empty and derelict, making Western civilisation seem laughably futile. In Empire of the Sun Jim’s crystal clear pool empties itself at the same rate that the expatriate community are evacuated: ” [t]he water was covered with leaves and dead insects, and the level had fallen by almost three feet, draping a scummy curtain on the sides. Cigarettes ends lay crushed on the white tiles, and a Chinese packet lay under the diving board” [10]. In a subtle way, the refuse that the Chinese soldiers have left suggests a form of colonisation, a politicised reclamation of space through rubbish.

In a more startling correspondence, the changing fortunes of the high-rise and the relative cleanliness of the building’s swimming pools are directly correlated. Apart from the waste disposal-chute incident analysed above, the swimming pool is the original place of conflict in the high-rise, where the separate levels begin to divide themselves into a series of primitive castes. The first incident involves an argument between a cost-accountant from the 17th floor and Mrs Wilder. The cost-accountant accuses Mrs Wilder’s children of repeatedly urinating in the pool. Aside from the comic images this evokes, it sets in motion a spiralling series of additional incidents, culminating in the death of the jeweller. As the children are banished from the sullied swimming pool the lower-levels retaliate by drowning an Afghan hound owned by an upper floor resident. What Ballard terms the “contamina[tion]” and “profanation” of the pool again announces a more specific objective correlative for the psychological health of the high-rise. The pool, like the building as a whole, is already progressing from a space of decadent leisure to one of violent contamination and waste.

The decline of the swimming pool is gradual yet entropic; “a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris” (HR, 75) soon becomes “yellowing water [...] filled with debris, the floor of the shallow end emerging like a beach in a garbage lagoon. A mattress floated among the bottles, surrounded by a swill of cardboard cartons and newspapers” (HR, 88). After this, the 35th floor pool has a lengthy absence until it reappears: “[t]wo bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture” (HR, 159). Both pools have become established unofficial dumps, places where both kitchen waste and human bodies can be discarded with equal ease. This disturbing image acts as a mere prelude to the climactic description of the 10th floor swimming pool:

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust (HR, 170).

This is perhaps the ‘ultimate waste’ generated by the high-rise’s harsh environment. With the Jewish Holocaust as a historical intertext, we are reminded how easily humans can discard one another on an unthinkable scale. True to the earlier observation that, “for all their descent into barbarism, the residents remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse” (HR, 134), the numerous bodies that fill the pool are the systemic waste products of a building, a community, and the individual, in a state of absolute collapse. In a more sinister way, the body pit presents an extension of the unshakeable late-capitalist tendency towards disposability. Ballard’s dystopian vision of architectural modernity suggests a salient and unrelenting feature that transcends seismic social change: the generation of waste.

With the precise details of an autobiography, Concrete Island situates itself very specifically within time (at exactly 3 o’clock April 22nd 1973) and place (six hundred yards from the junction of the Westway and the M4). Richard Maitland’s car tyres explode and send him careering into a forgotten wasteland, setting forth a narrative imbued with the indisputable force of possibility. This piece of derelict land has been created and disremembered, hidden and neglected. Its true origins are made deliberately ambiguous, an ambiguity provoked by Ballard’s enigmatic and exacting style: “a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes” [11]. Whilst the familiar term “traffic island” suggests the immediate designs of motorway planners and municipal bureaucrats, “waste ground” creates a contrary and implicit opposition, a sense of chance and contingency: an incidental systemic by-product of humanity’s need for transportation. This concrete island is not only “sealed off from the world around it by the high embankments on two sides and the wire-mesh fence on its third” (CI, 13), but is also “a forgotten island of rubble and weeds” (CI, 5). With “the world around it,” the waste ground is a non-space, deliberately sealed and excluded from the social and economic norms of the everyday. Yet Ballard’s insistence on the term “island” presents a powerful force of naturalisation, with all the associated notions of colonisation and empire, primitivism and pioneer living. As these brief extracts already suggest, Concrete Island is a novel obsessed with the junctures between the created and the artificial, natural and unnatural, the familiar and unfamiliar, the valued and the discarded.

Compounding an endless flux between binaries is the lingering remnants of the island’s archaeology, which has been described by Andrzej Gasiorek as a “physical palimpsest” [12]. Maitland traces the outline of what was once a Victorian terraced street, discovering the ruins of an abandoned church, graveyard, and print shop, with the littered type of an old letterpress still scattered on the ground (CI, 41, 65). We glimpse traces of the island’s hidden history, a history made archaeology by post-war demolition squads and an emerging desire for high-speed travel. All this Victorian certainty has become waste, both by design and neglect. The durable old world has been replaced by a transient new world. The shifting fortunes of what was once a habitable and thriving environment, stable enough to support a church, print shop, and cinema, gives emphasis to the ephemeral nature of land use and value. An uncertain duality between the created and the forgotten is tirelessly reinstated, Maitland’s environment becomes loaded with both a benevolent domestic potential and a desolate wasted malevolence, and it is between these binaries our traditional valuations of wastelands are wilfully disrupted.

What is so remarkable about the island on which Maitland finds himself is its resistance to straightforward categorisation. By successfully existing as island, waste ground, Victorian ruin, “unofficial municipal dump” (CI, 13), and the home of Jane and Proctor, this space retains a robust semantic multiplicity. If we choose to agree with Ballard’s speculative observation that “this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by exercise of guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust” (CI, 69), then we must also acknowledge its semantic undecidability as an important contributing factor to this persistence [13]. Maitland’s grim assessment of his island as an “abandoned ground,” no more than “meaningless soil” (CI, 32), does not merely express his frustration with being marooned, rather, it communicates his thwarted desire to give his environment meaning; to give this space a proper language, and a proper name.

If Maitland’s island represents a sort of non-space, without unequivocal value, then we should be unsurprised by the catalogues of seemingly formless refuse piled at the island’s boundaries. With these, Ballard gives his 1970s wasteland a sense of impossible borderlands, populated by the miscellaneous and discarded. The following passages are typical:

[a] wire-mesh fence sealed off the triangle of waste ground from the area beyond, which had become an unofficial municipal dump. In the shadows below the concrete span were several derelict furniture vans, a stack of stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse. (CI, 12-13).

No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence (CI, 39).

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

Although both extracts technically describe an area beyond the small triangle ground that Maitland inhabits, this is no less instructive. As the eastern end of the triangle is the only side not lined with a solid, insurmountable motorway embankment, it presents the only viable means to escape, yet Maitland observes a “jungle of refuse” that forms a third embankment, a wall of waste that effectively completes his isolation. Paradoxically, the waste ground is given boundaries through heaps of refuse, but the inherent chaos of these heaps serves only to obscure the islands’ beginning and end. The wire fence can only form a tenuous and explicitly porous screen between the ‘wanted’ and the ‘wasted’; the leaking oil signifies their fragile, if not impossible, division.

Just as discarded objects pile up in Concrete Island, so too does socially discarded people. Richard Maitland, a successful architect, is thrown into a wasteland, perhaps never to escape. Proctor, after injuring himself in the circus, has been made mercilessly unemployed: ” ‘They just threw him out’ ” (CI, 98), whilst Jane, once wealthy, married, and pregnant, has become a drug-using prostitute [14]. It is through the island’s three inhabitants that we are made aware of the fluid movement between success and failure, the harsh downside to a socially mobile population. Ballard describes them as “[t]hree derelicts” (CI, 109), and “outcasts” (CI, 114). Their social identities become fused with the status of the island:

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged (CI, 70).

The island harnesses a powerful ability to fragment, making Maitland wish he could discard the aspects of himself that have become useless: in a similar passage, frustrated with his damaged leg Maitland wishes “he could disconnect” and “throw it away” (CI, 127). In Ballard’s deeply critical manner, Maitland has become fully absorbed into disposable culture; a culture that has made and populated the island, a culture that is predicated on throwing away anything that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. Along with the haunting reminders of Jane’s aborted child, Ballard strikes deep into a society that complacently accepts the human body as a form of waste, as something to be discarded along with the cigarette packets and empty bottles.

Although the pervasive culture of the disposable may shape and populate the island, this should not detract from the fluctuating categories of value that prevents rubbish from becoming an entirely static order of meaning. Instances of scavenging and recycling galvanise Concrete Island’s Crusoe-like ‘survival-narrative,’ connecting the novel to a long history of travel fiction. But unlike the great majority of canonical shipwrecked heroes, Maitland must rely on an artificial and redundant landscape for sustenance. His need to recycle gives great testimony to the dynamic aspects of Thompsonian rubbish theory, a subtle implosion of categories that suggests a continuous renegotiation of value.

The novel’s first instance of recycling occurs where he wrenches off a piece of exhaust piping from his wrecked car to fashion a crude six-foot long crutch. In a peculiar way, his car continues to give him mobility, or rather, it is recycled waste that makes his hobbling exploration of the island possible (CI, 32). No less remarkable are Maitland’s desperate attempts to catch the attention of passing drivers, firstly by setting the car alight to make a beacon, and secondly by using the car’s blackened wiring as writing material (CI, 51, 61). Although he fails to attract anyone’s attention his recycling is nonetheless successful, transforming the wreck into a crutch, a torch, and a pen.

As Maitland establishes himself on the island, the opportunities to utilise its rich resources multiply. Proctor shows him the island’s main food-source, the fly-tipped kitchen waste of a local restaurant:

[A]n amorphous mass of gleaming mucilage which lay in a three-feet-high heap across a stack of tyres. The nearest edge of this sludge-pile was already oozing through the mesh [...] Proctor picked at the slices of wet bread, lumps of fatty meat and vegetable scraps embedded in the greasy avalanche (CI, 128).

This complex (and comparatively rare) use of consonance and assonance indicates a clear intention to shock. Phrases such as “gleaming mucilage,” “sludge-pile,” and “greasy avalanche,” emphasises the decaying viscosity of this “illicit garbage dump” (CI, 128). Yet this fetid feast leaves Maitland profoundly unaffected: “he felt no sense of revulsion” (CI, 128). The episode is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the island a habitable benevolence, with a moderately reliable source of food Maitland’s colonisation becomes possible. Secondly, it illustrates an important revolution in value. The fatty lumps and sodden dregs register the excesses of Western consumerism, at first considered waste, once again finds value in the mess tins of Maitland and Proctor. Finally, it provides a significant example of how powerful emotions of disgust can act as organising principles behind categories of value. William Miller has argued that disgust is an emotion that “ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering” [15]. Therefore, Maitland’s loss of disgust announces a cosmic, or rather, a holistic reordering of value. His rotten heap of food scraps corresponds to what the German phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai has called the “prototype of all disgusting objects”; the sight, smell, or taste of putrification; “the tactile impression of flabbiness, sliminess, pastiness, and indeed anything soft…” [16]. Similarly, Julia Kristeva argues that food loathing is “the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” [17]. But, if we accept that the abjection of objects in part constitutes the Lacanian “I”, where the expelled object affirms and consolidates the formation of the self-becoming subject, then Maitland’s acceptance of waste suggests the reversal of this process, signifying both an unravelling and restructuring of the self. Via the consumption of waste, an emerging identity is therefore articulated. Through the assimilation of previously abject(ed) material Maitland becomes waste, and waste becomes him.

The novel’s powerful depiction of ‘wasted living’ — the domestication of and through waste — finds climactic resolution when Proctor creates Maitland a “pavilion of rust” (CI, 162); a crude house made of the discarded sections of cars. In a deeply ambivalent way, Jane observes: “I can see that you’re a real architect” (CI, 163). Has Maitland achieved a truer sense of ‘reality’? Does a recycled eco-architecture present a viable antidote to the unreal high-rises that dominate the urban skyline? Are Jane’s words a sarcastic commentary on Maitland’s dramatic fall from grace? The presence of waste makes these questions both possible and irresolvable. The fluid transactions between categories of value obscure a critical overview. Critics have often preferred to stress the dystopian aspects of the novel. Gasiorek writes that the island is a “symbol of the waste and destruction modernity leaves in its wake,” Peter Brigg calls the work a “disaster novel,” and Roger Luckhurst writes of the “uncanny wasted margins or ruins of a forgotten twentieth century history” [18]. Ballard’s Concrete Island typically engenders thematically negative readings; nowhere is the novel’s latent utopian content, seen in the regenerative treatment of waste, given an opportunity to redress this imbalance. The tragi-comic ambiguity of Maitland’s fate depends on our acceptance of the island as a viable space in which to live. Should we accept this, as Maitland certainly does, then we must radically reappraise our hierarchies of value and acknowledge the hidden potential to be found in the discarded.

If High-Rise and Concrete Island generate and explore myths of the present, “The Ultimate City” tells a myth of the near future, an exploration of how the future will look upon our present. Raised in the post-industrial ‘Garden City,’ Halloway becomes captivated by the world his parents left behind. Using the flying competition as a thinly veiled excuse, he builds a sailplane and reaches the other side of the sound to explore the metropolis: “an abandoned dream ready to be re-occupied” [19]. He discovers systems of waste built upon an aggressive use of power and materials, an economic unsustainability predicated upon massive overproduction and consumption, only to be abandoned on an equivalent scale. Not only does Halloway reoccupy a wasteland and a derelict high-rise, but an entire metropolis. He re-inhabits a discarded twentieth-century.

The defining contrast of the novella opposes the docile pastoralism of the Garden City on the one hand, and the aggressive petroleum-driven industrialism of the abandoned metropolis on the other. The Garden City’s manufacturers are so exact that “everything [is] so well made that it last[s] for ever” (CSS, 879), what refuse is produced is efficiently recycled. The metropolis is an enormous monument to the culture of the discard, a wasteland strewn with abandoned cars, televisions, washing machines, and other commodities. Through Halloway’s regeneration of the long abandoned city, the narrative asks crucial questions about the material legacies of technologically advanced societies, the transient nature of material culture, and the futile ambitions of Western industrialism. His ability to playfully master the systems of a distant twentieth-century tie into processes of reconciliation and self-exploration, allowing him to come to terms with his insatiable desire for power and waste.

The aptly named Buckmaster, the ageing industrialist Halloway meets in the metropolis, represents the industrial glut of Fordist production. With an emphasis upon disproportionate material accumulation, surplus and excess, Buckmaster describes his golden age:

During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them… [and] … enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robot-assembly kit (CSS, 896).

Ballard gives us a clear sense of the motive and morals of the old world, constantly reflected in the enormous volume of discarded goods: “[i]n the open fields a local manufacturer had dumped what appeared to be a lifetime’s output of washing machines” (CSS, 879); “[t]housands of cars lined the streets, their flamboyant bodywork covered with moss” (CSS, 882). The size of production and consequent abandonment is enigmatically captured in Miranda and Buckmaster’s waste sculptures:

As he stepped down from the pedestrian exit, he noticed that a nearby parking lot had been used as a municipal dump. Old tyres, industrial waste and abandoned appliances lay about in a rusty moraine. Rising from its centre was a pyramid of television sets some sixty feet high, constructed with considerable care and an advanced geometry (CSS, 883-884).

With their direct association with the monuments of ancient civilisations, these heaps of consumer durables hold an arresting power [20]. Although they represent objects drained of use and exchange values and made useless through abandonment, they demonstrate a nostalgically aestheticised form of memorialisation. This is most powerfully demonstrated in Buckmaster’s “cathedral of cars” (CSS, 897), a four hundred foot monument made entirely of cars, and the largest of the city’s pyramids of waste. Halloway observes that this pyramid “resembled a gothic cathedral” (CSS, 895). These physical epitaphs to Western civilisation hold an implicit relationship with Dada, and to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades.’ Like Dada, these towering monuments of rust express a clear rejection of rationalist humanist principles, elevating mundane objects as works of art and debasing works of art to the level of mundane objects [21]. Duchamp argued that his readymades were created to inspire “a reaction of visual indifference [...] a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact, a complete anesthesia” [22]. Of course, the last thing Duchamp’s shock-tactics inspire is critical affectlessness, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) still attract debate. More accurately, Duchamp’s readymades challenge our traditional tools of analysis, obscuring the distinctions between art and the everyday, the aesthetised and the ordinary [23]. Buckmaster’s ‘cathedral’ represents an extension of Duchamp’s Dadaist ideals, generating something far more elaborate than an ‘architecture of waste.’ The pyramid allows a complex network of competing uses and meanings to collide, a nuanced mixture of object d’art, monument, memorial, and deification of waste. Rubbish, rather than the simple by-product of a forgotten economic system, is figured as the very symbolic locus of that system. All this is achieved through the very materials that the monument seeks to celebrate, waste is used to glorify waste. A very specific brand of mise en abime is created, collapsing important interpretative binaries such as the relationship between part and whole, end and beginning, subject and object: the physical and semantic centre of the edifice is therefore rendered disturbingly ambivalent.

The pyramids trigger in Halloway an appreciation for waste that goes far beyond nostalgic mourning, he begins to see the aesthetic desirability of waste. The following extract is arguably one of the novella’s most powerful:

Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of Twentieth-Century industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal-scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from the abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all the plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped into the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic Christmas tree, rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old china-clay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their moss-covered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature’s, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here was no death. (CSS, 915)

Ballard steers us towards a peculiar version of the Kantian sublime: the common flower can no longer hold Halloway’s attention, only a “fierce and wayward” bricolage of waste can provoke his ‘fascination’ and ‘rapture’ [24]. Whereas in High-Rise and Concrete Island rubbish was embraced for typically utilitarian ends (for food, shelter, domination), Halloway’s appreciation of waste operates on primarily aesthetic terms, abstracted beyond a crass division between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It might be tempting to dismiss the final line of this extract as mere Ballardian hyperbole. To do so would be to miss the source of wastes unique aesthetic properties. If a bomb were dropped on La Gioconda it would become worthless, if a bomb were dropped on a rubbish tip its visual nature would be altered, but its value would remain unchanged. The visual attractiveness of industrial waste is one that can never be tarnished — its steady decline is the very source of its arresting beauty.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

ENDNOTES

[1] I believe Ballard’s treatment of waste runs contrary to John Scanlan’s between garbage and the complete absence of meaning and value; see John Scanlan, Garbage, (London: Reaktion, 2005), 97-98, 112. For Ballard, waste lies on a flexible spectrum of value, ever fluid, mutable, and capricious.

[2] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Tavistock, 1972), 66.

[3] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 2

[4] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appaduri (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 64-91.

[5] Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 9-10.

[6] Ballard’s High-Rise is set in 1970s London Docklands, at the very cusp of gentrification which only gathers its full pace in the 1980s. It is commonly believed that the West End grew to be a desirable and exclusive district because it lay up wind of the slums in the east, the colonisation of the East End by the affluent professional classes in High-Rise supposes a solution to this problem; a solution the novel wilfully destroys.

[7] J. G. Ballard, High-Rise, (1975; London: Flamingo, 2000), 8. Hereafter, cited in the text as HR.

[8] Jürgen Joedike, Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions, trans. J. C. Plames, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 110-23.

[9] Peter Smithson, quoted in Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, (1977; London: Academy, 1989), 23.

[10] J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun, (1984; London: Panther, 1985), 62. Hereafter, cited in the text as ES.

[11] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction,” Concrete Island, (1973; London: Vintage, 1994), 11. Hereafter, cited in the text as CI.

[12] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, (Manchester; Manchester UP, 2005), 113.

[13] Scanlan argues that symbolic and linguistic undecideability is an inevitable characteristic of waste. See On Garbage, 11-53.

[14] The fallen fortunes of the islanders are reflected in Ballard’s appropriation of establishment names. ‘Maitland’ may well be a reference to jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland (1850 – 1906), whilst ‘Proctor’ might refer to astronomer and philosopher Richard Anthony Proctor (1837 – 1888). If this is so, then Ballard takes two eminent Victorians, who worked to uphold legal and natural law, and places them at the mercy of the twentieth century.

[15] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 2.

[16] Aurel Kolnai, “Disgust,” On Disgust, ed. and trans. Barry Smith, Carolyn Korsmeyer (1929; Chicago; Open Court, 2004), 51, 52.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (1980; New York; Columbia UP, 1982), 2.

[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, 108, Peter Brigg, J. G. Ballard, (Mercer Island, WA; Starmont House, 1985), 68, Roger Luckhurst. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (Liverpool; Liverpool UP, 1997), 132.

[19] J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City,” The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 876. Hereafter, cited in the text as CSS.

[20] New York’s ‘Fresh Kill’ landfill site towers at 505ft tall and 2.8 by 3.8 miles diameter; twenty-five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Ballard’s pyramids of waste are therefore closer to reality than they at first appear. For more on Fresh Kill see William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992; Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001), 3-9.

[21] For an overview of the many different varieties of Dadaism, see Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus, 1980), 7-52.

[22] Marcel Duchamp, quoted in William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 37.

[23] See Scanlan, On Garbage, 89-115. Although Scanlan ignores the excess of meaning Duchamp’s aesthetics of waste inspires, he nevertheless is right in noting that the use of rubbish by Duchamp is fundamental to an art that “has no objective meaning” 96.

[24] Dylan Trigg has written that an encounter with decaying modern buildings prompts an experience of the “post-industrial sublime,” proving “reason to be fictitious.” See The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, New Studies in Aesthetics 37 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 141-153.

Image by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez.

The influence of BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh is spreading far and wide, so much so he is now featuring in a personality profile (disguised as a walking tour) in the Los Angeles Times in which the colour of his hair is discussed! Luckily, the writer, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, leaves space for Geoff’s thoughts, which as always are impressively concise, intelligent and jargon-free:

And that means he thinks of L.A. as a historical place?

“Yes! Not in the human history sense but in the sheer sense of Earth time. And as dumb as that may sound, I feel that you can actually see it — you can see it in the species of trees and in the natural landscape. In the Grove, for example, where the shops have methane meters, because gas is leaking out of the tar deposits.”

We walk back toward his apartment, along surprisingly crowded sidewalks and past a hulking SUV with a license plate reading “00 MPG.” We pause at the intersection of Washington and Keystone. At the northeast corner sits a collection of building-sized satellite dishes, crammed like huge barnacles on a small pier. They are responsible, Manaugh says, for sending most of Sony’s programming to China. He turns in the direction of his apartment building.

“They send the signals basically in this direction, so the whole time we’ve been living here there’s been this constant stream of movies and TV shows going above our heads as we sleep, across the Pacific.”

Also, check out Geoff’s recent BLDGBLOG post on ‘Climate Change Escapism’, which looks at artists’ renditions of a drowned Spain exposed to climate change, as commissioned by Greenpeace. Far from seeing these as the warning they are intended to be, Geoff sees a Ballardian, transcendental beauty:

What we see is a world transformed, made unearthly, like something from a J.G. Ballard novel. Where there once was a pristine beach, the sea has returned, giving us modern ruins: sandbars in the lobbies of hotels, tide pools accumulating on the boardwalks of towns you didn’t like in the first place. What appear to be coral reefs are the underwater remains of marinas. What look like atolls are lost subdivisions, or banks at the bottom of the sea.

[Geoff includes a quote from Ballard's The Drowned World here]

Lush, science fictional, Romantic: apparently this is the future of climate change.

My point in saying all this is simply that these images don’t shock; they’re more like posters for tomorrow’s specialty tourism firms.

Fabulous stuff. We need Geoff back here on Ballardian.com to deliver more of these funhouse-mirror-image world views. Especially with killer blows like this:

Only half-jokingly, I might even suggest that the real way to scare people about climate change – assuming that fear is the correct tactic to use here – is not through referring to landscape at all, but through threats involving 1) sex and 2) children.

All that pollution… so much carbon in the atmosphere… dirty water, social unrest, lack of food…

Well, your prostate will swell with metal and your kids will all drown.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh

Back in July, the always-excellent things magazine reported the existence of ‘The Suburban Emergency Management Project, always on the lookout for some major Ballardian catastrophe’. SEMP’s mission statement is to provide ‘a full spectrum of resources to support any community organization that provides or manages disaster-related services. SEMP publications include Securitas Magazine and Biot Reports (each free), SEMP Academy educational programs, disaster management consulting and custom education, and SEMP books, including the award-winning The First 72Hours: A Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness. SEMP’s mission is to help professionals, educators, students, the media, and volunteers achieve peak performance providing community-based disaster services.’

Now, in a symbiotic twist, SEMP featured the dictionary definition of ‘Ballardian’ in a recent newsletter (scroll down, to the left).

Image from Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World (courtesy Victorian College of the Arts).

Still in Melbourne, I somehow missed this last year (think I may have been O/S at the time) but it’s worth recording as yet another excellent example of Ballard’s spreading influence in the visual arts.

There’s one apparent error, though — as far as I know Drowned World was written in the early 60s, not ‘the 50s’…

From the ABC website:

Julie Copeland: Welcome to Exhibit A. Today it’s the Melbourne-based artist Jon Cattapan whose work is currently showing in his home town at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. In between teaching and lecturing on drawing and painting, plus overseas artist residencies and exhibitions, for the past three decades Jon Cattapan has been preoccupied with visions of the city, not so much the energy and excitement of the metropolis but rather the influence of JG Ballard’s apocalyptic fiction or movies like Blade Runner. That’s led to his large, dark paintings in which skeins of light trail over what look like submerged ghostly cities, lights glowing beneath blues and reds viewed from above, as from an aeroplane at night. And you may be intrigued, as I was, by the title of Jon Cattapan’s current exhibition, The Drowned World.

Jon Cattapan: I suppose it’s got two points of genesis. The first is that it came from a body of work I started in the early 90s which has become known as the City Submerged and that body of work came about literally because I was thinking very much about the idea of the city as a place that was deluged with information. So it was the start of that framework that’s been in my work for some time. The second genesis of the title is that I’m a complete JG Ballard nut, and the curator has known that and he also is a very big fan, and Ballard’s book The Drowned World actually…it was for me a fairly seminal text in a lot of ways and it pinpoints a lot of the ideas that I’m kind of interested in.

Julie Copeland: What are those ideas in Ballard’s book?

Jon Cattapan: The Drowned World essentially speaks about a world that has warmed up a lot, a world that has water levels rising everywhere…

Julie Copeland: So it is literally physically drowning in water.

Jon Cattapan: Yes, that right, a world where life has become much less precious, a world where fuel is at a premium. Is this all sounding familiar?

Julie Copeland: Painfully so.

Jon Cattapan: So this book was written in the 50s. He is an acute kind of intellect for the 20th century and I think that a lot of his work prefigures stuff that’s happening now in the early 21st century.

Julie Copeland: Well, he’s very anxious about the future in his work. I mean, it’s quite a bleak, pessimistic view of the future, his writing, and I suppose that applies to some of your work too. There certainly is the anxiety about…well, some of the elements you’ve just mentioned.

Jon Cattapan: There has been a sense of…for want of a better word, the darker side of things in my work. I don’t think that that’s all it’s about obviously. I mean, I try to make things that are visually interesting or beautiful even, if you like. That’s actually paramount because ultimately I’m interested in seducing the viewer into looking for as long as possible. But I do think it’s important to not necessarily present a report card of your time, but it’s good to be a part of what you live through and to maybe spin off from what you’re living in so that you, in a sense, bear witness, but in a very personalised and very subjective, sometimes poetic sort of a way. That appeals to me a lot. I think that’s a function that art can still do very, very well.

Life imitates Ballard, forces him out of own house:

‘In 1962 JG Ballard wrote The Drowned World, a fictional account of a flooded London, “a garbage filled swamp”. This week London has been under flood alert, with the water full of human sewage and bacteria. Coincidentally, Ballard’s own street in Shepperton is under threat, and the Environmental Agency has been advising residents to prepare for possible evacuation.’

From the popbitch mailout.”

Bizarrely, at the start of the year I outlined a potential scenario, using ‘dynamic flood maps’, predicting that if sea levels rose, Ballard’s Shepperton would be swamped.

Some of the following news is a little old; forgive me. I’m catching up on the last few weeks, after all. If there’s anything I’ve missed, please contact me.

UPDATE: passport located; and me, homeward-bound.

——————————————————————————————
+ BUT ISN’T IT JUST A NOVEL ABOUT WANKING?

Inspired by Alistair Cormack’s talk, ‘The Unlimited Dream Company: Blake and Ballard’, at the JGB conference, Mike Holliday has onlined ‘A Home and A Grave’, explaining how to read UDC, one of Ballard’s most ignored works, as a fascistic novel. Along the way, Mike offers up an intriguing match, suggesting that the ‘way in which [UDC's narrator] Blake wants to take the very existence of Shepperton’s inhabitants into himself is rather reminiscent of another, more notorious, fantasy novel – Lord Horror’:

…the transcendence that Blake offers up in The Unlimited Dream Company is as empty as that suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer or as portrayed in Lord Horror … all we are left with are vague phrases and the promise of the ending of all differentiation and individualization, a process which can only result in the annihilation of everything: “the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead”.

Now, who among us will dare to rehabilitate The Day of Creation or Rushing to Paradise? (actually, I’m working on the latter).

——————————————————————————————
+ ULTRA-MAN

Speaking of the conference, k-punk posted a riposte to the perceived ‘feel-good’ vibe of that event. He found it ‘dispiriting’, apparently because of its focus on Ballard’s ‘exhausted novels’ and a desire to celebrate JGB’s work. k-punk suggests that the latter is especially pointless, given that he sees Ballard as already ‘ultra-canonic’ for ‘any group that matters’ (although virtually every entry in the list of cultural nodes he provides as evidence features k-p at the centre or orbiting near by).

——————————————————————————————
+ HEAD TO THE SOUTH

Still from Silent Running.

Dan Lockton Dan Hill has done it again with another superb post, this time meditating on James Birrell’s ‘Brutalist-lite’ architecture at the University of Queensland campus and the ‘rampant sub-tropical foliage engulfing it’. Mouth watering — he ties in one of my very favourite SF films, Silent Running, as well as The Drowned World before motoring on to the crux of his argument:

Australia seems poised at this junction right now, beginning to explore new and old ways of dealing with its water supply, from divining, to not-building dams – “a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems” – to finally recycling.
…
How to reconcile urban development with climate change? How to build a sub-tropical architecture that adapts to the environment? How to use dangerous environmental conditions to the benefit of a nation, a culture, a people?
…
Like Ballard’s hero, head to the south, into the sun, to find the future. It’s counter-intuitive, but it might just work

(For my own musings on a Ballard-refracted vision of Australia, see ‘The Drought: Water Vigliantes’ and ‘The Rats that Ate Mill Park’).

——————————————————————————————
+ BLDGBOOK

Another fine archi blog, the one and only BLDGBLOG, announces a publishing deal for a ‘book of the blog’ that will include two subjects very dear to my heart: Ballard and micronations. Congratulations, Geoff.

——————————————————————————————
+ CHUCK SOUNDS OFF

Chuck Palahniuk disses Ballard in a recent interview:

MT: Were you inspired by J.G. Ballard?

Palahniuk: The Crash book, you mean? Not really. I mean, God bless J.G. Ballard, but that whole ponderous eroticism of car crashes? You know, the idea of putting a hood ornament in Elizabeth Taylor’s pussy and all of that, I thought that was just too much.

[ thanks, Tim ]

Dunno about you, but to me, Palahniuk’s blatant misreading of Ballard’s intentions (violating Liz; there’s nothing of the sort in Crash, not even remotely) seems nothing more than a rebellious kid telling lies about Dad, when deep down the kid knows Dad has influenced him more than anyone will — or can — ever know. The other thing to note is that Palahniuk wrote a short story, ‘Guts’, in which the narrator has his colon sucked out of his anus by a pool pump — all described in clinical detail. Many people found *that* too much.

——————————————————————————————
+ SECHERESSE

The French edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, looking more like an early Kraftwerk album cover.

Herve Lagoguey has put together a comprehensive gallery of French Ballard cover art. We await the two Ricks verdict on these.

(For more JGB cover art, see Ballardian’s interview with Rick McGrath and our reprint of Rick Poynor’s ‘Collapsing Bulkheads’ article.)

——————————————————————————————
+ GRAVEST HITS

From the latest RE/Search newsletter:

Dominika Oramus sent us her disturbing, intelligent book: Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, published by Univesity of Warsaw. For a copy write DORAMUS ul OSTROBRAMSKA, 84 m 129, 04-163 Warssawa, Poland. (I’m not sure how to send payment, or what the total cost is.)

——————————————————————————————
+ AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…

Still from Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, let’s hear from the man himself, this time in Ballard’s ‘review’ of the Dali & Film exhibition at the Tate Modern (although there are no new revelations, Ballard instead relying on familiar riffs; k-punk’s ‘exhausted texts’ assessment is useful here):

[In Un Chien Andalou] there are no clues to behaviour. Ants pour from a hole in the young man’s palm. Rebuffed, he puts on a curious harness and drags towards the young woman a huge contraption consisting of two priests lying on their backs, tied to a grand piano across which is draped a dead donkey. What comes through this 15-minute film is the feeling that it would all make sense if its scenes were assembled in the right order. But of course it would not make sense, whatever the order, and I take this to be the point of the film. The reality we inhabit daily, our domestic interiors and their emotional dramas, the hands helplessly caressing a young woman’s breasts, the tennis racket she uses to drive away her unwanted suitor (the surrealists were intensely middle class), the small section of space-time we blunder through, are all equally unreal, though meaning and sanity seem tantalisingly within our grasp.

——————————————————————————————
J.G. Ballard. ‘Shock and gore’, The Guardian, Saturday May 26, 2007.
——————————————————————————————

Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor against the eminently bombable backdrop of the Tate Modern; excavating the strata of the late 20th century with Jo Murray amid the lush, green undergrowth that lines the scabby underbelly of the M3 motorway; wandering the terminal sands that sheath the haunted and forgotten seaside zone of Grays Beach; getting lost in the forest and coastal paths of the Isle of Wight with my two brothers, as we searched high and low in the pitch black for the dinghy we had beached that would take us back to the safety of our boat. We stumbled upon a hidden community of nocturnal fisherfolk replete with high-powered torches for eyes and a string of gadgets blinking in the dark from the tips of their enormous rods like cosmic antennae…

But I’ve been too pushed for time to write it all up, as I’ve had some pressing family matters to engage with — the English portion of the Sellars clan is not one I get to interact with much, so I’m making the most of it. I used to have no trouble writing travel blogs on the go, but this time round it seems to have eluded me. Even writing this short entry is highly pressurised, as I must awake in 5 hours 3 hours at the crack of dawn to catch a fishing boat to Sealand, where I’ll be spending a day and a night in a considerable state of isolation. On my return it’s London for a couple of days, probably visiting old Brixtonian haunts, before hopefully visiting the sound mirrors in Kent. The following weekend I’m in Dubai and then I’m pootling off home to Melbourne, where I’ll be writing this trip up in all its glory.

I’ve let intuition guide me when taking photos and have been flabbergasted to discover that there are very few shots of people. Instead, industrial wrecks and new, machine-tooled monuments have dominated, like the old, semi-submerged pier in Brighton, the M3 in Shepperton, and the new lock in Cardiff, with its markings resolving themselves in op-art style allusions.

I know what’s happening, here. I watched Children of Men for the first time on the plane over from Melbourne and was deeply shocked and disturbed by its bleak view of a sparsely populated, near-future, anarchic Britain. That unnerving film has filtered my vision steel-grey every time I’ve looked through my camera lens: I’m finding resonance everywhere I move.

(I also hope to see 28 Weeks Later before I leave — God only knows what *that* will do to me.)

But all that’s to be expanded upon in future posts. I hope you’ll stay tuned for another week or so while I gather my senses and marshall my thoughts and attempt to make sense of this journey into inner space.

Until then, ‘Chant chant love war fear hate… Out of control – mob running wild / All you ever get is all you steal / Side of London that the tourists never see / Angle ambience’ (PiL, ‘Chant’, 1979).

Here’s an excerpt from the BBC documentary, The Martians and Us, focusing on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. It features Ballard cheer from Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Will Self, Roger Luckhurst, Brian Stableford and John Sutherland.

[ thanks, Pedro ]

Check out these flood maps — dynamic maps predicting sea-level rise around the globe (found via Dissensus).

First, adjust the rising sea level to +14m.

Then focus on London.

Now zoom into Shepperton.

Result: a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Shepperton-based author of The Drowned World.

Here in Victoria we’re undergoing a severe drought; heavy water restrictions are in force and things are projected to get much worse.

A sign of the times is the appearance of “water vigilantes”, as reported in the Age newspaper:

MARGARET Norriss is living in fear. The retired teacher is so scared of the emergence of water vigilantes that she doesn’t dare hose her front garden, even though she has been using a rainwater tank for the past nine years. “The whole thing is turning the community against one another,” Ms Norriss told The Sunday Age. “It’s becoming like Big Brother and I’m starting to feel very uncomfortable.”
…
She is not alone. Garden envy is rife and threatening to spill over to open hostility as the State Government asks the community to anonymously “dob in a water cheat”. Monash University academic David Dunstan fears the growing hysteria about water is threatening our sense of community as “neighbour is pitted against neighbour”.
…
Like an increasing number of Melburnians, Ms Norriss is terrified of being wrongly accused of breaking the new water restrictions. Terrified at the thought of a knock on the door from the “water police”. She has hung a sign on her front fence declaring only non-town water is in use. But that hasn’t stopped the abuse and glares of people as they slow to pass her Northcote home.”

Anyone who’s read Ballard’s Drought will surely notice the chilling parallel with the book’s Reverend Johnstone and his tub-thumping militia. Of Johnstone, Ballard writes:

By a strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.
…
Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can’t buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’ “

As we swelter down under, I’ll keep you informed as to whether the remainder of the Australian summer follows the prophecy outlined in the rest of Ballard’s book.

OPENING LINE:
“The dust came first.”

From the Penguin edition, 1976:

The wind came from nowhere … a super-hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers – where they turned against each other in their desperate struggle to survive …”

The Wind From Nowhere (1961) is JG Ballard’s first novel, not that you’d know it from official JGB bibliographies, where it’s never mentioned, or in interviews, where Ballard continues to assert that The Drowned World was his first book.

The wind from nowhere has gone back to nowhere.

In a 1975 interview with David Pringle, Ballard says: “I don’t see my fiction as being disaster-oriented, certainly not most of my SF – apart from The Wind from Nowhere which is just a piece of hackwork. The others, which are reasonably serious, are not disaster stories.”

The book does contain some ‘empty symbolism’, and the characters sometimes articulate overlong expositions, all a bit jarring from an author who was to bloom into the master of sparse, laser-sharp, all-killer-no-filler writing.

Still, it *is* Ballard; all the classic archetypes are in place, if a little sketchily (except for the ‘Vaughan’ figure) — the bitch-as-catalyst, especially — and it does have what must be the first truly classic JGB quote, one that ranks with the pearls collected in Vale’s RE/Search book, a quote that both presages future events and qualifies current ones.

A JGB ‘soundbite’ as Mr Pringle calls them… On p112 of my Penguin edition, Ballard writes: “Remember, it’s not enough to make history ­– you’ve got to arrange for someone to record it for you.”

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Ben Jeapes, one of the very few essays on the web regarding this ‘idiot offspring’ of JGB’s:

The seeds of what have since become traditional Ballard themes are all there, of course. Civilisation collapses, a handful of weirdos … no, not weirdos. These are real, everyday people. They either try and do something about keeping society going or they lie low and wait for it to go away — both sensible, believable actions.”

Here’s another review excerpt, from Strange Words:

That undefinable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work is here, around the edges, pushing away at our perceptions. While not partaking of the extreme ideas of The Crystal World, the obsession of The Day of Creation, or the fatal ennui of The Drowned World, there is that strange taste at the back of the mouth that is Ballard.
…
You don’t need a weatherman to know that a Ballard wind is blowing. In some ways, a lesser Ballard effort. But one can almost sense Ballard ringing out the old, making way for the strange and terrible world he would soon construct.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Wind from Nowhere is now a wind from somewhere
+ ‘Enigmatic Engineering’ in The Wind from Nowhere
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland…’

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Soon it would be too hot.”

From Amazon UK:

In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.”

On the back of my 1974 Penguin edition, there’s no blurb, simply this:

Ballard is one of the brightest new stars in post-war fiction. This tale of strange and terrible adventures in a world of steaming jungles has an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad (Kingsley Amis).”

The Drowned World’s relevance endures, as Umberto Rossi demonstrates with his comparison of urban landscapes in Drowned and Hello America:

J.G. Ballard has dealt at least twice with the apocalyptic image of the Dead City. This somewhat disturbing landscape is the background of his novels The Drowned World and Hello America. The two mark different points on the axis of time—namely, 1962 and 1979, respectively—cutting a segment on the line of Ballard’s evolution as a writer, but also defining a period of literary history during which many significant events took place, both inside and outside SF. Between 1962 and 1979 Ballard wrote important works such as The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and The Crystal World; SF literature “came of age” thanks to P.K. Dick, K.W. Jeter, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Brian Aldiss; and, as for North American literature, the postmodernist wave reached its zenith.”

On the other side of the coin, Justina Robinson takes Ballard to task for those old bugbears: characters as cyphers, and stylisation over emotion…

…stylisation continues throughout all the personal action in the book; a kind of old code, which to my modern eyes seems almost quaintly peculiar… A final criticism would be that the characters are all too much like ciphers acting out symbolic roles, and not sufficiently humanised to ring entirely true. Their remove from the reader and from each other, finally makes the entire story seem as though it’s been viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.”

Although she does end with this:

As a whole…this book deserves its place on the masterworks’ shelf and in the history of SF and literature. It shows, even from thirty-seven years ago, that artistic and literary aspirations could be brought together with SF ideas in a seamless whole…it’s worth reading for the sheer pleasure that the scenes of opulence and decay can provide, and in the wonder of the drowned world images that Ballard was able to completely master.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ BBC Radio 7 adapts Drowned World
+ Flooded London
+ Munich Round-Up: An Interview with JG Ballard
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.”

Ballard’s third novel was originally published in the US in 1964 as The Burning World, but is now more commonly known as The Drought, the name it was given for its initial UK publication in 1965. Strange Words has an intriguing summation of the book’s themes:

The Burning World is the tale of the long season. More specifically, it is a story of the timeless moment between the seasons, between end and the beginning of the cycle. It is the season of Shiva, whose eye opens and destroys the world in fire. And then it all begins again …

The Ballardian chronomania of The Burning World is the end of time. People rush like lemmings to a sea that can supply them no succor, and have their individuality destroyed in an endless string of small, desperate communities which are riven by blood feuds over the stuff of survival. They trap what small bits of the tidal flux that they can, to distill water and catch whatever meager food swims with it. Ransom, the ambiguous protagonist, sees the beach people as dehumanized things, as if cloned by a “cancerous division of time”, in a purgatory of beach limbo, desperate shantytowns where people are waiting around to die.”

The blurb on my 1968 Penguin edition is typeset like a poem and features the immortal line ‘Idiots reign’. Someone was taking themselves a bit too seriously, here…

Rain is a thing of the
past. Radio-active
waste has stopped the
sea evaporating.

The sun beats down on
the parching earth, and on the parching
spirit of man. A warped new humankind
is bred out of the dead land – bitter,
murderous, its values turned upside down.

Idiots reign. Water
replaces currency and becomes the source
of a bleak new evil…

If it ever happened,
it could be very like this.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
” ‘Save the albatross! Stop nuclear testing now!’ “.

From the 1994 Picador edition:

Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wins control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community. Breeding other threatened species and among themselves, these homesteaders slowly transform an Eden of their own into a much darker place. A savage send up of environmentalism, feminism, and extremism of all sorts, Rushing to Paradise is also a brave new exploration of that strange territory J.G. Ballard has illuminated over the course of his career: the twentieth century.”

A much-maligned work, Rushing to Paradise nevertheless has its adherents. Marcus Moure wrote an impassioned review for Spike Magazine, calling it a “cross between Greenpeace-gone-black and Golding’s Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s most powerful novel in years, a terrifying, all-too-real “what if.” Which is exactly what Ballard does best, what-iffing Armageddon-like possibilities in this paradise we call Earth.”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Gro