Advertiser’s Announcement: ‘Sex: Inner Space: J.G. Ballard’. Ambit no. 33, 1967.

Better Living through Psychopathology
Benjamin Noys (2009)

Presentation at at ‘The Future’, David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London (5 November 2009).

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

From the original Doubleday edition, Michael Foreman’s artwork for an Atrocity Exhibition chapter, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films [consulted 16 April 2009].

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

Adam McEwen. Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage. Approximately: 137 13/16 x 118 1/8 x 71 11/16 inches (350 x 300 x 182 cm).

JG Ballard’s writing has a strong connection to visual art, from surrealism to Pop. It informed his work and led to him befriending some of the leading artists of his time, while in turn his work has been an influence on today’s crop. The Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard at the London Gagosian attempts to represent these diverse strands. It’s a timely exhibition, organised in the wake of Ballard’s death but a long time coming given his growing influence over the last few years. Works have been sourced to the best abilities of a private if respected gallery, explaining a haphazard exhibition that, although at times stretching the definition of its remit, always holds interest.

The first item on entrance is Adam McEwen’s “Honda Teen Facial”, an imposing Boeing 747 undercarriage that summons half-remembered, grainy footage of the Lockerbie bombing, or more appropriately Ballard’s short story The Air Disaster. McEwen’s aims are ambiguous. In an aerospace museum, this piece would mean something quite different, but in connection with Ballard it can only mean violence and death. This simple juxtaposition, summoning connections that aren’t necessarily there, is reminiscent of some of Ballard’s earlier writing and was also a mainstay of the surrealists, some of whose work is in an easily-missed room to the left.

Hans Bellmer. Story of the Eye, 1946. Etching, red ink and pencil on paper. 12 x 9 3/4 inches (30.5 x 24.8 cm).

John Currin. Rotterdam, 2006. Oil on canvas. 28 x 36 inches (71.1 x 91.4 cm).

Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Hans Bellmer are represented, each with rather underwhelming works that belie the Gagosian’s limited pulling power. Dali’s pencil drawing of a head with a lobster holding a sewing machine on top is self-derivative as only Dali can be. Unsurprisingly, Bellmer’s drawings exhibit a twisted sexuality that is cringeworthy yet fascinating. His illustration for Bataille’s The Story of the Eye (itself a work of displaced sexuality with obvious Ballardian resonances) depicts the pucker of a lady’s anus, acting like a magnet to the eye. While Ballard’s love of surrealism excuses Bellmer, John Currin’s “Rotterdam”, a contemporary painting of a sex act copied from a pornographic magazine, is not only irrelevant but misrepresentative, suggesting the curators have taken inspiration from false media imagery surrounding the author.

Detail from Ballard’s “Project for a new novel” (1958).

There is a suggestion that this odd little room is meant to be a look into Ballard’s psyche, and one of the most interesting works is the writer’s own “Project for a New Novel”, a collage of photocopies from the pages of Chemistry and Industry magazine, where Ballard worked briefly after leaving Cambridge University. The yellowed pieces of text deserve academic scrutiny but fall short compared to the more rounded works around them. They feel unfinished, a prototype for later work, which in a way, of course, they are. Next to them is a simple Man Ray photograph of a woman, different from his more famous manipulated precursors of filmic special effects. The photo is uncanny in its similarity to an often reproduced photo of Ballard’s dead wife Helen. Perhaps I’m also making unnecessary juxtapositions, but it is an otherwise baffling edition to the exhibition, though quite possibly the only Man Ray the curator could get hold of.

LEFT: Chris Foss’s artwork for the cover of Ballard’s Crash (Panther, 1975). RIGHT: Dinos & Jake Chapman. Bang, Wallop. By J and D Ballard, 2010. Book: 7 3/4 x 5 x 3/4 inches (19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm.

LEFT: Louis Gréaud. The Future, 2009. Oil on canvas. 57 x 41 inches framed (145 x 104 cm).

Other rooms aren’t as themed, revealing an eclectic and extensive exhibition that can be hard to take in, with its almost random sensory overload. Some of the least successful works are the ones most obviously inspired by Ballard. Loris Gréaud’s “The Future” is a canvas displaying painted text of Ballard’s famous equation “sex x technology = the future”, along with a reproduction of his signature. It is an uninteresting work that buys into Ballard’s cachet with little effort. Another piece of text painted onto a canvas, Ed Ruscha’s “Fountain of Crystal”, which reads “A Fountain of Spraying Crystal Erupted Around Them” vies with it for blandness. The Chapman Brothers’ manipulated Ballard texts, “Bang, Wallop. By J&D Ballard”, a stack of fake paperback books on sale for a tempting but ultimately mercenary 25 quid, at least inject a bit of disrespectful humour, despite a familiar shallowness of thought. Who knows, though — maybe there is something hidden in their exhausting pages of random sentences.

Of the famous contemporary British artists on display, the divisive Damien Hirst is most successful. “When Logics Die”, a metal table covered in surgical instruments overlooked by glossy photographs of medical procedures, is both a nod to Ballard’s experiences as a medical student and a simplified expression of the connection between technology and flesh that Ballard found so philosophically interesting and that Hirst finds so rewarding visually. Turner Prize runner up Roger Hiorn is represented by an engine coated in his trademark copper sulphate crystals, which inevitably reminds of the more famous “Seizure”, an entire council flat given the same treatment.

Paul McCarthy. Mechanical Pig, 2003-2005. Silicone, platinum, fiberglass, metal and electrical components 40 x 58 x 62 inches (101.6 x 147.3 x 157.5 cm).

Works with an, at-best, tangential connection to Ballard stand out, foremost being Paul McCarthy’s “Mechanical Pig”, an astonishingly life-like plastic sow cruelly wired up to machinery, twitching and heaving in a tortured coma. This freakshow attraction goes beyond sensationalism to bring us face to face with our mechanised use of livestock, and is a great example of contemporary art’s relationship with impact advertising. I was mesmerised by its laboured breaths, each one threatening to be its last. In the same room, a strange, ramshackle structure of untreated timber and plywood juts from a wall. Accessed through an innocuous but incongruously aged door in the adjacent room, Mike Nelson’s “Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon)” is a replica of a public room, a theatre lobby perhaps, its expert, dusty detail indistinguishable from the forgotten spaces it draws inspiration from. Like German artist Gregor Schneider, who creates replicas of the anonymous cellars of his suburban childhood, Nelson’s installation is eerie and unsettling. The familiar is made unfamiliar and we are inevitably reminded of fiction, ghost stories and horror films, finishing Nelson’s artwork ourselves.

Mike Nelson. Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon), 2004. Film booth. Dimensions variable.

These two works are the most immediate in the exhibition and rightly stand out, but Crash’s real triumph is the handful of pieces that marry both a deep, unequivocal connection with Ballard and artistic brilliance. Inevitably some are by well-known names, but there are a couple of surprises. Easily missed is Malcolm Morley’s “The Age of Catastrophe”, an oil painting of a sunny, Mediterranean harbour overlaid by a plummeting aeroplane and a submarine suspended from an abstract frame. Chaotic and complex, the painting’s creation date of 1976 is important, suggesting a fascination with WWII’s long-lasting, violent psychological presence — familiar to any reader of Ballard.

Tacita Dean. Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard), 1999. Color photograph. 44 1/8 x 51 3/16 inches framed (112 x 130 cm).

Dan Holdsworth. Untitled (Autopia), 1998. Chromogenic print. Diptych: 41 7/8 x 52 3/16 inches each (106.5 x 132.6 cm).

Photography is well represented. Tacita Dean’s “Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (Ballard)”, where an abandoned scientific concrete structure barely reveals itself through lush trees, provides a perfect visual accompaniment to Concrete Island or Rushing to Paradise. Dan Holdsworth’s photos of empty, night-time motorways directly and effectively channel one of Ballard’s most familiar obsessions. But it is the in moving image that Ballard’s vision really comes to life. Jane and Louise Wilson’s DVD installation, “Proton, Energy, Blizzard”, with its footage of a rusting and seemingly abandoned Soviet rocket installation that nevertheless clanks and hums with mechanical life, is an hypnotic film that posits an answer to the perplexing problem of translating Ballard’s work to film. Stripped of narrative, this purely visual film manages to convey the awesome majesty of failed, large-scale scientific endeavour, and the mundane machinery behind nuclear annihilation, as well as our pathetic attempts to explore the universe. It reminded me of the human insignificance and terrible entropy so beautifully explored in one of my favourite Ballard stories, “The Voices of Time”.

Eduardo Paolozzi. Two prints from the General Dynamic F.U.N. series (1970). 50 plates. 20 frames: approx. 12 x 18 1/8 inches each (30.5 x 46 cm).

Eduardo Paolozzi’s two sets of screen prints, “General Dynamic F.U.N.” and “Zero Energy Experiment Pile (Z.E.E.P.)”, go further, dealing with the fundamental philosophical ideas behind Ballard’s work. Paolozzi was an influence on a youthful Ballard and later a mentor and friend, and his prints are both dazzlingly original and directly tuned to Ballard’s vision. In an overwhelming array of brightly coloured pop-culture images taken from space-exploration books, boys’ comics and Jane’s weaponry textbooks, images of missiles, bombs, rockets, tanks and submarines — along with diagrams, motifs and cutaway illustrations — are infused with a gaudy joy at odds with the often frightening technology they depict. The light-speed rate of change in the 60s, which Ballard cannily emphasised as technological and communications based, as opposed to more commonly referenced societal critiques, is expressed brilliantly by Paolozzi, who cleverly adds a sheen of psychedelic colour — the filter through which society saw, and dealt with, this technological future shock.

Andy Warhol. Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice), 1963. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas. 48 x 41 3/4 inches (121.9 x 106 cm).

A more familiar artist from this period is Andy Warhol, who Ballard believed was one of the few Pop artists to stand the test of time. Warhol’s “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” is an almost perfect depiction of the changes in communication in the 60s – the immediacy, sensationalism and brutality. The rapid deployment of mass visual entertainment in television, coupled with existential attitudes to morality brought about by WWII, combined to produce a bloody but newly distanced fascination with death, tempered with the fetishisation of celebrity explored by Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition and, later, Crash. The piece is understated and easily overlooked. A green monochrome print featuring repeat images of a car crash complete with supine victim, it presents these ideas in their very simplest terms and is devastatingly effective. The celebrity side of the equation is of course represented by Warhol himself, the first artist to present himself as a product, churning out signed works in his Factory. This aspect of Warhol is often dismissed as egotistical, money grubbing, but that viewpoint ignores his nuanced reflection of the world he existed in. Ballard wrote about celebrity while being scared of it himself; Warhol embraced this new phenomenon, revelling in it.

It is Warhol’s brilliant translation of the changes around him that connects him to Ballard and makes “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” the most important work in the exhibition. Both men represent a mature artistic culture that distanced itself from the political hectoring of pre-WWII art, and absorbed and translated a world of rapid change with cool detachment. The exhibition’s motorways, cars, aircraft and sexual imagery are only superficially Ballard. Tucked away on a back wall, in a small and at first insignificant-looking work, is where you find the essence of Ballard’s work presented succinctly by another twentieth-century great.

Many thanks to Mike Bonsall for his help with this review.

J.G. Ballard, photographed at his home in Shepperton for Liberation Newspaper, Paris. Photo courtesy burningrolls.

In Part 1, I asked whether Ballard’s three levels of perception could apply to Ballard’s five advertiser announcements. Look more closely. The first and fifth ads of this series are specifically about and feature Ms Churchill – first just her face, and then just her naked, natural, seaweed-covered body. This bifurcation suggests a natural split between head and body, between mental and physical, between latent and manifest. It also suggests that the three middle ads form some kind of bridge between the eye-dominated conceptual purity of the first ad, and the genital-dominated natural purity of the last. How can this fit within Ballard’s three levels? Here’s a possible answer: ‘Homage’, with its glamorous pose and languid look could represent the world of public events, with its sexuality mimetized on giant billboards across the land.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (left) and ‘Venus Smiles’ (right).

On another level, ‘Venus Smiles’ could represent the world of the immediate personal environment, the geometry of postures, the angles of desire, that which has been captured within the immediate and present. This leaves the three middle ads – those without Ms Churchill— as a sort of Coma, Kline and Xero of the inner world; three versions of woman as an imaginary construct, each representing a specific psychopathology of desire. Seen this way the set becomes a kind of psychological study of a love, a public declaration of how, on each level, Ballard can dissect the elements of love into their specific components and conceptualize them as eroticized images, born from his idiosyncratic perception and expressing the validity of his feelings.

This appears to be the manifest… what of the latent? Obviously, given their textual basis in The Atrocity Exhibition, they are also ads for ideas apparently buried within the story/chapters. This additional layer of meaning gives us a new kind of condensation in already compressed text.

If we look at these ads this way, then ‘Homage’ becomes an ad for ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, and in this story Catherine Austin and Dr Nathan actually discuss Ballard’s series of ads. In a chapter called ‘Operating Formulae’, Nathan shows Austin the ‘elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in copies of Vogue and Paris Match’. Her response will be discussed when ‘Venus Smiles’ is analyzed.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ (left), ‘A Neural Interval’ (middle) and ‘Placental Insufficiency’ (right).

The three other ads segue neatly into the stories and ideas they promote: ‘Angle’ is from ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ a chapter in which Tallis attempts to solve the riddle of Marilyn’s suicide. In the story, the angle between two walls results in the death of Karen Novotny, and a happy ending is problematic as we’re not told if Tallis was able to “solve her suicide” in Novotny’s alternate death.

‘Neural Interval’ promotes ‘The Great American Nude’, and again features the death of Karen Novotny, who dies while trying to “break the code” of an immense plastic representation of Elizabeth Taylor’s body. Pleading for the “positive effects of sexual perversions”, ‘Neural’ supplies a variation on the Novotny “sex kit” with art of a woman encased in sado-masochistic fetish gear. As Ballard says in his later Atrocity Exhibition annotations: “the mass media publicly offer a range of options which previously have been available only in private.” This ad, apparently, reveals yet another of those “options”.

‘Placental Insufficiency’ is associated with ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, a story about a “botched second coming” and a time-man pilot who inhabits the story like an alien in Minkowski space-time, a virgin child outside of an oedipal world. This ad inverts the story, however, as the “insufficiency” of the model’s placenta guarantees no savior, and the freezing of time and space in a daily afternoon ritual. Whatever – the incredible choice of art, a sort of female William Burroughs, is guaranteed to attract your attention – as does all the art in this set.

Like ‘Homage’, ‘Venus’ advertises ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, a recapitulation of the Apollo disaster by a staging of the Dealey Plaza death of John Kennedy and the car crashes of Ralph Nader. The story includes one telling chapter which Ballard may using as the basis of this ad. Entitled “What exactly is he trying to sell?”, the copy block features an exchange between Dr Nathan and Catherine Austin, who asks the question in response to these selfsame ads found in popular European publications. Dr Nathan: “’You, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse’”.

Need Ballard be any clearer? Which is why the argument can be made that in this set of ads, Claire Churchill is not only Claire Churchill, but Ballard’s stand-in for Catherine Austin. And further, that each ad represents a conceptualization of not only Claire Churchill, but of the varied, perverse and geometric sexuality of The Atrocity Exhibition.

While Ballard was working on his five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, he also found time to create another advertisement for Ambit, entitled ‘J.G. Ballard’s Court Circular’ which appeared in October, 1968.

From an advertising point of view, ‘Court Circular’ appears to have no specific layout at all. Whereas ‘Project for a New Novel’ crammed copy into the rough shape of a billboard, and the ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are based on the techniques of real ads, ‘Court Circular’ fills a full-page of a tabloid newspaper and doesn’t resemble an advertisement at all. In fact, given its layout, it appears to be the reverse of an ad, with the headline on the bottom, followed by art, and then the text at the top.

Does this have meaning? One could argue that Ballard knows well how ads should look, so why this inversion? Mike Holliday makes the point that each element of the ad corresponds to Ballard’s three levels of reality, with the photograph of the models representing mediatized reality, Bruce McLean’s stylized drawings the imaginative reality, and Ballard’s concrete poem – a printout – the “everyday” reality.

However, according to a comment Tim Chapman made on ballardian.com, we can also take clues from the ad’s name: “The Court Circular is the daily diary of official engagements of members of the Royal Family, which was carried in ‘newspapers of record’ such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. So the ‘Court Circular’ would have been an expected feature of the newspapers that this special issue of Ambit seems to have been pastiching. ‘JG Ballard’s Court Circular’ could suggest that it’s intended as the record of Ballard’s own official engagements… or, given Ballard’s oft-stated anti-monarchic principles, it may just be satirical.”

The idea of satire makes sense, given the upside-down nature of the ad, which appears to want to be read from the bottom up. In this configuration, the components might be seen to represent Ballard’s conceptual relationship with Ms Churchill, revealing her as the combination of three disparate works of “art” – the photographic, the illustrated, and the described, with the last example ironically given place of honour by being put at the top.

In any case, upside down or not, ‘Court Circular’ is not a triumph of form over content, and as an ad barely lives up to its name. Perhaps that’s the point, as circles have no top or bottom, and you can read this “ad” in a circular manner.

My last example of Ballard’s experiments with advertising is the extended campaigns detailed in Kingdom Come, a novel ostensibly about consumerism, but also about the “message” of advertising and its effects upon an unsuspecting community.

In some ways a variation of the themes in Ballard’s short story ‘The Subliminal Man’, Kingdom Come envisages a society coerced to consume not for economic reasons, but to slake an unconscious thirst for violence hiding under widespread boredom, ennui and ignorance. In actuality, Kingdom Come presents us with two campaigns, both originating in the mind of the protagonist, Richard Pearson – the first for a car designed for driving in London, and the second for the Metro shopping centre in the suburb of Brooklands.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s campaign for a new micro-car is based on the slogan, “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” This upside-down approach, called “strange” by Pearson, is designed to free the consumer from their usual relationships with cars – that is, giving them iconic status – and instead treat these objects as a vehicle for psychopathology – in this case, drive like maniacs and transform yourself into a liberating vehicle of violence and destruction. It’s not boring. And the fact people died as a result of this strange campaign? “Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere”, Pearson complains. You can almost hear Ballard chuckling in the background. And while it may be liberating for the populace to buy very small cars with the idea of using them as weapons of psychic liberation, we are, unfortunately, not told anything more about this campaign – except for the fact it got Pearson fired from his job at the ad agency, a situation which then precipitated his divorce.

Once in the suburbs, Pearson irrationally decides to reprise his radical ad campaign: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What Ballard is talking about here when he says “subversive” is instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional, the self-serving pleasure principle. The benefits are not product-oriented (new model, spend money, impress your colleagues and neighbours) as they are in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but rather this campaign is social and attempts to appeal to a new kind of consumer who responds not to rational messages about brand personality or product benefits, but to messages designed to appeal to the id, that unorganized, unconscious part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. In Freud’s formulation: “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality… we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.” (12)

The id is also amoral and egocentric, it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, and infantile in its emotional development. The id can further be divided into two categories – each ruled by the life or death instincts, and in Kingdom Come Ballard focuses his attention on the death instinct, and how it is present in Pearson’s attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and aggression.

Pearson’s advertising strategies for Brooklands reflect this unorganized outlook: “Message? There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics. No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. OK, no message. But what is a non-message? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Overlooking the nitpick that even a non-message is still a message (as we shall see), one could give Pearson the benefit of the doubt and suggest we’ll be seeing something rather different from the usual “50% Off Sale” campaign at the Metro Centre.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

In Kingdom Come we don’t see any actual advertisements, but Ballard does describe the campaign in some detail and outline the media to be used: giant billboards, relentless TV commercials and personal appearances of the campaign’s pitchman, one David Cruise. Pearson’s idea is to reveal him as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film… as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods – grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” In other words, similar to a four-year-old child… or the pleasure-seeking, pain-averse id.

The novel describes three billboards and six television commercials. As any sophisticated marketer would, Ballard has Pearson design a campaign that builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more fantastic (fictional) than the last. They are indeed mad, although Pearson later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is a masterpiece of understatement or self-delusion.

• Billboard #1 shows Cruise, as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”
• Billboard #2 reveals Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.
• TV Spot #1 has Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.
• In TV Spot #2 Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.
• TV Spot #3 shows Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.
• TV Spot #4 shows Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”
• In TV Spot #5 Cruise is shown howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.
• TV Spot #6 is just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the imagery itself – aggressive and violent. It’s what Ballard calls “elective insanity” dressed up in the iconography of the cinema. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression and empty minds, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of irrational freedom. But then, this is what they’ve been dreaming of: “…people are looking for their own psychopathology. They‘re looking for madness as a way out”. As Pearson notes, his advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.”

LEFT: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s reconnection with the reality principle comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence his campaign has created, he finally understands the consequences of his actions: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement… The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

There’s the rub, and that’s the danger of advertising Ballard wishes to express in this cautionary tale. Why? Like the unaware populace of ‘The Subliminal Man’, the people of Brooklands also succumb en masse to the message they receive, but not as individuals, as in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but as Philip Tew states in JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Kingdom Come is “centered upon an underlying malaise not individual or private, but communal”.(13) However, instead of forcing people to do a crazy thing – endlessly buy slightly newer versions of the same product – in Kingdom Come Ballard cuts to the chase and simply encourages people to simply go crazy – with predictable results.

From an advertising point of view, just what is going on in Pearson’s campaign? In structure they appear to be correct: the two billboards offer large, easily-identified images and apparently no copy at all, save perhaps an unmentioned Metro Center logo. Even that may not be necessary, as the pitchman is already a well-known public persona in the community. The six TV commercials are the first of their kind in Ballard’s fiction, and they must be among the oddest commercials ever found in fiction – but then, how many TV spots educate and persuade with glimpses of madness? What is interesting about them is their child-like quality, with their mass of instinctive drives and impulses, their bold representation of fears and aggressions. Technically, the ads are institutional in nature, as they essentially promote a brand – the shopping centre – by equating it with a series of images, usually of an aspirational nature appealing to the mores of the general target group. In that sense, Ballard’s Metro-Centre ads are well-conceived, revealing Pearson’s psychic understanding of the Brooklands population.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Would such a campaign work in reality? Perhaps in a tightly-controlled dictatorship, where such messages are shown to the exclusion of all others to a population already mad with revenge – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Bush’s America – but in reality such a conceptual set of ads would have little or no impact upon a lazy, uncaring populace, no matter how much pent-up psychopathology they have buried in their unconscious. They might become a hit on You tube, however. The public consumes ads on a “what’s in it for me” basis, with adults well-trained with experience to gloss over or ignore messages not within their sphere of interest. And Ballard’s noir campaign may be simply too complicated for an average viewer to first comprehend, much less put into action, as there are no direct “commands to action”, an integral part of all advertising messages. No command, no action. This is not to say there are no instances of “crazy ads” on television – it’s an old ploy — especially in the retail sector. The pitch usually involves madness — “we’re crazy to lower our prices this much” – and in rare cases, violence and aggression, such as the American car dealer who took a sledgehammer to new cars and after bashing them in his commercial, reduced the price accordingly. During the late 1960s, when these spots ran, the dealership did Crash-like business. In these instances, however, the psychopathology is directed and focused to a specific sales goal – the point is not to make viewers go out and smash their own cars. In Kingdom Come it’s focused on itself – there’s no “message” to link it to reality. If anything will save us from the horror of Ballard’s marketing nightmare, it’s the simple fact people are too lazy or stupid to do the work of unraveling the madness message and mindlessly adopting it to their own lifestyle. The concept is beautifully executed in Ballard’s psychodrama ads, but it’s a concept that is flawed by its own reliance on the reality principle, which ultimately trumps the pleasure principle upon which the id is based. Well, that and the superego – the state.

So, where does this all leave us? If Ballard did work in a real ad agency, he’d be out on the streets. Real ads cannot withstand the newness and dense conceptualizations of Ballard’s output. Real ads are not as challenging as Ballard’s, in fact, most advertising is nothing more than clichés given a new paint job – old women dressed as tarts. Consumers tend to be frightened by the new, so admen tend to recolonize the familiar by adding a slight twist to it. A perfect example is Saachi & Saachi’s famous punning billboard for Margaret Thatcher’s first UK political campaign – an all-white billboard with a simple, centered headline: “Labour isn’t working.”

Ballard’s ads are artistic, not commercial, although one could imagine them as institutional ads for Ballard’s quiver of concepts. They appear to be dense messages from the subconscious, but are probably highly manipulated concepts of a philosophic nature. Like most of Ballard’s experimental work, they are fascinating more for what they don’t say than what they do. Once again the consumer is expected to complete the process (itself a marketing concept), but even Ballard’s most ad-like ads – the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ – offer up multiple meanings given one’s approach to the set. However, outside the world of harsh reality, and within the world of the unbridled imagination they work hard to reveal those psychological concepts and ideas that Ballard finds interesting enough to separate from his fiction and re-express in a specialized, technical form.

Whether or not it’s Pure Lemon Juice is up to you.

The author wishes to thank Mike Bonsall for his time-saving JG Ballard Concordance, Mike Holliday for his work on ‘Court Circular’, Tim Chapman for his royal insights, and Umberto Rossi for his suggestions and encouragement.

REFERENCES:
(12) Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton & Co, 1965)
(13) Tew, Philip (2008) ‘Situating the Violence of J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction: The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma’. JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum, London 2008) p. 116.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard.

J.G. Ballard’s first professional job as a writer came when he was just 22 years old — as a copywriter for the London-based advertising agency Digby Wills Ltd. He remembers writing ads for a company called Pure Lemon Juice in the three or four months he was employed there, but no doubt the restricted creativity of copywriting didn’t appeal to the young and restless Ballard, and his career next veered into the eat-what-you-kill occupation of door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. From fruit to nuts. But one must assume something about print advertising’s combination of truncated text and stylized design must have had some underlying influence on the young Ballard. His fascination with the structure of advertising — an idea neatly contained in a stylized box, exuding promises of fulfilled desires — and the advertising man himself (both Crash and Kingdom Come feature admen as protagonists) crops up regularly in Ballard’s work from 1958 onwards. One can even trace this interest back to Ballard’s Shanghai youth, where, sharing his interest with the cinema, radio, and comic books, he has repeatedly told the story of his fascination with glossy American magazines and their otherworldly pitches for big cars, washing machines and sexy fashions. The aesthetic of the advertisement appears again and again in Ballard’s work, and it may be informative to examine these ersatz works in detail.

Ballard’s earliest experimental work to include elements of advertising, ‘Project For A New Novel’ (1958), was influenced by the groundbreaking ‘This Is Tomorrow’ Pop art exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. And while Ballard claims Pop art and artists had no influence on the commercial fiction he wrote in the late 1950s, the work he did on ‘Project’ reveals he was strongly affected by that exhibition’s interest in collage and the artistic use of everyday or found objects — in this case, the words, text, charts and page layouts of the scientific magazines he edited.

It’s still unclear why so many elements of ‘Project For A New Novel’ resurfaced years later in his breakthrough inner space short story, ‘The Terminal Beach’, and the condensed novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. If Ballard actually knew — and he maybe he didn’t — he wasn’t telling. After all, this is a writer who is fascinated by the mediascape and who thrives on ambiguity and what he calls ‘open-ended’ stories. ‘I wasn’t satisfied just by writing SF stories’, Ballard told David Pringle in 1982. ‘My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.’ [1]

ABOVE: Detail from J.G. Ballard’s ‘Project for a New Novel’ (1958).

And expand it did. ‘Project For A New Novel’ — ostensibly an entire novel reduced to resemble two-page magazine spreads — was designed as an ad to be posted on billboards. As Ballard himself describes the ‘Project’:

“(These are) a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s… sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes… The pages from the ‘Project For A New Novel’ were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News — I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them.” [2]

Rarely, if ever discussed by Ballard scholars, ‘Project For A New Novel’ remains a kind of curiosity today, a collection of names and themes of interest to those who seek out connections between it and the later works, and those who attempt to fill in its blanks and construct the semblance of a plot from its various components. ‘Project for a New Novel’ was designed to be published on a billboard, however, and as such, had it ever been produced, might have been the first instance of art being published on outdoor media. There was an instance in the late 1960s when Canada’s N.E. Thing Company, founded by Iain Baxter, attempted to publish a line of poetry by placing a word on a billboard in each of Canada’s major cities, thereby constructing a poem 3,000 miles wide, but in both instances, however, Ballard and Baxter’s message surely would have confused or bored almost all of those who observed it. Why? For Baxter, a lack of information; for Ballard, ironically, a lack of time. Our inability to understand the ‘message’ of Project as an ad is not simply a function of the abstract quality of the piece, but because of the severe technical restrictions of billboard media.

LEFT: Image by Rick McGrath.

Designed to be viewed from moving cars (Ballardian in itself), billboards offer the advertiser the benefits of a very large message, but the disadvantage of greatly reduced viewing time. Three to five seconds is the average length of time an individual has to scan a billboard, and this feat has to be accomplished in moving traffic. In order to compensate, successful billboard ads rely on strong, simple visuals and to-the-point messages. No one is going to drive around the block for a second view. It immediately becomes apparent that ‘Project For A New Novel’ breaks these rules by its sheer volume of words and complex, unbalanced layout — as well as the fact it seems to make no sense, offers no brand, no benefits, and no indication of how to respond. But that may be the point, as ‘Project’ is a quasi-surreal piece vaguely reminiscent of the ‘cut-up’ technique used by W.S. Burroughs. This same technical problem was identified by Ballard’s friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, ‘Most of the text you can’t read because when you see things on billboards you don’t read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred — you can only read the headlines and some remarks.’ [3]

In a September 2008 letter discussing the work, Ballard said, ‘I gave some pages [of Project] away… and then, sadly lost interest — the “fictional” elements were pure stream of consciousness, the first thing to come into my head. I clipped and scissored away.’ [4] Looked at this way, the only real correlation between ‘Project’ and actual billboards is its shape — a correlation that, as we shall see, is developed and expanded to include content in Ballard’s later advertisements.

Ballard’s next foray into the world of advertising came in January 1963 with the publication of the short story, ‘The Subliminal Man’. This story is influenced by Vance Packard’s 1957 tell-all, The Hidden Persuaders, a highly popular book which attempted to reveal advertising’s use of psychological techniques — from motivational to subliminal — to induce an irrational desire for products. ‘The Subliminal Man’, however, is not about advertising. It is concerned with the effects on society of an ‘over-capitalized industrial system’ which requires ever-increasing levels of production and consumption, and is willing to use simple, direct subliminal commands to herd the unsuspecting population.

LEFT: Image by Simon Sellars.

Advertising itself is not overtly critiqued as the society Ballard portrays has no choice of product — there’s only one ‘brand’ of everything — and the subliminal message is not ‘hidden’ within an existing ad. It is interesting to note, however, that the medium chosen by Ballard to deliver this barrage of subliminal commands is again the billboard — appropriate for this culture, which is dominated by cars and the fact that fully one-third of the land space is occupied by roads. ‘The Subliminal Man’ is a warning about what might happen in a state with a fascistic need for increased consumer activity — a theme Ballard would revisit many years later in Kingdom Come — and the point of the subliminal message in this story is not to sell specific products, but to ’spur’ the populace into increasing productivity and production through ever greater consumption.

Ballard’s next project is the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ he created and published from 1967 to 1971 in Ambit magazine. According to Ballard:

‘Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising — I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…’ [5]

While it’s interesting to note that Ballard emphasizes the fun he had in repeating all the steps in the actual production and dissemination of the ads — the craftsman aspect of designing, blockmaking and delivery — Ballard’s five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are not far from the more ‘creative’ ads produced by agencies in the late 1960s, when the emphasis on target groups shifted from war-shocked parents to the leading edge of war babies, from traditional middle class concerns to the newly affluent and psychedelic youth culture. In appearance they most resemble a collage poster — a billboard on end — that may have been created out of Ballard’s original idea to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of montage illustrations: ‘I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork — a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.’ [6]

ABOVE: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. One of Mike Foreman’s illustrations for the abandoned illustrated version of The Atrocity Exhibition.

However, they are print ads, although not in the same sense that ‘Project For A New Novel’ is a billboard. They are designed in the usual picture-headline-text layout used by ad agency art directors in the late 1960s, and close inspection reveals an intellectual concept behind the set, although it is not apparently obvious and, in fact, requires the consumer to view all five ads to receive the ultimate message. In July 1968, after he had already begun the series of ads, he told Jannick Storm:

‘It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned… I had a number of ideas which I could fit into my short stories, my fiction in general, but they would be better presented directly. Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea… I’m advertising extremely abstract ideas in these advertisements, and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them… But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them.’ [7]

In actuality, these ‘ideas’ were already in his Atrocity Exhibition stories, as we shall see, and one could argue about their overall effectiveness, given the fact most people don’t think of an ad as an artistic puzzle they have to ponder to grasp. And when Ballard says advertising is an ‘unknown continent’, his own ads reveal the extent of his explorations, as well the heads of exotic animals he’s caught along the way.

ABOVE: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (1967): JGB’s first ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ is a coded message written in the Euclidian symbols of atrocity exhibitionese and comes complete with a promise of four future ‘announcements’, revealing, perhaps, that Ballard has already planned the project to conclusion. In this first ad, Ballard eschews a headline in favour of a real head and reduces all to a tightly cropped closeup of Ms Churchill’s smiling face. All that intrudes on the art is a downplayed copy block which links her to Abraham Zapruder and Ralph Nader — icons of high conceptual value to Ballard. ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ was published in Ambit in July, 1967, and it borrows copy from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. In the short story the copy obviously doesn’t include any references to Ms Churchill, but the section in which it is found — ‘Pentax Zoom’ — expresses Trabert’s attempt to understand the deaths of the three American astronauts in the ‘equations, gestures and postures’ of Karen Novotny who, in the preceding chapter, appears to be a modulus of domestic bliss: ‘Their period in the apartment together had been one of almost narcotic domesticity. In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs, he seemed to mimetise all his dreams and obsessions.’

This ad also seems to have roots in the chapter entitled ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, first published as a short story in the September 1966 edition of New Worlds, with Ballard’s advertisement almost an extension of that story’s section, ‘The Enormous Face’, with Ms Churchill replacing Elizabeth Taylor as the object of Ballard’s ‘private and public fantasy’ — this ad supplying the ‘public’ part. One can barely miss the concept at work here: ‘In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.’ Substitute Ballard for Travis, and Ms Churchill for the actress, and it appears this is a poster disguised as an advertisement that is really a love letter. The emphasis on the eyes, and the rhetorical question that follows (‘At what point does the plane of intersection of these eyes generate a valid image of the simulated auto-disaster, the alternate deaths of Dealey Plaza and the Mekong Delta’) admits Ms Churchill to the conceptual world where she provides ‘a set of operating formulae’ for Ballard’s ‘passage through consciousness’. But just what might these operating formulae be? And is there anything to be made from the fact ‘The Death Module’ was renamed ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ based on a suggestion by Ms Churchill?

ABOVE: ‘The Angle Between two Walls’ (1967): JGB’s second ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ”The Angle Between Two Walls’ is a still from Alone, the American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin’s movie about a masturbating woman.’ [8] First published in Ambit, September 1967, ‘Angle’ is a link to another Atrocity Exhibition story, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’, first published in New Worlds in June, 1966. This ad is another visual-dominant piece, featuring the header, in full reverse, right above a transported female face. Reproduced in high contrast black and white, the woman’s abstracted hand reveals the source of her pleasure, but her thrown-back head reveals the conceptual basis of onanismic sex. Question headlines are usually avoided in real ads (nobody bothers to consider an answer), but in this example Ballard uses the rhetorical question to control our eye and has us read in a backward Z from the headline to the head to hand to text. This announcement is skillfully designed, and actually appears to be an ‘ad’, although one doubts very much that Vogue would consent to run it. The most explicitly ’sexy’ of the series, Angle introduces the ‘little death’ of a ‘happy ending’, emphasizing in geometric terms the relationship between the two walls of reality and fiction and how they can be conceptualized by the imagination into memory and desire.

And, as we shall see, it also forms part of a larger concept.

ABOVE: ‘A Neural Interval’ (1968): JGB’s third ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard again: ‘Neural Interval was a picture from a bondage magazine.’ [9]

‘A Neural Interval’ is much the same in design and conception to ‘Angle’, and again the theme is associated with a story from The Atrocity Exhibition — in this case, ‘The Great American Nude’, first published in Ambit in July, 1968 — the same issue as this announcement. ‘A Neural Interval’ is also picture-dominant, showing a bound and gagged woman, dressed in sadomasochistic gear, who appears to be in a boat or beside the ocean. Her picture dominates the ad, and the text is reversed, with the copy left and the headline to the right, probably representing the reversal of affection in a sadistic relationship.

The header, ‘A Neural Interval’, suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. The text refers to a chapter in ‘The Great American Nude’ entitled A Diagram of Bones in which women have been reduced to pieces of ‘coloured plastic tubing, the geometry of a Disney.’ In his later annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard explains: ‘The past… is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future.’ That is a very good definition of how most advertising works on the conceptual level. Ballard continues: ‘The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.’

This concept of ‘packaging’ is one of the main themes of ‘The Great American Nude’, which features a huge, plastic amorphous Elizabeth Taylor and a Karen Novotny ’sex kit’, which ‘may be more stimulating than the real thing.’ Or, as Dr Nathan explains: ‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.’

Such a perversion, in this case shown by the sadomasochistic illustration, reveals Ballard’s attempt at showing how the ‘outer world of reality’ — packaging — ‘must be quantified and eroticized’: in other words, accepted as a part of the aggressive aspect of the male sexual instinct, and not ‘reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form’, an invitation to the boredom and jaded excitements of socially-approved sexuality.

ABOVE: ‘A Placental Insufficiency’ (1970): JGB’s fourth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

Ballard: ‘I’ve no idea of the source for the strange gun photo, though Les Krims was a very well known US photographer.’ [10]

‘Placental Insufficiency’ was published in Ambit in September, 1970, and uses as part of its text a snippet from ‘You and Me and The Continuum’, first published in the March 1966 issue of Impulse Magazine. This announcement is again almost entirely picture-dominated, showing a naked, middle-aged woman holding a rifle and looking away to the left as she stands in from of a car and trailer in a field. The text is small and difficult to read, as Ballard has chosen white type over a dark, mottled background, obscuring the text from a chapter of ‘You and Me and The Continuum’ entitled Placenta, which reads: ‘The X-ray plates of the growing foetus showed the absence of both placenta and umbilical cord. Was his then, Dr Nathan pondered, the true meaning of the immaculate conception — that not the mother but the child was virgin, innocent of any Jocasta’s clutching blood…’ To this Ballard adds some new copy: ‘Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorize the trajectories of her body.’

The meanings here are dense. In his first ad, ‘Homage’, Ballard identifies this ad as ‘the left axillary fossa of Princess Margaret’ — which actually means her royal armpit. Certainly an insufficient placenta, but in this case, given the ‘insufficiency’ of the headline, one assume this announcement deals with the unconceptualized or real woman, the woman who is not virginal, who does not escape the fate of Oedipus’ mother — and who is not embarrassed or concerned about the ‘packaging’ of her body, given it’s obvious distance from any cultural ideal of a sexual icon. The juxtaposition of the woman and her phallic, but non-aggressive gun adds meaning to the line, ‘the trajectories of her body’, but Ballard reduces her sexuality to the point of the ‘outer world of reality’ and appears to challenge us to ‘quantify and eroticize’ her. The irony, of course, is that the bound and gagged woman of ‘A Neural Interval’ and the naked trailer trash of ‘Placental Insufficiency’ both represent mythologized sexuality, albeit in an extreme form.

ABOVE: ‘Venus Smiles’ (1970): JGB’s fifth ‘advertiser’s announcement’.

As Ballard explains: ‘Claire Churchill… is also the subject of the fifth ad, which shows her, after swimming in the sea off Brighton, sitting naked in the front seat of my car covered with thousands of specks of seaweed — so outraged was she by my sneak photography that she stole my only copy of the ad, but she has agreed in the interests of Art and Literature to have it published.’ [11]

Suffice to say ‘Venus Smiles’ is an ad about voyeurism, about obsession, about the conceptualization of the elements of the body. Suppressed by Claire Churchill for years after Ballard made the photo, she finally relented and allowed her seaweed-strewn naked torso to be published in this ad in the winter, 1971 edition of Ambit. The copy is from two chapters in the short story, ‘Tolerance of the Human Face’, first published in Encounter in 1969. The first sentence is from Marriage of Freud and Euclid, and the second from Fake Newsreels. This ad is also dominated by a photo of a naked female body, and his decision to snap it unawares suggests an obsession with form studied at leisure. Given the ambivalence between title and subject — there is no head to supply a facial smile, although we are shown two sets of ‘lips’ — one is initially tempted to interpret this as a kind of thank-you to the goddess of femininity that the ad’s creator is in such close proximity to a loved one who loves back.

Again, Ballard’s design is asymmetrical in this ad, with the head, art and text forming a forward slash across the page, which is further accentuated by the dominant white legs. The normal manner of reading is once again reversed with the headline on the right and copy to the left. It is also a bookend to the first ad in the series — revealing Ballard’s progression through the psychopathologies of sexuality, from the conceptual to the physical. It is also worth noting that the first ad only shows Ms Churchill’s head, and the last just her body. Full circle, and now complete. But what does the text tell us? The first sentence is more revealing in what it leaves out — the idea in Marriage of Freud and Euclid of ‘turning everything into its inherent pornographic possibilities’ and how this marriage can become deformed through ‘displaced affections’ and an obsession with ‘targeting areas’ of sex and violence. The second sentence, from Fake Newsreels, is preceded by a scene in which Travers searches through ‘montage photographs’ of ‘pain and mutilation’ and Catherine Austin wonders why he is so obsessed with these nightmare images when their actual relationship is the opposite — associated with light, ardor and purity. Perhaps a clue can be found in the preceding chapter, called Hidden Faces, in which Ballard links colliding cars, the ‘geometry of aggression and desire’, with ‘celebrations of his wife’s death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulating all his memories of childhood…’

When all five ads are considered together a pattern does seem to want to emerge. Mike Holliday, in his article on the three levels of reality in ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, notes that: ‘Something else that was evidently important for Ballard at that time is the notion that we live on three different levels simultaneously, and that meaning is created where those different levels intersect.’ Ballard has discussed these three levels at length in various interviews, but perhaps one of the best explanations is given by Dr Nathan in the ‘Planes Intersect’ chapter of ‘Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown’:

‘Planes intersect: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards, random deaths mimetized in the experimental auto-disasters of Nader and his co-workers. Their precise role in the unconscious merits closer scrutiny, by the way; they may in fact play very different parts from the one we assign them. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office, the angles between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.’

Can this have any meaning or correlate to these Advertiser’s Announcements? In Part 2, we shall find out.

REFERENCES

[1] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 122.
[2] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[3] Bax, Martin. (1984) ‘An Interview with Martin Bax’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 39.
[4] McGrath, R. (2008)
[5] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 38.
[6] Pringle, David. (1984) ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’. RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 124.
[7] Storm, Jannick. (1968) ‘Interview with Jannick Storm’. Speculation #21, 1969.
[8] V. Vale. (1984) RE/Search: JG Ballard 8/9, (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search, 1984) p. 147.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.

Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ’sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

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

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ’sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ’script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ’surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

JGB in 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

The following interview was conducted in Shepperton at some point during the autumn of 1982, shortly before the publication of Myths of the Near Future, and published in 1985 in a German collection of essays on Ballard called J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen, edited by Joachim Körber. Ballard’s next book would be Empire of the Sun, in 1984, but his concerns here seem far from his own past.

Much of the interview concerns influences, and Ballard is particularly strident in his rejection of Burroughs’ influence, whom he appears to see as a modernist after the fact. He stresses the distinction between the modernists’ exploration of subjective consciousness and his own method, which affirms the outer world as a reality to be comprehended by consciousness, rather than created by it. Rarely has he stated his materialism so explicitly. In this context, his assertion that The Atrocity Exhibition is like a machine working to analyse the concrete relations of the outer world seems hardly a metaphor.

Dan O’Hara.

LEFT: ‘Die Stimmen der Zeit’ (‘The Voices of Time’), the German title for part 1 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Even today quite a few critics are still of the opinion that Science Fiction concerns itself with the future. Yet you yourself have said repeatedly that it is with the present that SF must concern itself. The present in England is surely interesting enough to deal with. How do you see it and its possible consequences for the future?

BALLARD: Now, we have here at present a situation such as has never arisen before. We find ourselves in a process of drastic social transformation. I can’t say what the world will look like if these upheavals take effect, but they will in any event be significant. Youth rebellion, violence in the street, such things have never yet occurred in Great Britain, and the middle classes and moneyed upper classes particularly are faced with a problem, as they lack any experience of it. Of course there have been social revolutions that only took place through violence in all eras, for example in the Twenties, when fascism was strong, but I scarcely believe that these developments can be compared to each other. Nowadays there are fewer poor, and the revolt issues less from need and much more from weariness.

Violence in the streets is something one knows rather better from continental Europe, but not in England where such things are quite unheard of. I can’t imagine a larger proportion of the working classes in this country being drawn towards the right wing, especially since it was precisely the Conservative administration which is at least in part responsible for the current state of affairs. But I also don’t see any danger of class war coming here, that might change some aspect of the British system. England is an expressly conservative country, it was always so, and that’s as true as ever today. The unrest is not as bad as the media and particularly television would have us believe. It is in fact true that many of the young are in revolt, skinheads, punks and so on, but their number is smaller than one would suspect – which naturally should not be taken to mean that their cause or their concerns are any less serious or important on that account.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: That you yourself have mentioned punk directly offers us an excellent opportunity to re-direct things to another subject. The modern punk revolution, especially in music, seems to be comparable with the mood of literary upheaval in the Sixties, which in the end led to SF’s ‘New Wave’. This is also the view of Michael Moorcock, then the principal writer. What’s your view of this?

BALLARD: Now, one can certainly draw some parallels. Punk is a movement of rebellion against outdated and overbearing values. But there, the parallels are in my view already exhausted, as the New Wave was a cultural affair in the first place, a quest for a literary breakaway, whereas punk goes much further. Punks often aren’t looking for any new direction, but only to denounce the old. And the New Wave orientated itself towards the future, whereas punk rock, as much as I pick up from listening to the radio, is really reliant on older musical traditions.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stick closer to literature. Even when you published your first stories there was, in certain ways, a dominant atmosphere of upheaval, even if it was entirely different. Or can one not see it that way?

BALLARD: Certainly one can! My first story appeared in 1957, and that was the year of Sputnik. I still remember it all exactly today: we sat in front of the radios and listened to the signals from this first artificial satellite – nothing more than bleep, bleep, bleep. And that really was a break such as one dramatically, emphatically cannot understand. This event seemed to change everything at a stroke. On the radio it was as if it was a celebration of the beginning of a new world, and it was also actually the beginning of the space age. It was unimaginable: one heard messages from other planets!

1957 was the real beginning of the space era, and it seemed to confirm everything that the old guard of SF authors had dreamed of and written together up to then. In those days it was like an intoxication; Campbell’s prophecies seemed to be really becoming true. (Laughs). And yet I was already back then of the view that outer space was not the right environment for science fiction. SF concerned itself with the gigantic proportions of outer space, and as a result the psychological component was forgotten completely – and naturally the literary aspect, too. I knew the way couldn’t lead outwards, because the space programme had already taken off. There was nothing really interesting to explore. The way had to lead inwards, in my view. That was natural for me, as I’d always been greatly interested in psychology. For me, SF was and is the only legitimate literature of the space age, but back then it took a wrong turn in a direction which never interested me personally because it wasn’t based on a psychological component, at least, not in a clear and deliberate way. The Fifties were an interesting time in various ways (as it seems the Eighties will also be), and one didn’t need a literature dealing with imaginary worlds when the most fascinating was the current-day on our own planet.

In my opinion, it’s important for a science fiction author to pay attention to and describe the present, the modern landscape of communications, technological and scientific developments, and so forth. Even in the Fifties so many changes had begun, the media landscape expanded, TV, high-circulation magazines, tourism gradually grew, pop music, all these developments had a direct influence upon human life, and in fact a much more direct influence than the space programme and the like – and no-one dealt with it in a proper way. The first computers were developed, the automation of modern industry began, technology also gained an ever greater influence over the lives of people who had nothing at all to do with it directly. And then naturally there was always the nuclear threat in the background, which hadn’t been there to such an extent before. And if one thinks of all these fascinating facts, it really is just too laughable that a literature such as science fiction, with such great opportunities, concerned itself with what was taking place on… pah, Proxima Centauri, or with invasions of giant dragons and such trivialities. The future began back then, in the present, and we were all witness to it!

LEFT: ‘Vom Leben und Tod Gottes’ (‘The Life and Death of God’), the German title for part 2 of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories collection (German edition published 2007).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And your view found nothing to mirror it in American science fiction?

BALLARD: I believe a little of it rubbed off there, too, at least they still talk of a New Wave over there even now, in connexion with authors like Harlan Ellison or Roger Zelazny. But I don’t believe one can compare that with the actual New Wave in England. Authors like Zelazny or Harlan Ellison represent the world without reflecting on the times in which they live or write, they chiefly plunder ancient myths and dress them up in new clothes. That may be new and fascinating for American SF, but it isn’t original. At present, the big market for science fiction in America is the cinema, with films like Star Wars and so on. And hence SF is reduced to the level of comic strips, and from that a view all too easily arises that the whole of science fiction is worthless rubbish.

Science fiction is very popular today, and it was in those days too, but what differs from then is that today, the whole machinery is more geared towards commercial exploitation. Back then there were magazines like Galaxy, F&SF and New Worlds, in which one could publish original and unusual material. I find it rather hard to believe that a magazine like for example the very popular Omni would today publish one of the really innovative and ground-breaking stories of the Fifties, like something by Pohl and Kornbluth. Of course they’d be published there today, but only because they’re now known.

We live today in an era in which the sci-fi game is becoming ever more popular, and naturally that’s bad news for the serious science fiction writer. To outline things from my point of view: when I began SF had just had a terrifically big boom; in the USA there were 35 different magazines on the market, and even in this country there were six. That offered the serious interested writer a great opportunity to express himself. Writers like Philip K. Dick were popular back then.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: How did the New Wave proceed, anyway? In the Sixties there existed a brigade of interesting authors who were relatively quiet in the Seventies. And just now, at the beginning of the Eighties, many are coming late to fame and honour. One could perhaps here mention John Sladek as one of the best examples. What was the matter with the New Wave in the Seventies? And why have many authors become popular only now? Do you think that the time is ripe for the kind of literature which they wrote back then, and which largely met with disconcertment on the part of the readership?

BALLARD: Now first of all, the magazine New Worlds was suspended, which had been a common forum for many of us for a long time. That was a hard blow. Also many simply lost interest in SF, and went into other fields. Most simply didn’t manage to break into the American market, since there were no more opportunities to publish in England, at least no magazines that were sold under the label ‘Science Fiction’.

As far as I myself am concerned, I also distanced myself a little from SF at the beginning of the Seventies. After the stories in The Atrocity Exhibition appeared in book form, I worked very intensively on the novel Crash… and that’s how it went. I think I also somehow lost interest in the American magazine market. The USA was not nearly as interesting as in the Fifties and Sixties, and I think back then that applied to the whole of Western Europe. The USA had lost its supremacy in every respect, nothing really original and new came out of it anymore. Europe in the Seventies was (and still is today) far more interesting. Nowhere in the world can one follow such a clash of opposing political ideologies as in Western Europe. In this respect, there must surely also follow a cultural rapprochement with the Soviet Union at the least, in the long term the Soviet Union has to open itself to Europe – but Europe must also reciprocate. And the USA is an obstacle to this process. I think that Europe is a far more fascinating place, because the United States has simply lost the flair it had in the Fifties, it no longer has a monopoly on the future, the unlimited possibilities it once had. I said at the beginning that I expect interesting developments in this country. I think one can confidently extend that comment to the whole of Europe. Europe is a bubbling cauldron of constant psychological and political change, whereas in the USA there isn’t anything at all like politics in our sense. In the USA we have something to do not with opposed political ideologies, but at best a power struggle between men neither of whom is any better than each other, who are at most perhaps more power-hungry. Look at how mediocre American politicians are! Or the trade unions – in the United States the unions are completely apolitical, something unthinkable in Europe. Men like Reagan for example… or let’s take Ted Kennedy, who is already regarded as a left-leaning liberal in his country. Here – I don’t mean just in Germany – but here one would undoubtedly put him at best in the liberal wing of the conservative party.

LEFT: German compilation containing Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise (2004).

Many writers here lost interest completely in the USA and instead concerned themselves more with Europe. I can say that for myself, at the least. At the beginning of the Seventies I wrote Crash, The Concrete Island [sic] and High Rise, and none of these books is strictly speaking science fiction – they are all concerned rather with certain social trends that were becoming apparent in Europe, and I tried to realize them novelistically. Accordingly these books did very poorly in the USA.

The same is true of Moorcock. In the Fifties we all looked to the USA, because SF there produced original achievements in those days. But no longer, in the Seventies. Take Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels – they’re very typically European, inspired by London and the so-called pop-culture of ‘Swinging London’, a radical departure from the American model.

For me the gap between European and American science fiction opened up in the Sixties, because the public there simply couldn’t understand the New Wave experiment – still less the editors and publishers. And if for once one of the New Wave books did stray over to America, it was mostly by mistake, because publishers bought in an author without seeing the work. That happened to me with The Atrocity Exhibition, and I recall a very nice story about that, one which in many respects demonstrates the exact situation. The Atrocity Exhibition was bought by a US press, and shortly before the distribution of the book, this respectable publisher glanced over the contents and saw to his horror that it contained stories such as ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and the like. Consequently he had the whole print-run pulped, all but my author’s specimen copies. Unbelievable! And afterwards I permitted myself the pleasure of sending a copy to Ronald Reagan, complaining about whichever respectable US publisher dared to publish this smut and filth. Of course I never got any reply, but it was worth it, for me.

Back to the topic. If a movement such as the New Wave forms, it always takes a while until new borderlines are defined and the whole thing takes shape. In the Sixties there arrived many new authors who were published in the genre, and who afterwards seemingly abandoned it. The only reason for that is that the complete shape of the innovations of the New Wave still wasn’t fully defined throughout. I myself never set out with the conscious intent: ‘And now you write science fiction.’ I always only wrote what was important to me at a particular moment, and then realized it was science fiction in retrospect. In the Sixties the situation was different again. In those days I wrote much that wasn’t strictly speaking science fiction, but that was published in related magazines and anthologies. The anthologies grew particularly in the Seventies, when the great dying-off of the magazines began. For me that was a shame in all sorts of respects. I like anthologies, I like to read original anthologies, but still they lack the freshness of a monthly magazine. Anthologies get created in publishing house offices, and by and large they’re conceived by the publishers as being in the same mould as a magazine. Also one can usually publish more quickly in magazines, get in touch with the public more quickly. Original anthologies are entirely different, there it can sometimes take years before something gets published, and that’s no good because by the time of publication the writer may very well find himself in an entirely new phase of creativity.

Magazines are more flexible in this respect. All my early stories appeared in Carnell’s magazine, I think I wrote something like fifty for him. Maybe more, but there were certainly fifty in the period from 1957 to 1964. And he never turned even a single one down. Everything I wrote got published, because he needed the material. He had a magazine to fill, some twelve issues a year appeared, and that’s not uninteresting to an author in any case, if he has a stable and reliable market. I’m extremely sorry about the end of New Worlds, it was a shame the magazine had to be closed down.

It would be my greatest wish for a new magazine to come out right now, as these times resemble the Fifties, and we could urgently do with one about them. I think that drastic changes in our lifestyle will come directly from new technologies. The video revolution, for example, will change everything. In the Fifties TV came along, which changed everything, the whole world, and video will also change the world, lastingly, in fact. Everyone can experiment with video, everyone can be his own artist. With video, everyone can transform his living room into a TV studio. It will have serious consequences, the extent of which is not yet at all quantifiable. We absolutely need a new magazine, the Eighties deserve to be examined more closely. With these continuous upheavals, the Eighties are really much more like the Fifties than were the Sixties or Seventies. I would rather it were a small format magazine like Carnell’s New Worlds, as with a large illustrated magazine there’s always the danger of it ending as so many such ventures do, that is, with the illustrations spreading and starting to displace the stories.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: And what do your plans for the Eighties look like? How will J. G. Ballard deal with the dawning of this new era in his work?

BALLARD: I’ve already written some new short stories and novellas emerging from the end of the Seventies and beginning of the Eighties, and they will also appear shortly in a collection. In all sorts of ways they’re a return to ‘pure’ science fiction, and a re-envisioning of what I wrote in the Fifties.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What are the actual influences forming you yourself, and your work? Several of the stories in the Sixties were influenced by the new French literature, and if one takes a look around right here, one sees books about the Surrealists everywhere. Have they had an influence upon your style of writing, and if so, which ones?

BALLARD: Yes, naturally, it’s true that I’m a great admirer of all the Surrealist painters, and their works certainly continue to be not without influence on my work, and if I hadn’t become a writer – and hence a painter with words, in a way – I would surely have had a go at painting Surrealist pictures. I can’t say with such certitude what influenced my work in the Fifties. My early books are stuffed full of allusions to the Surrealists, that’s also true, but that was more of an expression of the admiration I felt for them. I don’t believe that the literature I’ve written would have developed differently had I never heard anything of the Surrealists. I do want to say, not once have I consciously taken Surrealist paintings as a model for my short stories or novels, even though naturally stories like ‘The Voices of Time’ or the Vermilion Sands stories do display certain parallels. It was more of a homage on my part, rather than a direct influence on their part. Moreover, in practice it’s impossible to recast sculpture or painting in a narrative form because it’s a question of fundamentally different forms of art. It is simply impossible to capture the mood expressed in a Dalí painting in the right words.

If painters have influenced me at all, it was the Pop-Art artists, initially much later, when I wrote the Atrocity Exhibition stories. Writing had already become an important business to me when I was at the beginning of my twenties, and in those days the great French symbolists of the nineteenth century may have exercised an unconscious influence upon me.

ABOVE: JGB at home in Shepperton, 1985: photo by Bleddyn Butcher.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Your influences lie in any case outside Science Fiction to a considerable extent?

BALLARD: Most certainly. I first came across SF when I was in Canada with the Air Force, it must have been 1953 or 1954. Before then I’d read no science fiction at all, but in the base there they kept SF magazines to sell in the canteen, everything possible from pulps to the better digest magazines. I realized that a lot of the magazines back then contained really interesting, colourful stories that in various respects were better suited to the times than so-called ‘contemporary literature’. It’s true that they were hideous in design, with these ghastly covers – one knows them quite well enough – but the content was sometimes genuinely interesting. Sheckley, Pohl, Kornbluth, Jack Vance – those were the authors I liked to read back then. Kornbluth was an intelligent author, and I thought to myself, my god, here are really vital and interesting stories! But they were nonetheless still stories that were published in popular and commercial magazines, and that meant that the authors were quite freely subject to certain laws of the mass market, and so furthermore, they only went just as far as they could and no further. They employed no idea solely of their own accord. And suddenly it was all clear to me: here you have exactly the right environment for the kind of literature you really want to write, a literature of limitless possibilities. I had a head full of ideas and stories, and here was a medium that offered me the chance of expressing them adequately. I knew one could push open the window of commercial science fiction and let a little fresh air stream in. Outside there was a whole new world waiting for the literati to comment on it. And shortly after I’d got to know science fiction, I left off reading it again, because I made up my mind to write it myself.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: Let’s stay with your career for a moment. You published as you said something like fifty stories in Carnell’s magazine, some in the US also, and then came the point when time started to play an important role, when the stories became freer and more experimental. They lost the linear narrative of a story and brought in different events taking place simultaneously. That was the starting shot for the later ‘condensed novels’. For science fiction it was new and revolutionary.

BALLARD: That may be, but as with much that was ‘new’ in the New Wave, it was rather an aspect of that which was already recognized in literature generally. That goes for the New Wave in general, and for my collection The Atrocity Exhibition especially. That too was not new in modern literature. There were already experiments taking place even in very early modernist literature, for example in the novels of Virginia Woolf. The sole meaning of the more experimental literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in an exploration of different subjective states of consciousness. The big difference in the New Wave and my own ‘condensed novels’ was that it wasn’t exactly very important to me to investigate different subjective conditions of consciousness, at least not in the first place. What concerned me primarily was to take the traditional themes and view them through subjective eyes, through the eye of science and the changes introduced by it, if one will.

If one takes a look at The Atrocity Exhibition one will realize that, naturally the book has a hero of a much more subjective type, who has possibly been driven from a nervous breakdown into madness, but actually he isn’t the ‘hero’ of the book at all: that’s much more the experimental landscape of the world in the Sixties. That’s the subject of the book: the communications landscape, the intersecting mirages of fiction and reality with which we all live, they’re the real heroes. It’s not important to me to investigate an internal sensibility, as the great modernist writers did. In this context I actually don’t like hearing the phrase ‘experimental literature’, exactly, as when it’s used here in this country, it appears mostly in a critical sense, because unfortunately ‘experimental’ literature is mostly really nothing more than the ego-trips of different people into their own psyches, which hardly anyone can follow and which are ultimately only of interest to themselves. That’s the case with much of what’s generally considered ‘High Literature’. Unfortunately.

With The Atrocity Exhibition, on the contrary, that’s not the case. Here, the outer world is omnipresent, whereas in such books as those I’ve just mentioned, it has no relevance whatsoever. Consequently the book isn’t just a daydream, but consists of concrete relations throughout.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: What actual influence did the works of William S. Burroughs have on The Atrocity Exhibition? Do you appreciate him only as an author, or has he also made a lasting impression upon you?

BALLARD: He’s had no influence on me at all. I like several of his works. I often hear that Burroughs must have been a great influence on me and that it’s particularly noticeable in The Atrocity Exhibition. But it’s untrue. If one looks at Burroughs’ books, one can see that they’re entirely unstructured stylistically, that they consist almost completely of a ’stream of consciousness’ in the Joycean sense, and are hence of a fully subjective world, and his works are improvised, frayed at every point, without a clear aim. His narrative structure is without architecture, written straight out of the feelings, without planning. And I’ve never used the so-called cut-up technique. I’ve been acquainted with Burroughs for several years, and he is quite of the opinion that his cut-up and fold-out techniques are very helpful in representing the world around us as it really is. He is of the opinion that the true nature of the world will be revealed by his random associations. My stories in The Atrocity Exhibition are entirely in opposition to that, they have a very precisely designed structure; the ‘condensed novels’ are like a machine working towards a clearly defined goal.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: On to the Seventies. Your first novel to be published in this new decade was Crash.

BALLARD: Right. It developed directly out of The Atrocity Exhibition; there was even one of the ‘condensed novels’ with that title. The automobile accident has always interested me, and Crash is actually a model of the fictionalization of reality in the Sixties. In the ‘condensed novels’ there appears at one point a protagonist who puts together an exhibition of crashed cars, that was before I’d yet written Crash, the theme already held an extraordinary fascination for me. I wanted to have this exhibition as a sort of test for my theories, and I held this art exhibition as a psychological experiment as it were. What interested me particularly was how the visitors to this exhibition would react. So, we exhibited these automobiles that were heavily crash-damaged in a gallery in London, a gallery that was otherwise completely bare, only white walls, nothing else, no posters, no other exhibited items, just the junked cars. And naturally no explanation of what it was all supposed to mean, just the three cars displayed as sculpture. And then I had an internal monitor system, as well as a topless girl who went about interviewing the audience, and this would be recorded on the monitors. At the opening I gave a party for the press and so forth, and you can believe me when I say that although I’ve been invited to a lot of publisher’s parties and the like, I’ve never yet seen one where people got drunk so quickly as on that evening. And also, when the exhibition opened, people would react with shock and nervous laughter. One of the cars was a Pontiac that had had a frontal collision. The cars were intact up to the forward part and the front seats, where the motor had been impressed into them, as it were; or better, the other way round. Especially these cars with their emblematic American appearance and the psychological contouring embodied in American cars, these cars had a very particular fascination for people. People were stunned. And the girl who conducted the interviews was actually supposed to do it entirely naked, but when she saw the cars she decided to refuse. And when she conducted the interviews and people saw themselves on the monitors being interviewed in the cars, they would shift into the back seats at the drop of a hat.

And also the cars got in worse condition the longer they were on display, the remaining windows smashed in with bottles and so on. The result of this test was in any case extraordinarily odd, and quite evidently I touched people’s nerve, a psychological nerve. Many people came to the exhibition several times, just to attack the cars and destroy them further. Ultimately, this exhibition convinced me that I ought to write Crash. I’m still of the firm conviction that everything I wanted to express in Crash is true.

And something fascinated people, as the book went through two hardback editions here, which is unusual, and it was a big success especially in France. It’s a pity that it never appeared in Germany. Incidentally, the book was a flop in America, despite great expense on publicity. But that might be because Europeans are mostly faced with uncompromising subjects more frequently, particularly in France where there’s a very long literary tradition of pornographic texts. In France pornography was always recognized as a serious literary stylistic movement, their tradition stretches back as far as people like Sade. And also all the principals in the French revolution wrote pornographic or erotic literature. In France it’s recognized, whereas people in this country or in America maintain a very strict distinction between it and other literature, because it’s only just started to be published during the last fifteen years, and most of that is of dubious character.

FUCHS & KÖRBER: After Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise, the two other novels which both essentially take issue with modern technology, there was another short story collection published, Low-Flying Aircraft, which when set against the stories from the Sixties also contain new material that proceeds more from your earlier stories…

BALLARD: Oh, I’ve always only written basically a certain type of literature. People always think that in the middle of the Sixties I only wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, but that’s not the case. In actual fact I also wrote a great number of entirely conventional short stories during that time. People tend to think that I left off writing ‘condensed novels’ in 1970 because they weren’t accepted by the public, just as they’re of the opinion that I left off writing conventional stories after 1965, because they were no longer accepted. One also often reads that, but it’s not true. In 1965 I wrote my fifty-fourth short story, and that was ‘The Assassination of JFK’, and story number fifty-five was ‘You and Me and the Continuum’. Then in 1970 I wrote my eighty-sixth short story. That’s thirty-two stories all told, and of those, twenty were certainly entirely conventional stories. I’ve therefore never turned my back on them.

I admit that in a certain way 1975 was the end of a period. I’d written four books all tending in one particular direction, if one counts The Atrocity Exhibition, all dealing with the communications landscape and modern technology. Afterwards I’d simply had enough of it and I went off towards other themes. That will also be apparent in the new collection, which I’ve just finished. It will have the title Myths of the Near Future, and many of the stories it contains are pure imagination, so they range about in the zone of free, fantastic literature, like both of my last novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America.

LEFT: Kristallwelt (The Crystal World; Phantasia Science Fiction Series, 2005).

FUCHS & KÖRBER: In the newer novels there’s somewhat of an absence of the forceful hallucinatory images that your earlier books like The Crystal World contained. Did those descriptions back then have their origins in drugs, and have you yourself ever experimented with drugs or written under the influence of drugs, as many have supposed of The Crystal World?

BALLARD: Now, I wrote The Crystal World in 1964, and ‘The Illuminated Man’, the short story upon which the novel was based, must have come into being in about 1961. In those days LSD had certainly not yet become an issue, and I myself first tried it in 1967. Back then it was the great fashion, and everyone tried it once, psychedelic culture came directly out of it. Naturally there are states of affairs described in The Crystal World – the prismatic world, the static elements, the complete absence of time and so on, even experiences – that bear a marked resemblance to an LSD trip. Yet the novel didn’t emerge from a drug experience, and that to me is further evidence that nothing comes even close to human imagination, it can do it all. The ending of ‘The Voices of Time’ is also very strongly evocative of a drug experience, when the protagonist with his increasing perceptions can suddenly perceive every most minute particle of the world, loses all sense of time, and sinks completely under a storm of impressions. This story also came about without drugs, and that, I believe, confirms what I’ve just said, that the human imagination is incapable of nothing, it doesn’t have to fall back on artificial stimulants, on chemicals, to release something that the brain can do even on its own. A fertile imagination is better than any drug.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs/Joachim Körber, ‘Ein Interview mit J. G. Ballard’ in Joachim Körber, ed., J. G. Ballard: Der Visionär des Phantastischen (Meitingen: Corian-Verlag, 1985).

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Munich Round Up: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

by the Crashman.

ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.

As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.

When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.

In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.

I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.

I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie was devastatingly, beautifully faithful to Ballard and after I saw it I realized that all of Ballard’s work could be read as a screenplay, a script for a movie about the storms of change enveloping the world.

ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.

I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.

In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.

Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.

I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.

But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.

ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.

Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.

So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.

ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’

The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.

I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.

I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.

ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’

The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.

At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (‘This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.

While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.

I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.

ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’

The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.

I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…

Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.

It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.

On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.

We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.

The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.

..:: MORE CRASHMAN
+ Crashman: YouTube
+ Crashman: LiveVideo

The house that Sam built … from Pam.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on Sam Newman’s ass house:

“As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a television howl. Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture. Was this, he wondered, the denouement of the French Revolution?”

For those outside of Australia, Newman is a local type, an ex-footballer who built a new career out of being an all-purpose media boor. So the script goes, nothing is beyond him, whether it’s allegedly monstering pregnant women in supermarkets or, yes, erecting a larger-than-life facade of Pamela Anderson (“we’re just good friends,” says Sam) to breast his inner-city property.

MelbPsy’s ironic appropriation of the Atrocity aesthetic is completely appropriate, then, given that book’s concern with irradiated images of celebrity culture beamed aloft on 400ft-high billboards:

“He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor Pammy Anderson. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.”

JGB, Atrocity, 1970.

Sam Newman: “Most people are wankers…”

In Atrocity, when the main character erects mindscapes and celebrity billboards, he’s using the radiation of the media landscape against itself in order to clear autonomous zones — “neural intervals” — ready for inscription by brand-new auratic powers…

…while Newman has been run over by his girlfriend in her car (giving him a broken leg and ankle) and has been beaten up by an ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend (giving him a broken nose). Yet Sam has used these highly publicised sexual pecadilloes to create his own independent nation, the United State of Sam, seceding from Australia on the back of its strident Constitution, customised and retooled from all that negative publicity and now reoccupying and re-broadcasting across all media:

“Most people you meet are wankers, pure and simple. Women are schemers, men are liars. That is all you have to remember … I’m just about the only heterosexual left in my street. I’m thinking of leaving the country before being gay becomes compulsory. I like women. Just remember they are schemers.”

Sammy, 2003.

He has been punched out not once but twice by separate footballers live on air, and is renowned for his trademark phrase, “You idiot,” hurled indiscriminately at the public — at mental defectives, immigrants, grannies, junkies, any old trash — while doing his roving “Street Talk” segments for The Footy Show, the sport-hooligan fest that made his TV name and on which he appeared in blackface after Aboriginal footballer Nicky Winmar failed to make his scheduled slot. He has more enemies than Max Gogarty, yet remains a wildly popular and highly paid celebrity.

According to this puffpiece, he serves an all-purpose role, functioning equally as virtual gigolo and cathartic release for the pent-up violence of ordinary lives:

“No small part of Newman’s attractiveness to women (and make no mistake about it, Sam Newman has a good deal to do with “The Footy Show”’s enormous popularity with women, who watch it in greater numbers than do men), is the impression he conveys of being a man who does not lose his temper. This is a man you can thump in the chest, reprimand, tease — without risking being hit. And this is a man you can flirt with, show your legs to (as did one elderly woman in a notable “Street Talk” segment), without fear that he will “lose control.”
…
Sam does not “control” himself. Sam calls idiots idiots. It does not really matter (to most of the audience) whether or not they are idiots, whether or not Sam has quoted them or represented them fairly. It matters that someone says what he bloody well reckons. Those without Sam’s license (women, for instance) can enjoy this vicariously.”

If you’ve read Kingdom Come, which of course charts The Rise and Fall of TV hack David Cruise and his Minders from Staines, Sam might be sounding familiar by now:

“It was tuned to the Metro-Centre cable channel, and showed an afternoon discussion programme transmitted from the mezzanine studio. The suntanned face of David Cruise dominated everything, and covered the proceedings like a cheap but over-bright lacquer. He was smiling and affable, but faintly hostile, like a bullying valet. Perhaps people in the motorway towns liked to be shouted at.”

“‘So David Cruise is the führer? He’s fairly benign.’

‘He’s a nothing. He’s a “virtual” man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It’s a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hates.’”

“Cruise’s obsessions and sexual hang-ups were the compass-dance of a demented king bee, guiding the hive to a destination it had already chosen. His chat-show act, based on scripts I tailored around him, might be a performance, but it validated the hunger and restlessness of his audience. The housewives mailing their photographs to him were performing rituals of assent, expressing their longing for a faith beyond politics.”

“David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.”

“‘One thing David Cruise had was an unlimited supply of enemies. That was part of his strategy. You know that, Richard. You planned it that way.’”

All quotes, Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Oh yes. Now I remember how Kingdom Come ends…

Our man David Cruise in his latest campaign… Photo courtesy Metro-Centre.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia
+ The Rats that Ate Mill Park
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men

One is to provide full RSS feeds for this site rather than partials, which is what was on offer previously. I did this because I read on various forums about so many people getting indignant about partial feeds, saying if a site supplies partials they’ll ‘unsubscribe from the feed straight away, no fooling around, mister!’ Or that ‘life’s too short to click on a partial feed and go to an external site; the RSS reader is my space, how dare you take me out if it’… Or, ’sites that supply partials are like big bastard record companies plastering music with DRM; how dare you place restrictions on my content, I want it delivered the way I choose’, etc etc…

Such venom. It really takes me aback, the way people feel about this topic.

Personally, I don’t have a problem clicking on a partial feed to read a post in its original context, and I’m imagining I’m as ‘time poor’ as many, but if it gets me more readers then full feeds it is. Although, after carefully redesigning the site so that no post is privileged over the other, so that there’s no top-down hierarchy, full feeds of course scupper that ideal — it’s top-down all the way with your good old RSS readers.

The other thing I did, perhaps the most controversial, was to set up a MySpace page for the Ballardian Home Movie competition. The cheek of it, eh? After I had the nerve to unceremoniously slag off that whole insidious gated community.

Heh, heh.

Go on, then — flame away.

The fear of some of our best contemporary writers is that the British love of classic adaptations reflects an unhealthy obsession with the past.

Novelist JG Ballard is blunt about it. ‘I can’t stand these costume dramas. They drive me insane. It is all so phoney,’ he complained. ‘Why does the BBC spend so much time in the past? It seems the only thing we have to look forward to in this country is our nostalgia.’

The nation, he believes, has ‘always been in love with pageantry and uniforms’, but it is not something the BBC should repeatedly encourage.

‘There are too many hats. Everybody is over-dressed. We should have more drama set in the present day. These costume dramas feed our desperate need for a more deferential class system and a sense of order in society.’
…
The enduring appeal of the costume drama for its millions of viewers is harder to pin down … [Bill] Gallagher suspects these series are popular because they portray a simpler world… Ballard would disagree, of course. His most recent novel, Kingdom Come, was set in a shopping mall outside west London and asks whether consumerism in our society could ever turn into fascism. ‘We seem to have our heads in the sand,’ he said. ‘It is almost as if the present is too frightening to face.’

I don’t know, I just find all this rather amusing, the fact that the Observer journalist, Vanessa Thorpe, in composing this piece on Britain’s ‘love affair with braces and bonnets’, has seen fit to ring up Ballard for his opinion.

It is ultimately fitting, though, in that Ballard has always savaged what he terms ‘heritage England’, memorably describing London as ‘a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.’

Costume dramas, in his view then, seem equally ‘instruments of political control’, ‘endless columned porticos’ for the mind…

[ thanks, Tim C ]

Recently, Rick McGrath was in the process of wooing Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy with his extensive collection of Ballard first editions, which the Collection might archive. Sensing his keen collector’s eye, the head of the Collection passed on a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974. According to McGrath: ‘It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The interview is 8,000 words long, and covers a wide range of topics.’

Rick has now onlined the transcript and it’s an absorbing read. Today we are well familiar with Ballard’s riffs and routines, but imagine how utterly alien his pronouncements must have sounded back then. An indication of this is the difficulty the interviewer, Carol Orr, sometimes has with Ballard’s concepts. When talking of the isolation that results from surrounding ourselves with technological systems, Ballard says, ‘We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza…’ In response Orr says, ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of conscious decision to people’s psychological needs, since that was industrialization, that was….’

Then Ballard, with this: ‘These are the sort of dreams these are — I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’

Protesting, Orr says, ‘Well, if you want to make that kind of statement. I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either’. To which Ballard replies:

JGB: One is not living in…an 18th-to-19th-century city where, as it were, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations. Where we were in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case. Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. That being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realize. Oh sure, you may…

Orr: … as far as you are trapped within your own body…

JGB: No, no, compared with the life you would have lived 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think a mediaeval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more. The city or the town or the suburb or the street — these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

I do get a sense that Orr is a little out of her depth, and it’s no surprise that after this exchange she suddenly says, ‘On that note we’re going to have to close up shop’, ending the interview. I’m not having a go at her by saying this, just pointing out that Ballard was thinking through technological relations and scenarios in a rather unique fashion back then. Picture it: he’s a science-fiction writer, whose ostensible job is to predict the future, but who undercuts that by suggesting that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow, today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device, I mean a direction, a compass-bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving toward psychologically and physically — I think that possibility is rather outdated.’

I’m especially blown away by the following statement, in response to a question from Orr about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust. Not only does Ballard seriously undermine the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would reach a frothing peak in the 80s, but he also accurately foretells the role of networked technology and identity theft as much greater threats. All from the ‘primitive’ vantage point of 1974:

JGB: I wouldn’t have thought if there were any danger to life on this planet it would come from the possibility of nuclear warfare. Far more from the misuse of, say, antibiotics, the misuse of computers, [or] of overpopulation as a product of better health, better nutrition and the like, and a general lack of control. What I’m concerned with is that people, by reacting against technology, by taking a very Arcadian view of what life on this planet should be, may no longer be able to deal with the real threats when they begin to come from technology, which they probably will.

Threats to the quality of life that everyone is so concerned about will come much more, say, from the widespread application of computers to every aspect of our lives where all sorts of science-fiction fantasies will come true, where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere — where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information. Now, I think that’s much more of a danger.

The potency of Ballard’s prophecy is especially relevant when you consider that Alvin Toffler’s very popular Future Shock was published around the same time, and was considered to be a frightening and all-too-real vision of the future, with its warnings of a ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’.

In this interview, by contrast, while Ballard might be concerned about the effects of networked technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome that derives from a belief in the evolutionary, affirmative possibilities of this rapid rate of change:

JGB: I’m absolutely convinced now people are morally and psychologically stronger and healthier than they’ve ever been before. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. I think they’re strong enough and healthy enough to begin to, in a sense, play with their own psychologies, to be able to play games with themselves. In the sense that one goes out to one’s tennis court and plays a set of tennis with a friend. One will be able to play psychological games, one will be able to assume psychological roles of various kinds. One will be able to devise situations, the dramatic kind if you like, which won’t upset us, which won’t damage the mind in any way, which won’t lead to a nervous collapse. I think people are strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place.

I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference of being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach…

I can’t help thinking of the whole FaceSpace phenomenon when reading this passage, and while in my mind the jury’s out on the ‘affirmative’ nature of that particular interface, I have no doubt that, as a futurist, Ballard has the edge over Toffler. Very simplistically (I’m no Toffler expert), the difference seems to be that Toffler insists we must impose our will on technology, whereas Ballard is positive that we must, to a certain extent, accept the inexorable logic of technological growth and adapt accordingly.

And now, one final quote, and then you must read the whole 8,000 words for yourself over at Rick’s site. I like this passage for the insight it gives into the Ballardian aesthetic, and the sense that aesthetic standards are really just another form of control (what Fredric Jameson has termed ‘the domination of political form over matter with the imperatives of aesthetic modernism’):

JGB: I feel that a modern high-rise building or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself the aesthetic laws, all the laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives — the well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. I mean, they embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.

The last 100 years have led us toward industrial design, have consistently led us towards the set of standards, the set of aesthetic yardsticks, which we apply in our everyday lives — to our judgment of which washing machine we buy, which motorcar we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say “my God” automatically, because to say something is a road, it must therefore be ugly, is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.

Recently, Keith S. emailed to tell me he’d come across a rare Ballard interview from 1974. It was published in Corridor, a small-press magazine that has been described as ‘a cheaper, thinner, New Worlds [featuring] many of the same authors’.

The interview took place in February 1973, with Crash about to be published and Concrete Island recently completed. JGB talks to Peter about his rejection of ‘hard science fiction’, about the genesis of The Atrocity Exhibition, and about his later switch from experimental fiction to a more conventional narrative style. Ballard also tests soon-to-be familiar riffs, including what must be among the first airings of his famous maxim: ’sex times technology equals the future’.

SS

PETER LINNETT: How did you come to be a writer?

J.G. BALLARD: This goes back to when I was a child. In fact the first book I ever produced was when I was about 12 years old, on how to play contract bridge. But my real start, oddly enough, came at school. The whole form was given, for some reason, 10 pages of lines to copy out. The masters didn’t give a damn what we wrote out — all they wanted to see was all this paper covered. I was copying lines out of a thriller, and I found that it was easier if I didn’t bother to transcribe, but just made up the story myself. That was the first time I realised it was exciting to invent things. That set me off. I was writing all through school.

LEFT: Ballard’s 1951 author picture as published in Varsity.

Then when I went to Cambridge there was an annual short story competition in Varsity — I entered it, and won it. By that time I was about 20, and pretty well convinced I wanted to be a writer.

How about Science Fiction, was that what you were starting out to do?

At that stage no. When I came out of the Air Force at the age of 24 I’d written a lot of short stories of a general kind, and was vaguely writing a novel, but there was something missing from all of this, as well as from most of the fiction being published then. It didn’t seem to me interesting enough or about the real world. I saw the middle fifties as being more and more dominated by science and technology; and the only fiction that was about life then was science fiction. If the whole of previous fiction had not existed, if you started out from scratch in 1956, to write about the world in which you lived, you would write something pretty close to SF. You had to write it, to write about your own world.

It’s a paradox — people thought of SF as something fantastic and remote from ordinary experience. But I felt that was a wrong impression; in fact here was a marvellous area, a tremendously exciting area, that ought to be explored. I wasn’t interested in interplanetary travel and time travel and so on — this was the other thing, I felt SF hadn’t really tapped its own possibilities. This was what I set out to do.

I think your first published story was ‘Prima Belladonna’, in Science Fantasy in 1956. I don’t suppose the SF markets were very lucrative at this time?

No, the payments were extremely small — a flat rate of 2 pounds per one thousand words. But over the years a lot of the short stories have made a good deal of money for me, through being reprinted so many times. Some I’ve made a total of l,000 pounds from — each. And many have been anthologised 30 times. The point about writing for the SF magazines was, the demand was unlimited. You were under pressure by the editor, if you had any talent at all, to go on writing. You could have a short story in every issue of a magazine, for a whole year. Which was quite unlike any of the general fiction magazines like Argosy, or the literary magazines — they would take a story from you but they wouldn’t want another one for a long while. That’s still true today. So there was this great pressure to produce material; and it was a tremendous test of one’s talent and imagination.

Your first published novel was The Wind From Nowhere, in 1962, which seems rather different from the rest of your work.

That was really done as a kind of joke. At the time I wrote it, in 1961, my wife and I were extremely short of money. The one thing I wanted to do was to be able to give up my job as an editor of a scientific magazine so that I could write a decent novel, to think about where I was going as a writer. We’d moved to Shepperton in 1960, and I had this tremendously long railway journey in the evenings, coming home from work; there were all these small children running around, I was absolutely exhausted. The future looked extremely dismal, professionally speaking; I’d been writing short stories since 1956 but I felt I was getting nowhere. I needed a break. I didn’t want to begin lowering my sights and begin churning out novels that were partly serious — you know, money spinners. I had two weeks’ holiday — I think my wife suggested it: why don’t you, just for the hell of it, write a novel in two weeks? I’d always been intrigued by the idea of writing a novel very quickly and I still am. I’d like to be able to write a novel in three days. So I sat down and wrote The Wind From Nowhere, in literally I think 10 working days. I set myself a target of something like 6,000 words a day, which I kept up for 10 days. I didn’t make very much money from it, but I made enough, straight away, to be able to give up my job. Soon after I wrote my first serious novel, The Drowned World.

Why did you use the form of the disaster story in your three subsequent novels?

I wanted to deal with a large canvas. I was interested in events, if you like; systems, of a very large area. The entire biological kingdom viewed as a single organism, as a single continuing vast memory. In fact I’ve never thought of them as being disaster stories, because I don’t see them as having unhappy endings. The hero follows the logic of his own mind; and I feel that anyone who does this is, in a sense, fulfilling himself. I regard all those novels as stories of psychic fulfilment.

The apocalyptic scene is really just the means of sending the hero on this journey?

Right. Also I was dealing with states of tremendous psychological crisis and transformation. Possibly because of my own background in the Far East during the war, and so on, I’ve always felt that there are situations such as great natural disasters, or wars — huge transformations of ordinary life where the barriers between external world and internal world of the mind begin to break down, and you get a kind of overlap. All this seemed to me a very potent, very powerful area — for my imagination anyway.

That’s inner space? Did you coin that term?

I don’t know whether I was the first person to use it; when I first used it I was using it in conversation, in the late fifties. When I began writing I used it specifically within the context of SF, as a counterstroke against the phrase ‘outer space’, which roughly speaking summed up the whole of SF. I wanted inner space, psychological space.

Do you prefer using a specific locale in your work? In The Crystal World, for instance, you set the scene in Central Africa.

I use the locales that seem suitable to the subject at hand. I’m drawn to certain kinds of landscape: deserts, jungles, deltas, certain kinds of urban landscape. I suppose I like very formalised landscapes, like great dunes or sand bars. I’m drawn to freeways, concrete flyovers, the metallised landscapes of giant airports.

As far as naming a particular place goes — well, take something like Atrocity Exhibition. It’s not really set anywhere. It probably is England, in fact, but it could equally be elsewhere. A lot of Americans think it’s the United States. It’s not specifically the U.S. but it could be. It’s really a landscape we see in our minds, which we carry around with us, which we might see as we dream.

Why did you start writing the so-called condensed novels?

I wanted to write directly about the present day, and the peculiar psychological climate that existed in the middle sixties, when I started writing them. I think the key to that book was Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, which I saw — and still do see — as the most important event of the whole of the nineteen-sixties. It seemed to me that to write about this, and about similar events that were taking place, like the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, and the emergence of political figures like Ronald Reagan, and the whole tremendous explosion of the mass media, the way politicians and advertising corporations were using them — well, it was to try to come to terms with all this. It seemed to me it was creating a landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.

Reality and fiction were crossing each other.

Yes, they’d begun to reverse — the only point of reality was our own minds. It seemed to me that the only way to write about all this was to meet the landscape on its own terms. Useless to try to impose the conventions of the 19th-century realistic novel on this incredible five-dimensional fiction moving around us all the time at high speed. And I tried to develop — and I think successfully — a technique of mine, the so-called condensed novels, where I was able to cross all these events, at right angles if you like. Like cutting through the stem of a plant to expose the cross section of its main vessels. So this technique was devised to deal with this fragmentation and overlay of reality, through the fragmentation of narrative. Although the plot lines are very strong in those stories.

And they’re all variants. Each of the main stories in that collection describe the same man in the same state of mental crisis, but they treat him, as it were, at different points along a spectrum — as you might compile a scientific dossier about someone, explore various aspects of his make up. On the one hand a story like ‘The Summer Cannibals’, where a man and a woman have turned up at a kind of super-heated resort. This is a completely naturalistic account of two people on the level of their sweat glands. In fact they don’t have names, because their names are not important. Right through to the other extreme, where the character is seen as a kind of cosmic hero, a second coming of Christ, in ‘You And Me And The Continuum’. The same character appears in a whole series of different roles. Any of us could be fragmented in the same way, we are all to some extent.

The three heroes of your earlier novels seem to be variations of the same character. Do you worry very much about character — getting across a person’s character?

This one figure is a dominant character of mine; I suppose he’s a version of myself. It’s a journey towards myself — I suppose all writing is. On the whole, SF is not that interested in characterisation; it’s interested in psychological roles which operate on a slightly different level,

Atrocity wasn’t liked very much by critics.

It had very bad reviews over here, on the whole. But in Europe, oddly enough, the response was completely different. Denmark, Germany, Holland — it had a terrific reception, absolutely stupendous, What impressed me about the reviews was not that they were flattering, but that they grasped straight away what the book was about. Most of the English reviewers seemed to resent not just the technique, the style in which the book was written, but also the subject matter, that I should want to talk about such things.

In America the entire Doubleday edition was destroyed, on the orders of an executive, for similar reasons. The book has just been published in America under a different title [Love and Napalm: Export USA], by Grove Press. As far as response to the stories on the US SF scene goes, you’ve got to bear in mind that there I was seen as the originator of the so called New Wave — terrible phrase — and I was absolutely loathed by most of the American SF establishment. The old guard — Isaac Asimov and company — would almost go red in the face with anger. But that particular storm, New Wave vs. Old Wave, has died down; it was just a sort of last spasm of the old guard, I think,

Do you see any good writers emerging from the so-called New Wave?

I don’t think there ever was a New Wave. There was a generation of younger writers, writing largely within New Worlds magazine, and trying to do something different with SF. Americans like Tom Disch, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, and various others like Charles Platt — they’re really all individualists, not a school of writers. They’re all very different.

Who do you think lumped them together like this?

They were lumped together by being published, to some extent, in New Worlds. The so-called New Wave began long before it was seized on by the old guard SF fans. When Ted Carnell was still editing the magazine, in the late fifties, he was already publishing the sort of material by me that was going to outrage American fans. He published ‘The Terminal Beach’, a story which actually started me off on the series that led to The Atrocity Exhibition, in 1963. Some of my early stories were already arousing tremendous hostility on the part of the British fans. They were writing to Ted and telling him, stop publishing this nonsense. So the trouble was brewing a long, long while ago.

The Atrocity Exhibition was published in 1970 — could you say anything about what you’ve done since?

Well, my last novel I finished three weeks ago. I’d rather not give the story away as it won’t be published here for a year [presumably Concrete Island; SS]. But a previous novel, entitled Crash, will be published in June by Cape. I spent about two years writing that. As the title implies it’s about the motor car, and its whole role in our lives. It’s a cautionary tale in a sense, how I see the future. Sex times technology equals the future. In the novel I take the motor car as most clearly representing technology in our lives.

Taking off from ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’?

In a sense it’s a follow on, but it’s written in completely conventional narrative. I felt that was the best technique to use.

So you still feel it’s OK to me conventional structures?

I think one has to adjust the style to the subject matter. People have accused me of being an experimental writer, but I’ve written 90 short stories and 6 novels, of which 80 short stories and 6 novels are completely conventional, in technique and form. I think the subject matter comes first; the style and technique serve the subject matter; and I still think there’s a place for conventional narrative. It’s the idea that needs to be needled. My real criticism of most of the fiction written today is that the content is so banal, so second rate, so imitative of itself. It’s a fiction based on fiction, other people’s fiction, rather than based on experience and ordinary life.

Finally, have you any advice to offer to budding writers?

Yes, I’d warn anyone beginning his career, that the days when a writer could think of having a career, writing fiction as a main life’s activity, are probably over. I think it’s going to be more and more difficult for the novelist and short story writer to make a living of any kind over the next 20 years. All the signs are that fiction sales are sliding downwards, continuously. Don’t regard yourself as being anyone special, as having any right to even a modest financial success, because you’re a writer. So be very wary about committing yourself entirely to being a writer. I think the writer’s role is very much in decline, at least for the time being.

As for SF, it’s one of the healthiest fields in fiction — sales of SF books all over the world are going up, one’s stuff is endlessly reprinted. I would say that SF is one of the few areas where you could actually be successful, if you have the flair. There’s no problem within SF; it’s outside the field that the problems lie, for the writer there.

..:: END

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted at in the book’s second-last chapter, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. A version that replaces Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

In ‘Fuck Reagan’, ‘patients in terminal paresis’ are encouraged to devise the ‘optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan’. A ‘unique ontology of violence and disaster’ takes shape, as the ordinary public — the patients suffering from paresis; impaired movement, paralysis — reanimate by tearing down the lustre surrounding celebrity culture, the forcefield that has prevented the ‘little people’ from realising their full potential.

In Ballard’s piece, originally published in 1968, the cultural class system that has impaired, or paralysed, ordinary people with feelings of guilt and inadequacy in the face of a galaxy of radiant stars is destroyed in a savage, air-strike of the imagination:

Patients [placed] Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks… Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (165).
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This literally is SLASH fiction. Blood drips from it.

‘Fuck Reagan’ marks a distinct break from the rest of The Atrocity Exhibition, in which, despite the instability of the central character’s fantasies, there was a certain awe underlying his imaginative sorties into the world of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, John F Kennedy and so on — an awe that prevented him from making the final leap. It’s also present in the character Vaughan, in Crash, who yearns of killing Elizabeth Taylor in a celebrity car crash but ultimately ends up annihilating only himself, terminally unfulfilled (along with a busload of innocent bystanders who got in his way).

In ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Ballard tested the wind, pushed the equation to its outer limits, predicted the rise of a new kind of ‘celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement’ (as Ballard later termed the second wave of celebrity culture), a celebrity that causes resentment when ‘ordinary people’ finally have the means to dismantle the image, trying it on for themselves like a serial killer tries on a woman’s skin. There is no further truck with reification, with celebrity-deity because ordinary people have built a web 2.0 culture (or have been given the power, the means to build it) that will answer back and that will destroy those who seek to involve an unwilling public in their fantasies.

In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan… Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (168).
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But a web 2.0 culture doesn’t need to employ technology — doesn’t need the web, even — to do so. So, let’s use this term ‘web 2.0′ to denote a free-for-all that translates into the real world, an attitude that’s hardwired into the brain through constant exposure to the media landscape. As Ballard clearly outlines, the media colonisation of all available public and personal space means that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but feed on the corpses…

Fame and celebrity were again on trial, as if being famous itself was an incitement to anger and revenge.”

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J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003).
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…spiraling down a black hole eating white stars, ported into Second Life, which lies just below the whirlpool, landmarked over there.

Paris Hilton is being consumed as we speak, just another star imploding. The savage public will not be placated by her talk of finding God in a jail cell. The savage public will not be wooed with her repentance and renunciation of vacuity. The savage public wants to feast on the corpse of empty celebrity. The savage public wants revenge. Like an anonymous would-be web 2.0 commenter leaving bile in the comments box of some blog that’s got too big for its boots, the savage public wants to break through the screen, wants to pierce the rump of unattainable stardom until blood oozes through the pores. So the savage public goes further, building its own ‘blog’ that becomes a destroying machine that becomes the body, drinking the blood and becoming infested with the knowledge that no one is better than ‘me’. The savage public wants to wank over serial killers and murderers, taking revenge for celebrity being attached to the cult of death. The savage public devours torture porn, bathes in the Bathory blood of actresses hogtied upside down. The savage public ensures that the most searched term leading to this very website is, in fact, the term ‘Princess Diana car crash’ and its multiple variations: ‘Di death fuck’; ’sex Di death crash’; ‘fuck exhaust sex Di car Dodi died’.

The savage public wants to kill kill kill until there is nothing left, just a flat, smoking wasteland.

The savage public demands that torture porn be indistinguishable from snuff.

The savage public has no imagination and will feed off that corpse before turning on you, too.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

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J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (173).
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…:: ATROCITY II: Notes Towards a Sequel
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+ ‘R.P.M’ by Chris Nakashima-Brown
+ Invisible Celebrity Literature
+ Gallery of the Absurd by ‘14′
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ ‘Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Annik Hovac
+ ‘Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency’ by k-punk

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):

For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of a day’s television programmes transmitted to an unnamed city in the northern hemisphere on December 23, 1999, offers its own intriguing insight into the origins of the disaster.”

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J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
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I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ‘14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and frightening caricatures of A-list celebrities. There’s TomKat recast as TomRat — two furry, grotesque rodents cradling their hideous offspring; there’s The Three Disgraces: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, their scabby firecrotches on display in a gross distortion of Botticelli’s La Primavera.

And then there’s an entry titled If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie [see above], with its distinct Ballardian tinge. In Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, the character T’s fractured psyche, trying to make sense of the imploding late 60s media landscape, is awash in a distorted world of gigantic billboards featuring images of celebrities and traumatic, media-irradiated eruptions of violence (the Vietnam War; the Kennedy assassination) — all of it filling his mind and consequently the skies that hang above the coded landscape of telecommunication towers, satellite arrays and filling stations.

Here are some representative passages:

For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.”

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J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, p. 11.
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During the past week a series of enormous signs had been built along the roads surrounding the hospital, almost walling it in from the rest of the world… Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea…”

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J.G. Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), RE/Search edition, p. 15.
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Ballard borrows the concept of the mindscape — the mind as landscape — from Dali, explaining that he wanted ‘to explore the subliminal connections between, say, the Marilyn Monroe figure on a giant billboard, one’s own personal life and sexual relationships, and the unconscious layers of sexual memory and desire stowed away in the cargo hold of one’s psyche. All this is creating a mix that is unique to the 20th century.’

In the 21st century, that mix is hypermagnified, hyperintense — celebrities are famous simply for being famous (or for flashing their crotch in public). Again, Ballard was quick off the mark:

Celebrity uncontaminated by actual achievement has enormous lift-off capacity. It can float instantly in the air and we all stand back in amazement. This puzzles us and triggers a curiosity about the real nature of these people whose fame you can’t justify. Fantasy then rushes in to fill the vacuum, which is a very different thing from the way fame operated in the past. I don’t suppose the average Londoner living through the Blitz had any fantasies about Winston Churchill.

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J.G. Ballard, quoted in Frieze, 1996.
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This chimes in with the artist’s statement:

One of my favorite Salvador Dali paintings is Sleep. I place Angelina Jolie in this painting because she’s larger than life and needs several Daliesque pedestals to support her fame. Not only is she considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, she also donates time, money and energy toward the betterment of others. Her qualities of rebellious vixen combined with doting mother generate intrigue and devout fandom.”

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‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’. 14.
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Indeed, 14’s brilliant, timely Dali pastiche, featuring the monstrous, suspended head of uber-celebrity Angelina Jolie backlit by a Surrealistic sky, is nothing less than a portrait from a 21st-century Atrocity Exhibition.

by Benjamin Noys

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In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced with Dr Noys’s permission.

Benjamin Noys is Lecturer in English at The University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000) and The Culture of Death (2005).
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In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) as ‘the first great novel of the universe of simulation’ (1994: 119). For Baudrillard it took science-fiction beyond its usual coordinates of imaginary future universes and towards our world as hyperreal (1994: 125). In this situation of the ‘precession of simulacra‘ (1991: 1, Baudrillard’s italics) theory becomes science-fiction and science-fiction becomes theory. Therefore we see a point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J. G. Ballard, which has developed as both try to ascertain the precise mutations of this new universe of simulation. Together they form a strange kind of Beckettian ‘pseudo-couple’: locked together as ‘Baudrillard-Ballard’ or ‘Ballard-Baudrillard’. Despite the fact that, unlike the most famous theoretical ‘pseudo-couple’ of Deleuze and Guattari, they have not collaborated together numerous points of exchange exist between them. This is not a neutral cooperation but often takes an antagonistic form; what Baudrillard calls the mode of alterity or ‘the duel’ (2005: 72). However, in this mode we find an increasingly shared diagnosis of the present and a ‘hypercriticism’ that tracks the fate of alterity (synonymous for Baudrillard with Otherness, difference, and negativity in their radical forms). If the universe of simulation aims at ‘a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled’ (2005: 202) then alterity will be its victim.

This problem can be seen in what might seem an appropriately mediated reference to Baudrillard in Ballard’s recent novel Super-Cannes (2000): ‘I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard’ (88). Although this might be dismissed as a typically postmodern ironic ‘in-joke’ it actually speaks to the fate of alterity. The extremity of Baudrillard’s own theory becomes absorbed as a marketing tool by the culture industry, reduced to an unnamed quotation. What we can see here is a further mutation of the ‘perfect crime’ of the murder of alterity. This is a crime which also ‘erases its own tracks’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 197) by the production of new forms of simulated alterity. This then is the situation faced by the hypercritic; not only the extermination of any principle of alterity from which to make a critique but also the simulation of critique itself. It is precisely this mutation that both Baudrillard and Ballard engage with in their recent work.

Baudrillard’s example is that of auto-immune disorders (1993: 60-70). The more medicine eliminates disease the more it becomes haunted by disorders in which the body’s own immune system turns on itself. To avoid the disastrous consequences of this elimination of alterity the system of simulation introduces doses of homeopathic alterity (small amounts of alterity that keep the system in ‘health’ rather than leading it to turn on itself). In this way simulation goes so far as to simulate alterity, after it has ‘murdered’ its truly threatening forms. The result is a new form of what Baudrillard calls ‘trompe-l’oeil negativity’ (2005: 203), the simulated mirror-image of ‘real’ alterity. Although Baudrillard has laid a great deal of stress on this analysis recently, such as in Part II of The Transparency of Evil (1993: 113-174), it was present in his earlier work. In Simulacra and Simulation he remarks about the capacity of simulation ‘to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder – a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis’ (1994: 18-19). In fact it also bears close resemblance to the ‘artificial negativity’ thesis of Paul Piccone (1978) and the Telos group who, inspired by the work of the Frankfurt school, argued that the system required protest to buoy its functioning. Piccone argued the new left and other social movements of the 1960s were not real threats to the social system, but encouraged by the system to correct its own functioning. However, while he still sought an ‘organic negativity’ that could resist this process Baudrillard (and Ballard) instead trace the potential exacerbation of simulated alterity.

The murder of Otherness, of alterity, produces a new obsession with it and its return in what Baudrillard describes as ‘the melodrama of difference’ (1993: 124-138). For Baudrillard this is particularly true of forms of identity politics and other proclamations of the ‘right to difference’. In fact this always reduces alterity to something negotiable and actually refuses radical alterity. We can see further evidence for this ‘melodrama of difference’ in the toleration and funding of so-called ‘transgressive’ art – for example, in the symptomatic fact that Charles Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising (including for the British Conservative party), was the chief patron of the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of New British Art. In this case the ‘melodrama’ generates the requisite shock while also being used to market the singular ‘new’ achievements of British culture. Outside of the still relatively ‘high’ domain of art we could also consider the fashion for ‘extreme’ works in popular film. Since Se7en (1995), which explores the baroque tortures inflicted by a serial killer, a whole range of contemporary films have exploited the horror of torture: Ôdishon [Audition] (1999), Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Creep (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Hostel (2006) (to mention only the most well-known). Often they are seen as a reaction against the postmodern irony that has been prevalent in horror film since Scream (1996). In a sense, though, they offer a meta-irony; to make a ‘true’ horror film rather than a pastiche is simply to pastiche the ‘true’ horror film. This is evident in the way in which recent explicit remakes of 1970s horror films, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; original 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006; original 1977), have returned to negativity of the ‘original’ film only all the more effectively to simulate it. Any political negativity present in the original is lost through a focus on more and more precise representations of bodily suffering.

Still from Wolf Creek (dir. Greg McLean, 2005).

This then is a situation of administered alterity and the hypercritic responds not by withdrawing into a position of disgust, ressentiment, or resignation, as does Paul Virilio (2003). Neither do they simply celebrate this new body-shock art as revealing the obverse ‘truth’ of our mediatised culture. Instead they try to exceed both the new forms of simulated alterity and those forms of critique which rely on an alterity that has now disappeared. In fact despite the seeming pessimism of this analysis, in which every instance of alterity is ‘always-already’ simulated, Baudrillard insists on the ‘Other’s indestructibility’ (1993: 146) and the need to reconstitute the radical Other ’starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture’ (1993: 155). The very capacity of simulation to simulate alterity actually threatens to overwhelm it, with radical alterity now taking a viral or catastrophic form that permeates simulation. Of course what remains contentious is not only the extent to which we accept this analysis, presented quite explicitly as a fiction, but also the mechanism or mechanisms by which this reversal, implosion or catastrophe is supposed to, or is, taking place. Here we re-encounter the notion of crime, but this time a crime directed against the original crime and its cover-up. This is the exacerbative approach, not returning to ‘organic negativity’ or celebrating the ‘truth’ of negativity, but committing a new crime, which will exceed the original.

In Ballard’s fiction this articulation of excess literalises Baudrillard’s metaphor of crime. This is particularly true of the novel Super-Cannes, which begins with Paul Sinclair, an aviation journalist, and his young wife Jane, a doctor, travelling to the business park of Eden-Olympia on the Côte d’Azur. While Paul is recovering from the effects of a flying accident Jane’s role is to replace the previous doctor David Greenwood, who went on a killing spree before killing himself. Almost immediately they arrive they encounter the threatening psychiatrist Wilder Penrose and take up residence in Greenwood’s old villa. With time on his hands, and increasingly obsessed with the fate of Greenwood, Paul Sinclair begins to investigate the circumstances of the killings. He slowly uncovers evidence that suggests both a network of criminality in the business park and that Greenwood was deliberately executed. Although it comes as no surprise to the reader, there is deliberately little mystery in this novel, the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose is the orchestrating figure. Suffocated by the banality and conformity of the park, which is totally regulated and simulated, the executives who lived there had begun to fall ill with minor and persistent ailments. Penrose’s solution was ‘a controlled and supervised madness’ (2001: 251) through a secret therapy programme of crime.

The novel ’stages’ both the danger of simulation leading to the internal collapse of a social system and the way in which those who manage the system recognise this risk and ‘re-inject’ alterity. Penrose’s crime programme is directed outside the park in the form of violent raids (ratissages) against the local Arabs and blacks, robberies, and also child prostitution. It was Greenwood’s role in administering this programme, and especially his recognition of his own paedophilic desires, which led to his attack on the park. As Paul discovers it was not actually a wild striking out but a deliberate attempt to both punish those responsible and to uncover the ‘therapy’ programme. The novel ends with Paul setting out to complete the task at which Greenwood fails – another crime to expose this surreptitious criminality. Certainly Ballard’s novel is a fiction and, despite the seriousness of its subject matter, not without humour. However, Ballard’s recent work also puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture (see Gasiorek, 2005: 202-214) – to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression.

This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’ (1998: 194). The excess emerges out of the acceleration of this bidding beyond any hope of containment or return. In the same way Paul Sinclair’s crime answers, and out-bids, both the failed crime of David Greenwood and the organised criminality of Wilder Penrose. It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’ (1983: 114). It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest, as was Greenwood’s original crime. Also, it functions as a micro-model of dissident resistance against the organisation of alterity: the ‘real event’ here being the eruption of a ‘real’ alterity. Finally, as an echo chamber, it expands beyond the immediate context of the novel as fiction, resonating in the mediascape of contemporary culture. What is also crucial is that Ballard does not actually describe this act; it remains a virtual future left in all its potential ambiguity. Rather than provide another representation of radical alterity, bringing the crime back into simulation, Ballard’s novel marks its ‘presence’ in the form of an absence. The perfect crime of the murder of alterity and its simulation is ‘matched’ or out-bid by another crime that never occurs, and may not actually occur, in the fictional universe.

Still from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (dir. Michael Haneke, 1994).

This is very similar to the recent work of Baudrillard. Although he does not have the license of fiction for him the out-bidding of the perfect crime takes place in thought: ‘[o]ur only hope lies in a criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ (2001: 61). The substance of Baudrillard’s thought has, as we have seen, remained quite constant. Therefore I want to suggest that this ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ for which he strives is rather more a question of form. Since what we might call Baudrillard’s ’simulated sociology’ (the last great work being Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)), which at least mimicked existing academic forms, his work has increasingly been articulated through disruptive formal strategies. His use of aphorism, impressionistic or journalistic writing (the bête noir of academic writing), fragments, diaries, and so on, work towards a hypercritical writing, which is itself implosive or catastrophic. The reason for these strategies is, again, the refusal to simply stage or represent the ‘indestructible Other’. Instead the fragmentary form of his work circulates around it, registering its destabilising and implosive effects through writing. This is Baudrillard game of seduction: seducing simulated alterity into contact with the distortive ‘black hole’ of radical alterity.

Of course it is worth noting that there is nothing particularly original in these strategies per se, which can be found in thinkers like Pascal, Lichtenberg, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lyotard. Each, in their own way, also chose these forms to explore the effects of a radical alterity which cannot be spoken of directly. However, unlike the tendency of these thinkers to put everything on the side of subjectivity Baudrillard insists on the ‘Object’ as the final figure of otherness (1993: 172). The Object is not present as such but functions as a ‘vanishing point’, and the role of theory is to mimic the challenge of the Object (1993: 173). Despite this difference the manoeuvre is fundamentally similar, and perhaps even closer to his contemporaries like Lévinas and Derrida. A radically fragmentary writing attests, through its fragmentation, gaps, and absences, to the ’strange attractor’ that is the Object. The risk in this invocation of absolute alterity is that something will be lost: Baudrillard’s concrete tracing of the effects of simulation and alterity in the mediascape. For all its fictionality and Baudrillard’s studious avoidance of the scholarship of media studies his extreme thinking always anchored itself in the actuality of the present. In his choice of conventionally unconventional writing strategies and a conventionally unconventional thought of the Other this threatens to disappear in an unspecific and generalised invocation of absolute alterity.

In the terminology of Alain Badiou, we might locate Baudrillard as part of the dissident tradition of ‘anti-philosophy’ (see Hallward, 2003: 20-23). According to Badiou this ‘tradition’ poses an ineffable transcendent meaning against philosophy, and often does so in fragmentary anti-systematic forms. Although he does not deign to mention Baudrillard his list of anti-philosophers includes most of the figures mentioned above. Identifying unequivocally with philosophy, in a new rationalist form, Badiou argues that the fundamental orientation of anti-philosophy is theological. Lurking behind the transcendent meaning or figure of radical alterity is God. From this point of view Baudrillard’s ‘criminal thought’ would be another attenuated religiosity, searching for an ever-receding mystical intuition of the ‘Object’. Now Baudrillard himself, in Simulacra and Simulation, realised the danger of the ‘anti-’position of simply being opposed to an existing form or discourse (1994: 19). In precisely the terms I have been discussing the ‘anti-’ position is one of simulated alterity, by means of which dead forms sustain themselves. Instead of destroying what it opposes, the pose of opposition supports and sustains it. The irony is that Baudrillard and Ballard’s invocation of the extreme crime might all too easily sustain the system of simulation they are subjecting to hypercriticism. Rather than out-bidding and accelerating simulated alterity the danger is providing a new form of simulated alterity. They are both transfixed by the possibility of a truly authentic criminal act always just out of reach. This is made even more ironic by the media fascination with ‘true crime’ – from CCTV footage of criminal acts to the fascinated horror of accounts of the activities of serial killers. Therefore I am suggesting that Baudrillard’s ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ is not criminal and inhumane enough.

Passivity and inertia — the way forward? Photo by Emiliano Granado.

Isn’t the problem that this criticism simply leaves us in the position, so often made by critics of Baudrillard, of an absolute pessimism in the face of inescapable systems? ‘Criminal thought’ is a failure and so we have no escape from the reign of simulated alterity, other than a quite literal faith in the Other. I want to take another line of thought developed by Baudrillard as a line of flight out of this impasse of obsession with the radical crime. His earlier text In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) avoids the language of radical alterity and the Other. Instead Baudrillard explores how the masses, the ’silent majorities’, offer ‘the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral’ (1983: 2). Rather than the masses incarnating any sort of excessive energy or reservoir of transgressive alterity it is their very muteness which threatens. The text makes an explicit break with sociology, including media sociology, by refusing the operation of the ascription of meaning. This refusal is undertaken in the name of the masses, which, like the new theorist (or post-theorist) are indifferent to meaning. Here we can see a strange connection traced between the indifference of the masses and the indifference of the theorist. Not that Baudrillard simply falls into the trap of being the spokesperson for this indifference, which would immediately nullify it. Instead the masses indicate the way forward for theory through passivity and inertia that refuses to respond to the relentless incitement of the media: ‘Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum’ (1983: 21). What is also different is the mode of challenge they offer. They do not exacerbate alterity through a further crime, or excessive violence, instead they follow the fatal strategy of hyperconformity.

As Baudrillard puts it ‘You want us to consume – O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose’ (1983: 46). Let’s take the previous example I used of new extreme horror films. They seem to incarnate a logic of simulated alterity and invite either horrified disgust or perverse celebration, both operations of giving meaning to them. What about those spectators who take the films precisely as it often seem they are intended, as a game? The game is ‘what have you got to show me?’, ‘how far will you go?’, but rather than a perverse logic of escalation or desensitisation, it is a matter of indifference. Instead of searching for an alterity that would push beyond the screen, or even the viral return of the alterity, say in forms of mimicking of the violence shown, we simply have a passive response to it as a game. There is no alterity here, but only play.

One of the so-called ‘video nasties’ of the 1970s, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), had the tagline ‘To avoid fainting, keep repeating “It’s only a movie … It’s only a movie…”‘. The playful assumption of the tagline is that the audience will identify so much with what they are watching that they will be overcome unless they remind themselves that they are only watching a film. This sense of identification with the film has also been a common assumption in film theory, especially in its psychoanalytic forms [1]. However, what if the audience does not have to keep repeating ‘it’s only a movie’ to avoid fainting? What if they recognise this simulated alterity as what it is and hyperconform to it? They play a game with the film by not treating it as real, but at the same time conforming to its effects of horror. This does not involve a simple fascination with finding an authentic transgressive excess but rather a blank passivity. In some senses it might be suggested that the increasingly extremity of recent horror films responds to this audience inertia; as this over-involvement absorbs simulated alterity the filmmakers must ‘up the stakes’, only to encounter another level of inertia. Certainly these are my own highly speculative suggestions, but I think they indicate something that Baudrillard’s own recent invocations of criminal thought and radical alterity step-back from in his own work. What is being avoided is banality in favour of the transgressive crime.

This argument for the banality of the media and the hyperconformity of the masses to this banality has implications for our strategies of response that have not fully been exhausted. Within academia it is a familiar accusation that media studies is banal. In that most directly Baudrillardian of novels White Noise (1984) the character Murray, a lecturer on ‘living icons’, remarks ‘I understand music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in the place who read nothing but cereal boxes’; his friend replies ‘It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got’ (1999: 10). This exchange indicates something interesting, with a remark about the banality of the object being answered with the suggestion that this is our avant-garde. It identifies one of the key modes by which media studies has often justified itself: as an avant-garde political gesture. Therefore against the supposed banality of the object the media studies scholar replies by finding within that object, or more exactly in its use by the consumer, strategies of transgression or its synonyms (subversion, resistance, alterity, etc.). In this way the banality of the object is redeemed through its association with political or cultural transgression. At the same time the activity of the scholar is also redeemed from banality due to its political import, which is revealed by the superior insight of the critic. On the other side, that of cultural producers, the game of transgression is also played to elevate their own products to the status of transgressive objects. In this way academia and cultural producers position themselves with a self-confirming loop of transgression.

The ‘criminal’ gesture of Baudrillard and Ballard could easily be regarded as simply a hyperbolic extension of this line of argument. They claim that although the kind of everyday transgressions identified by media scholars or practiced by cultural producers are part of the society of simulated alterity there is still a radical alterity beyond representation. This might appear to be a radical ‘out-bidding’ but it falls within the same ‘avant-garde’ logic, as well as drawing radical alterity back into representation. In a sense it retains a faith in a pure product of transgression in relation to which every actual gesture of transgression, whether critical or artistic, must necessarily fall short. The alternative I am suggesting is to reply to the critic of the banality of the media in the mode of hyperconformity: ‘You accuse the media of being banal? O.K. what I do as a critic or producer is banal, more banal and useless than you could ever know!’. The advantage of this hyperconformist response lies not simply in disarming the critic. It refuses to justify the media object in other terms (political or artistic, for example) and it refuses the frantic invocation of transgression. The account that Baudrillard and Ballard give of simulated alterity suggests that transgression is not actually transgressive; it is rather that transgression is boring. Although de Sade is often regarded as the original thinker of transgression he already came to this insight in his account of the final apathy of the libertine (see Klossowski, 1992: 28-34).

To play the game of transgression is to fall within an unacknowledged banality, as well as to continue to sustain the dead forms of contemporary culture. Therefore it is a matter of pushing through and completing the banality of transgression. Of course this hyper-conformity can easily fall back into plain conformity, such as with the American artist Jeff Koons in his ‘Banality’ show of 1988. As he put it ‘[m]y work tries to present itself as the underdog. It takes a position that people must embrace everything’ (in Muthesius (ed.), 1992: 107). However, the withdrawal that I am tracing is not quiescent, but the refusal of the immediate equation of certain content with transgression and the refusal of the conformity of transgression itself. It is an attention to the politics of form. In particular it is an attention to that banality that Ballard accessed through science-fiction. As he stated in 1971:

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjuncture of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator (1984: 100).

Even, we might add, a cereal box.

Ushering in Banality (Jeff Koons, 1988). Photo by Henrike Schulte.

What is produced in Ballard’s work on the 1970s, and partly what attracted Baudrillard to it, is the refusal of the ascription of meaning and a free-floating attention to the ‘invisible literature’ that shapes our cultural landscapes. In Baudrillard’s reading of Crash precisely what he refused was Ballard’s positioning of the novel as traditional criticism, or his enclosing it within the logic of perversion (Baudrillard, 1994: 113). Instead of a world of transgression we have world ‘without desire’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 118). I want to suggest then that their more recent work functions still as a diagnostic but risks regression to a fascination with transgression rather than what Baudrillard calls the ‘dull splendor of banality or of violence’ (1994: 119). The return to those previous positions is then a matter of rethinking the exacerbative possibilities of form without conceding to a fixing of the form of alterity in the absolute crime or the totally Other. Contrary to the desire to find a real future crime we might follow Baudrillard’s previous suggestion for a fatal strategy: becoming-banal.

[1] For a convincing critique of this assumption see Smith (1995).

Benjamin Noys

..:: BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballard, J. G. (1984) ‘Fictions of Every Kind’ (1971), Re/Search 8/9: JG Ballard, eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno: 98-100.
___. (2000) Super-Cannes. London: Flamingo.

Baudrillard, J. (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Trans. P. Foss, J. Johnston and P. Patton. New York: Semiotext(e).
___. (1993) The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. J. Benedict. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
___. (1996) The Perfect Crime. Trans. C. Turner. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1998) ‘When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,’ in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds) Bataille: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 191-195.
___. (2001) ‘From Radical Incertitude, or Thought as Impostor,’ in: S. Lotringer and S. Cohen (eds) French Theory in America. London and New York: Routledge, 59-69.
___. (2005) The Conspiracy of Art. Ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

DeLillo, D. (1999) White Noise. London: Picador.

Gasiorek, A. (2005) J. G. Ballard. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Klossowski, P. (1992) Sade My Neighbour. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Quartet Books.

Muthesius, A. (ed.) (1992) Jeff Koons. Cologne: Taschen.

Piccone, P. (1978) ‘The Crisis of One-Dimensionality’. Telos 35: 43-54.

Smith, M. (1995) Engaging Characters. Oxford: Clarendon.

Virilio, P. (2003) Art and Fear. Trans. Julie Rose. London and New York: Continuum.

Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of detail here for those interested in tracking every filament of Ballard’s work, including what I consider to be one of the most fascinating periods of JGB’s career: the “miscellaneous media” he produced during the late 1960s, including a series of collages (termed “advertiser’s announcements”) for Ambit magazine that continue to exert a strange power over me. (This blend of experimental prose poetry and conceptual art is true slipstream “fiction” and there’s nowhere near enough discourse on it; with that in mind, I’ll be posting more on Ballard’s miscellaneous media at some vague point in the future.)

Mike also notes that Ballard’s first published story, “The Violent Noon” (1951) has been onlined by Rick McGrath, just about the only place you’ll find this ultra-rare twig of the tree. The piece, written by the 20-year-old medical student “J. Graham Ballard”, was the winner in a crime-story competition run by Cambridge University’s student newspaper, Varsity, where it was published. It’s a “Hemingwayesque pastiche written to please the jury” (according to Wikipedia), and takes place during the Malayan Emergency, when the guerrilla forces of the Malayan National Liberation Army battled British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces from 1948 to 1960. It’s worth reviewing, considering that JGB has said that winning this competition was just the impetus he needed to give full-time writing a proper go.

“The Violent Noon” describes a sneak “terrorist attack” on a British officer, Michael Allison, and his wife and child. The attack is described in gory detail, with Allison dying “in a foam of blood that bubbled out of his mouth and the wound in his face”, while Mrs Allison looks up “blankly from the pulped face of her baby”. It’s interesting to note that even then Ballard had an eye for surrealistic imagery embedded in violent death, a type of suspended animation that he has continued to refine in story after story, novel after novel. After the insurgents take off, Mrs Allison, her front teeth knocked out, kneels on the seat of the car alongside another officer, Hargreaves, with her dead husband beside them:

Mrs Allison was … calmly peering out through the rear window … quiet and composed. Neither of them made any attempt to move the bodies in the front seat. They just sat there, in the shambles of the chaos that had exploded about them … Mrs Allison watching out of the window, until a lorry passed by half an hour later.”

————————————————————
J.G. Ballard. “The Violent Noon” (1951).
————————————————————

Reading this passage, I was struck by the similarities with the scene in Crash where Helen Remington loses her husband in a car crash with the narrator, “James Ballard”:

Apart from a bruised upper jawbone and several loosened teeth, she was unharmed. … We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither of us able to move. [She] sat behind her steering wheel, staring at me in a curiously formal way, as if unsure what had brought us together.”

———————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973).
———————————————–

This “curious formality” of violence and death — this dispassionate narrative effect that’s a feature of Ballard’s airless worlds, and the media landscape that “factors death out of our lives” — of course derives from Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai, as has been well documented, where he witnessed the horrors of war first hand. “The Violent Noon” adds more fuel to that fire, with its bitter description of “Chinese gangsters and gun-happy roughnecks, no-goods from the villages, hopped up by agitators from the slums of Canton and Shanghai, promising prosperity to the people and then threatening them and pillaging their homes, slashing the rubber trees, madly shooting harmless women and children, filling the streets with frantic gunflame and death.”

As Ballard has said of his time at medical school:

The experience of war is deeply corrupting. Anybody who witnesses years of brutality can’t help but lose a sense of the tragedy and mystery of death. I’m sure that happened to me. The 16-year-old who came to England after the war carried this freight of ‘matter-of-factness about death’. So spending two years dissecting cadavers was a way of reminding me of the reality of death itself, and gave me back a respect for life.”

———————————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard, “Raising the Dead”, excerpted in J.G. Ballard: Quotes
(RE/Search Publications, 2006).
———————————————————————————————–

“The Violent Noon”, written just four years after “the 16-year-old came to England” is a fascinating Polaroid of the young JGB’s mindset, before the cadavers had reset his emotional circuitry.

—————————————————————————————————————-
NOTES:

1) Here’s Varsity’s blurb, worth regurgitating for the fact that it effectively contains Ballard’s first published interview as an author…

“J. Graham Ballard who shares the first prize of ten pounds with D. S. Birley in the “Varsity” Crime Story Competition is now in his second year at King’s and immersed in the less literary process of reading medicine.

He had, in addition to writing short stories, also planned “mammoth novels” which “never get beyond the first page.”

2) The publication of “The Violent Noon” also led to (effectively) Ballard’s first review. Varsity promised that “the summing up by the judges…will…be available next week on this page”. And so in the June 2, 1951 edition, we find, as David Pringle informs me:

“an unsigned summary of the judges’ reasons for picking the two winners, ‘The Violent Noon’ by J. G. Ballard and ‘Seance’ by D. S. Birley. Of Ballard’s tale, they say: ‘… ‘Violent Noon’ was the most mature story; it contains patches of high tension, the characters come to life, and the ending is brilliant in its cynicism. The author should, however, avoid a tendency to preach.”

Considering what came after — a body of work with politics that could perhaps best be described as “ambivalent” — we can only surmise that JGB heeded the advice to cut the preaching. I do wonder what became of D.S. Birley, though…
—————————————————————————————————————-

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”

For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard’s most important work. It reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology, as the ‘T’ figure reconfigures the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ — an aesthetic that’s proved to be hugely influential, perhaps more so on artists and musicians than writers.

Is Atrocity a novel or a collection of short stories? Ballard published the Atrocity pieces as standalone stories over a period of four years, while always claiming that he was working towards the big picture: an experimental novel.

Two versions are available: the Flamingo edition, and the large-format RE/Search edition. Both feature annotations from Ballard, although RE/Search’s version is recommended for the gynaecological illustrations from Phoebe Gloeckner.

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

The 1990 Re/Search edition added an Appendix with four additional pieces. These comprised three of Ballard’s ’surgical fictions’ from the 1970s: ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970), ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970), and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976); along with (rather incongruously) a story from the late 1980s, ‘The Secret History of World War 3′.

There was a U.K. large format paperback edition by Harper Collins/Flamingo in 1993; of the additional stories included by RE/Search, only Princess Margaret’s Facelift and Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty were incorporated in this U.K. edition. Subsequent U.K. editions are identical in this respect (though I don’t think I’ve looked at the very latest one).”

From Amazon:

First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.”

I recommend the inimitable Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) for his analysis of Atrocity — dense and theory-driven, but undeniably intelligent and provocative:

In a sense, the phrase “atrocity exhibition” is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where “mediatization” is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.”

Mark Fisher. ‘Flatline Constructs — The Atrocity Exhibition’.

..:: CONTENTS
+ ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966)
+ ‘The University of Death’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)
+ ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ (1966)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1967)
+ ‘The Great American Nude’ (1968)
+ ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969)
+ ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969)
+ ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1966)
+ ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ (1966)
+ ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ (1968)
+ ‘Crash!’ (1969)
+ ‘The Generations of America’ (1968)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)

Appendix
+ ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970)
+ ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970)
+ ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War III’ (1988)

..:: LINKS
+ Excerpt: Chapter 1 — ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 5 — ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 12 — ‘Crash!’

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Confronting ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ ‘An exhibition of atrocities’: J.G. Ballard on Mondo film
+ ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work)
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ The Ballardian Primer: Car Parks
+ Love among the mannequins
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ Atrocity II
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair
+ “Thirsty Man at the Spigot”: An Interview with Jonathan Weiss
+ Another Atrocity: A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard
+ Jonathan Weiss: The Atrocity Exhibition
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ William Burroughs: Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition
+ Author’s Note: The Atrocity Exhibition

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’.

From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition:

A century after America’s financial collapse and the climactic upheavals of the 1990s, Wayne stows away on SS Apollo, bound for the New World on a voyage of rediscovery. He and the crew encounter hazards at every turn and ghosts from the past as they travel West. In Las Vegas, roaming bands of Mexican teenagers welcome them to the citadel of late 20th century glitter. Their charismatic leader — a William Burroughs look-alike addressed reverently as President Charles Manson — invites Wayne into hs cybernetic stronghold. But suddenly the erratic president takes fright at Wayne’s alien presence and threatens to play deadly war games with an arsenal of leftover Titan warheads. Now it’s not just the Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe holograms that are at risk…

According to Ballardian contributor Umberto Rossi:

As we read Hello America we trek along a historical horizon, led by what we should call a historical-mythical imagery. The recession is not a retrogressive movement of evolutionary time, but a hallucinatory replica of American history. If The Drowned World celebrates the divorce of humans from their historical civilisation, Hello America offers a lucid and ironic anatomy of the American Myth (but we could call it the American Dream), a myth with a historical genesis and a historical unfolding. Every dead city visited by the research team led by Captain Steiner is the embodiment of a chapter of the American legend. At the same time, it is a transmutation of events and stages in US history.

Las Vegas is the ultimate telematic metropolis and Manson is its emblematic citizen until the end. It is no accident that his army is made up of teenagers. The model citizen of Videogame City is the eternal teenager, who can contact the world only through its image, through TV screens and computer networks. In the age of the information industry and data networks, the accomplishment of technical evolution, the process that Heidegger calls imposition [Gestell] of technics — the possibility of a total control, a total representability of the world — is the playability of the world. The world becomes a game. In this horizon of electronic simulation, any difference between true and false, between real and fictional, between presence and representation, becomes obsolete.”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”

There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted him into some semblance of mainstream recognition. Since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and filmed by Steven Spielberg, it seems that every journalist who has interviewed Ballard must ask him about his childhood in Shanghai.

From the Grafton 1985 edition:

“He is separated from his parents in a world at war. He must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him… In Empire of the Sun J.G. Ballard has produced a mesmerizing, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the Twentieth Century will be not only remembered but judged.”

Searing .. brilliant … an incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving.”
Anthony Burgess

“The best British novel about the Second World War.”
The Guardian

Read Ballard’s account of the book’s collision with Spielberg:

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can’t easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old’s infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘Look Back at Empire’.

..:: 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 Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

In that sense, there is a strong link between 9/11 events and the fiction of J. G. Ballard, inasmuch as they both concern a ’staged’ reality, a manufactured space-time (particularly in Ballard’s ‘mid-period’ novels, Atrocity Exhibition onwards). In early Ballard this sense of deep, geological, ancient time is usually more of a natural fact (as opposed to technological), a deeper ‘voice’ of reality that comes to claim the characters, undoing the more superficial cortex structure of the ego. Ballard’s characters are upper middle-class individuals, absorbed in a state of emotional alienation that can only be broken by the most spectacular transgressions.

In Ballard, however, we only get the point of view of the ubiquitous disaffected individual, but never from the point of view of the engineers of this staged reality. I can think of the architect in High-Rise, perhaps. But he himself is only unlocking a deeper layer of the unconscious through the language of architecture.

This is what annoys me a bit about Ballard: his POLITICS. What are the politics of Ballard?

Ballard, it seems to me, subscribes to a kind of naïve Freudianism. The technological landscape can only unlock what already pre-exists in the human mind. Or the key can be a liberating violence, an absurd violence beyond rationality. There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events. New ‘psychopathologies’ and configurations can, of course, be created (so, it is not a simple regression, or return to the primal scene, or whatever). But there is no sense of real human interests or other historical, social factors driving the manufacturing of these realities (for example, the enclave-resorts ubiquitous in the latest Ballard novels). There is always a sense of withdrawal, of entropic regress, which perhaps is (as R. D. Laing might have put it) a sane reaction to an insane society. Yet, there is no way out of this lock, except a resort to some transcendental mental structure; a natural, essential, pre-social drive. Ballard espouses a certain fatalism born out of a psychological reductionism. Can we ever escape this programming, this death-drive?

“Look back at Empire

JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed. Hauling them into the daylight can be risky. Within a few hours, a precious trophy of childhood or a first romance can crumble into rust.

I knew that something similar might happen when I began to write Empire of the Sun, a novel about my life as a boy in Shanghai during the second world war, and in the civilian camp at Lunghua, where I was interned with my parents. Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can’t easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old’s infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?
…

In 1984 the novel was published, a caravel of memories raised from the deep. Enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth. Curiously, my original memories of Shanghai still seemed intact, and even survived a return trip to Shanghai, where I found our house in Amherst Avenue and our room in Lunghua camp – now a boarding school – virtually unchanged.

Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.
…

Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: ‘Mr Ballard, we’re going to Lunghua together’. Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?
…

Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet’s fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg’s film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: “Oh, oh . . . !” and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: “But they’re actors.”

Empire of the Sun Special Edition will be released by Warner Home Videos on March 6, priced £19.99.

“Peep “TV” Show
PRO: Watching Yutaka Tsuchiya’s Peep “TV” Show is a lot like reading J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition—both are not easy to get through but are vital works of art. Peep “TV” Show is about a society (contemporary Tokyo) that is mediated to the last degree. Public, private, and commercial spaces are crammed with cameras that look into them, and (TV, video, computer) screens that look out at other public, private, and commercial spaces. Every level of life is a spectacle that aspires to become the total spectacle of the new century-9/11. The main characters in Peep “TV” Show are morbidly, erotically obsessed with the destruction of the Twin Towers, one even admitting that he wished it had happened to Tokyo. 9/11 is to Peep “TV” Show what the assassination of JFK was to Crash (1973), another J.G. Ballard novel. Crash, however, is a work of science fiction, whereas Peep “TV” Show is about the present and the real proliferation of electronic consumer products, specifically the digital and micro-cameras with which the entire movie is shot. Peep “TV” Show is relentlessly repetitive, but it does have several unexpected moments that break the surface of the vicious pattern and peer into the dizzying depths of what all underdeveloped economies are striving to become: overdeveloped, paperless, capitalist societies. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

CON: Peep “TV” Show is a deliberately abrasive DV feature whose main appeal, if it can be said to possess any, is the opportunity to gawk at Japanese youth subcultures. Want to see a young woman dress up as a “Gothic Lolita,” a sort of cross between Little Bo Peep and a riot grrrl (as featured in the Phaidon book Fresh Fruits)? Want to get a gander at the hikkikomori, the “socially withdrawn” men in their late teens and twenties who venture out of their rooms only to buy food in the middle of the night (as featured in the New York Times)? Want to see a live cat being placed inside a plastic bag and… never mind. If the movie were smart, it would indict you for the voyeurism of the main character, Hasegawa, who likes to tote around a tiny camera and film from the ground up on busy Tokyo streets. Instead, the characters offer the tepid excuse, “It’s not us, it’s reality that’s messed up,” and the movie gets lost in junk analysis of the appeal of 9/11 footage.
(ANNIE WAGNER)

Grand Illusion, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Thurs
7, 9 pm.”

Isabelle Jenniches, originally from Germany, is a multimedia artist now based in California. With collaborator Stefan Kunzmann she staged a theatre adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island at the Theater de Balie, Amsterdam, in 2002. The performance incorporated aspects of Butoh as well as an industrial/ambient soundtrack, projections and video; it was stunningly innovative, and stripped back Ballard’s already minimal text to an almost subliminal level, focusing on subconscious tropes and the nightmarish dream world that lay just below the surface of the original novel. The result was a poetic meditation on myth and perception, and the subjective nature of reality, as mediated through a technological lens.

I spoke with Isabelle about her and Stefan’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s work, as well as her ongoing artistic obsessions. Fittingly, for an artist so obsessed with telepresence, we conducted this interview via ICQ.

– Simon Sellars

How did you and Stefan hook up as a team?

We have been friends for…over 10 years! We studied together in Vienna and then somehow became interested in the same things. I started this postgraduate new-media program in the Netherlands, which was a total surprise to everyone as I had not even as much as seen a computer before. Anyway, I was really into it and then he came over and studied there too. Then after that, we both moved to Amsterdam.

Do you have any plans to return to Germany, like Stefan?

No, I could never do that. I have been away for so long, and I don’t know the place any more. I never much liked it anyway. I knew I would go away as soon as I was conscious enough to make decisions for myself.

Why did you both decide to stay in Amsterdam to create art? Did you find it to be a stimulating artistic community?

Yes, that was my initial reason. I’d done an exchange student year at the Rietveld Academie, when I was studying scenography, and I was really impressed by the theatre in Amsterdam. However, some things have changed since then. Now I find the theatre scene, especially, pretty uninspired and not at all daring enough, particularly when it comes to so-called new media. There were a handful of very talented and ambitious visionaries that were trying to set things up a couple years ago, but it somehow evaporated and nothing took its place. I guess there were isolated attempts, but I can’t say that I feel a part of a greater movement or that there’s any kind of exchange going on. I’m sure there are pockets where this is different, but this is my personal experience. Amsterdam is very different from, let’s say New York, which is this highly underfunded, but highly artistic and high-spirited environment where people just support each other because they have to! I was there for 9 months last year and it was blowing me away!

It seems that a lot of things are being stifled in the Netherlands these days. For example, the red-light district is not what it used to be, and the police are taking a very hard line on soft drugs. What do you think is going on?

Well, since the government changed towards the conservatives the arts have had a hard time, but I think it goes beyond the kind of government, in that the Dutch have the tendency to bureaucratise everything. People don’t take chances; they don’t just go for it.

I find the Netherlands totally fascinating, especially the concept of privacy. It’s such a small place and there are so many people crammed in, it’s like private space doesn’t really exist. I was wondering if that’s perhaps part of the reason why the Netherlands was able to invent Big Brother for TV?

Yes. There’s the famous cliche about Dutch people having no curtains and everybody looking inside everyone else’s house – we all do it! It may seem like everything’s out in the open, but the other side is that it becomes very hard to make contact. People are afraid of speaking out, of overstepping the invisible tolerance line. Everybody is free to do whatever they want – which is great – but you won’t get much comment, either neither negative nor positive, so it’s as if it doesn’t matter. After a while here, I was longing for a good fight!

Stefan told me that your adaptation of Concrete Island was a reflection on the superficial nature of Dutch culture, where everything floats on a surface level. Amsterdam seems wild to some people, for example, but below the surface it can actually be quite conservative; also you say the Dutch arts are funded, but there’s no real artistic individuality.

Concrete Island is so not Amsterdam that I cannot quite relate to that!

OK! Stefan warned me that when I spoke to you that you would disagree with what he said.

He was right!

So how do you see the work then? What was in your mind when you adapted Concrete Island? What do you want people to get out of it?

I don’t quite think like that. I mean, I can’t dictate what people will see or not see. I can only create what I see and make it come to life. In the case of Ballard, it is very much a fantasy, a wonderfully detailed world that I can really lose myself in. I would hope that my public feels at least a bit of that same fascination. Think of it as a journey – we set the pace and provide the means of transport and choose the route, but you are free to look out this or that window or to wear a pair of pink glasses or to read a book instead! Of course, this is an unusual concept for a theatre maker, which is probably why I am not really a theatre maker now at all!

Right, I see what you’re saying, but I guess I would still like to know if you have an interpretation of the novel, something that maybe guided you when adapting it. For example, I see it as a comment on technology, and how we are subservient to it – Maitland merges with the island, with the car, really, and he becomes a kind of post-human figure. I also see the events of the book as maybe taking place inside his head.

I think what I most liked when reading the novel – long before I even thought about adapting it – was Maitland’s slow change from civilised human to something else. This change took place in the middle of this civilised world, under everyone’s noses, but they were totally blind to it. At the end of our production of Concrete Island, our Maitland has become something like a lizard; that was the image.

I saw a video rough cut of the performance and I was really impressed by the whole set up: the stylised island, the subliminal images flashing behind, the stylised acting that propelled Maitland. I’m just wondering if your audience was quite prepared for something so conceptual?

No, probably not, although if they knew us, they should have been! We came up with the concept and the stage design together, but then when things got closer to the actual production process we had to split up because the workload became too much, and – this is interesting – we discovered what each of us can and cannot do! So Stefan was really good at working with the actors, whereas I am pretty much a failure at this. Stefan also adapted the text for the stage – an enormous amount of work. He wrote a beautiful script, where all the different layers were lined up next to each other. I did all of the video shoots and editing and linking it with the text and so on. That’s what we do – it’s like composing a piece of music. The script resembles sheet music.

Why did you choose Concrete Island? Why not another Ballard novel? Is it because the book is such a condensed version of Ballard’s ideas, and therefore easily adapted to another medium? Also, it’s set in a very contained space, so I’m guessing that probably made it easier to perform.

Yes, exactly. It really is this compactness that is intriguing. It has all the attributes of a good theatre play: a compact but well-defined cast, as well as the unity of space and seemingly of time, if you take it literally. But of course all that gets questioned in the end: has he been dying all the way through, and have we just witnessed the fabled speeding up of time just before death? Did he dream it all? Concrete Island is so much about intensity, an intensity that we loose in our civilised world. I’m not being romantic, but when Maitland goes back in time, so to speak, he becomes this other being. It’s actually very primordial; as he loses his humanity piece by piece, he fights for survival but also for the right of being king of this ‘island’. That’s fascinating to me, because without saying that this is a better world, Ballard reminds us about those intense, cruel streaks in us, that no matter how civilised we are, they are a part of us. Now these days, we have horrible images on TV and it’s so sickening, and we can’t escape it – but that’s not even the animal in us, it’s deeper than that. It’s about awareness instead of denial – it’s a part of being human and you have to deal with it! That’s why Ballard is important and that’s exactly why he’s so controversial.

The Souvenir project you did with Stefan is interesting, where you use the concept of travellers moving in and out of Amsterdam to present an alternative view of the city. It’s like you are using the concept of time travel to present a past, present and future history of Amsterdam. How did the audience respond to that?

Well, we started off with a round-table discussion about Amsterdam, then people were taken totally by surprise as 18 minutes of media saturation suddenly made them sit straight up in their seats: slides and video, voices on tape, frogs… People liked it actually, but we always get asked “Why so much and all at once?” Well, this is how I experience the world – I multitask all day long, so why should I stop when I am creating a performance? You have the extraordinary privilege right now of having my undivided attention; usually I would be working on something in the background and/or listening to my web-radio station and perhaps have another chat going at the same time. And, of course, I’d be looking out the window a lot!

Your work seems a bit dreamlike to me in that is doesn’t make logical sense at first, but has a dreamlike logic that’s consistent within its own world.

Yes. That’s certainly a great compliment, and something I very much like to achieve, to create a dreamlike world, as this is also how much of my work is made. Very often I follow my gut feeling, although there is a tremendous amount of thinking and theorising involved as well.

What’s next for you, artistically?

I admit that I have pretty much said goodbye to theatre, as it were. There has been a slow shift in my work – it’s mostly ‘art’ now I guess, lots of photographic work with strange twists, found footage from the net. I am obsessed with webcams! We did a project with the Waag Society in Amsterdam, together with three other artists. We wired up the city and installed connected devices to invite people to interact with each other over distance – not verbally, but by using objects. It’s about telepresence, really.

What do you mean by ‘telepresence’?

Well, I was involved with an earlier pilot project where we had two dinner parties going on at the same time in Canada and the Netherlands. This project was the work of Jeff Mann and Michelle Terran; I was just one of a handful of collaborators.

We linked the two parties using robotic devices, including glasses that would clink and a fish that could speak, wine that poured itself and also video that got projected onto the head of the table so that it looked as if the Canadian table was an extension of our table. It was a lot of fun and we found that interactions functioned on a very different level than when you just chat or wave into the camera. The Canadians were really quite there – they were present, or rather they were telepresent.

A lot of people, including myself, are really jaded with the Internet right now:  too much spam, too much bad porn, too much advertising clogging it up…

Wow, that’s really sad that you say that!

Can new media once again have the power to excite people, to give them that kind of hope that happened when the Internet first hit?

I certainly feel tremendous excitement; always have done and always will! The big thing, of course, is the potential in the marriage of mobile phones with the Internet, something that’s happening now, something that many people don’t even realise is happening – when you download ringtones and send SMS messages, you are online! I strongly believe in the power of free speech, and the Internet – and the other new tools available – will make it possible for people to tell their own stories, even though, at the moment, it’s not available to nearly enough people. That’s one aspect of why I work with new media, I want to create tools through which we can speak and communicate, perhaps not even knowing that we are using high-tech tools.

…the End.

“In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis I am proposing to offer, to explain the significance of mysterious and apparently unrelated objects, this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions – perhaps – that surround us in reality.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Graeme Revell (Summer 1983), RE/Search: J.G. Ballard (San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1984)

“Cadillacs, Coca Cola and cocaine, presidents and psychopaths, Norman Rockwell and the mafia… the dream of America endlessly unravels its codes, like the helix of some ideological DNA.”

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Hello America (1981)

Mallory stared at the distant gantries of Cape Kennedy. It was difficult to believe that he had once worked there. ‘I don’t think even Perth, Australia, is far enough. We need to set out in space again…’ ”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)

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J.G. Ballard’s imagery reveals the fossil record of the Cold War as it remains in ruined installations, text, movies, photos and the contemporary psyche – the ‘helix of some ideological DNA’ as he puts it. Growing up here on the edge of the world – Perth, Western Australia – I have always been very interested in Cold War iconography, partly because of childhood memories such as the flights of the Soviet Sputnik and of John Glenn. Less fondly, I recall mucking in with a neighbour’s children to fill sandbags for his nuclear fallout shelter.

This piece – originally presented as a Powerpoint presentation containing 39 slides and attendant discussion – is intended to promote these connections. It’s a kind of sketch for a longer piece I plan to make in another life. It comes out of a paper I presented at The American History of Science Society Annual Meeting at Milwaukee in November 2002. I planned it as a presentation where I read a paper and screened images. It didn’t quite work that way and I ended up running back and forth to a photocopy service to produce overhead transparencies as there were not enough data projectors to go around. The paper itself is an offshoot of my PhD dissertation which I am currently ‘finishing’.

– © Pippa Tandy

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Harvey’s anatomy of blood circulation (circa. 1628)

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.”

– J.G. Ballard, Ambit, No. 33 in 1967

For over forty years, in the late twentieth century, the Cold War and its omnipresent technologies provided the matrix, the essential mediating structure for experience of all kinds. The Cold War conditioned the possibilities, the pattern of a new culture, which was determined almost entirely by the technologies that it threw up. Through these and the cultural processes they initiated, it delineated, measured and defined the space in which newly emerging conditions of human existence came to be configured and consolidated. The priorities of the Cold War were embedded within the human, essential to life as we know it. The language and imagery of this configuration were hinged on powerful determinant metaphors making visible the relations of anxiety, power and desire that mediated the changing relations between human beings, their culture and technology.

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

I had seen these fossils before. Each of the bones I had remembered clearly, etched by the moonlight as I lay on the floor listening to the screaming of the birds as they struck in their sexual frenzy at the church tower. I remembered the shin bones of the archaic boar, and the barely human skull of a primitive valley dweller who had lived by this river a hundred thousand years earlier, the breastbone of an antelope and the crystalline spine of a fish – together the elements of a strange chimera. I remember too the terrifying skeleton of the winged man.”

– J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)

The work and writing of J.G. Ballard offers a field guide to the Cold War life world and its cultural productions. He applies his ruthless imagination to charting its phyla, to treating the evolving phenomena of the Cold War as a problem in taxonomy. He constructs sets of documents, charts, descriptions that open up the violent fusions, the unquestioned imperatives of the era of forensic inspection. For Ballard this new planet earth is ‘a deranged zoo and someone has left the cages open’. He describes his imagination at work, feeding on the ‘compost’ of ’strange crossovers in the new communications world’, scientific and technological ‘plankton’, discarded documents from wastepaper baskets, images from World War II and the Cold War. Ballard calls all this ‘ideological DNA’ (J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, December 1987, Issue 413, p.57).

It is the key to understanding the present moment. It is not that the Cold War began and is now ended. Rather, it constitutes the cultural genetic inheritance that continues to shape our lives at every level and will do so for the foreseeable future. While the actual origins of the Cold War go further back, its structure becomes visible with the Manhattan Project and the American decision, against the advice of nuclear theorists and practitioners such as Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and others, not to share discoveries and developments in nuclear weapons research with the Soviet Union.

Student textbook image of Klinefelter’s Syndrome chromosomes

In the field office he came across a series of large charts of mutated chromosomes. He rolled them up and took them back to his bunker. The abstract patterns were meaningless, but during his recovery he amused himself by devising suitable titles for them. (Later, passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions. Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.)

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

Ballard states that ’science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society’. The Cold War thus redefines the scope of literature and literary practices. There is no longer one literature but rather ‘fictions of every kind’. The writer must approach his subject matter ‘like a scientist or engineer’ and ‘out-imagine everyone else – scream louder, whisper more quietly’ (J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb. 1971).

Still from Dr No (dir. Terence Young, 1962)

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreels on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Ballard’s work and life parallel the growth and change in industrial technologies of World War II and the Cold War. He is both product and critic of the cultures effected by these technologies. His life experience brought him up against the material conditions of experience. His writing is informed by patterns, by repetition and return as he visits and revisits his subjects, He opens them to changing angles of vision and shifting distances and focus, as though through a set of variable focus lenses.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.

– J.G. Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash, (1974)

In 1951 Lancelot Law-Whyte wrote of the ‘increasing awareness of the morphological character of many of the sciences, which are now seen to be concerned with complex structures or forms of particular kinds’. He anticipated the ’simple and comprehensive method of describing the changing form or structure of a complex of relationships’ which was highlighted by the determination of the double helix structure of DNA two years later (Lancelot Law White, Note to ‘Chronological Survey on Form’, in Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, 1951).

Still from Atomic Café, documentary film by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty (1982)

Television has glamorized war for us, whether the movie drenched jungle palette of the Vietnam newsreel or the sinister black-and-white film relayed to our living rooms from the nose-cone cameras of Desert Storm’s smart bombs, which almost incite the television viewer to become a cruise missile.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The last Real Innocents’, The New York Times, 1991

Awareness of and interest in morphology is central to Cold War culture. Morphologies of the time are frequently articulated into culture through images. According to Lawrence Alloway, the word ‘image’ became a term that could be used to ‘describe evocative visual material from any source, with or without the status of art’, in the early 50s (Alloway, ‘The Development of British Pop’, Lucy Lippard, ed, Pop Art, 1966). This was when Ballard was reading medicine or wandering around London picking up work, writing advertising copy and selling encyclopaedias.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed – he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive he must be far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, he must scream louder, whisper more quietly.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, Feb, 1971

Also in the fifties, mechanical reproduction, spurred on by new technologies, increased the availability of images and their use in advertising and popular culture. Images thus became specimens, to be collected, reconfigured and exhibited, and ‘accessioned’ into taxonomies of desire. Both artists and the mass media gathered images from all sources into their archives.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

It’s photography and the cinema above all which provide us with reflections of this landscape. Television seems to me to supply a particularly important role, in the continuous flood of images with which it inundates our brain: it perceives things on our behalf, and it’s like a third eye grafted onto us.”

– J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Robert Louit, Magazine Littéraire no.87, April 1974

Magazines such as Life and Look increasingly exploited the potency of modern consumer imagery in the context of the culture and the technological events of the Cold War. Reiterated cycles of images became the currency, the everyday iconography, of the times. These images are now a vocabulary of the twentieth century, on the one hand a repository of cute kitsch, on the other, a powerful set of revelatory devices, as attested by the fact that many of the ‘key’ images of the period are now ‘owned’ by corporations.

Ballard is very aware of the power of these images. He is a visual writer, deploying images from his own archive, those of other artists and of the mass media. In collaging these images Ballard is also making a taxonomic frottage of the visual culture of his time, and a map of the human condition they inspired.

Still from Ice Station Zebra (dir. John Sturges,1968)

The Image Maze. Talbot followed the helicopter pilot across the rain-washed concrete. For the first time, as he wandered along the embankment, one of the aircraft had landed. The slim figure of the pilot left no reflections in the silver pools. The exhibition hall was deserted. Beyond a tableau sculpture of a Saigon street execution stood a maze constructed from photographic billboards. The pilot stepped through a doorway cut into an image of Talbot’s face. He looked up at the photograph of himself, snapped with a lapel camera during his last seminar. Over the exhausted eyes presided the invisible hierarchies of the quasars. Reading the maze, Talbot made his way among the corridors. Details of his hands and mouth signposted its significant junctions.

– J.G. Ballard, ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, (1970)

Ballard’s palaeontological treatment of technologies as cultural artifacts is essential for any analysis of the culture of the period. Ballard’s imagery makes visible the ontological structures of the emergent Cold War subject. It reveals the relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined.

Still from Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1961)

The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.”

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

The relationship between the body and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world, in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined, is apparent in both his method and subject matter, as in the ‘Terminal Beach’ quote above.

B-29 flying over Tinian Base in the Marianas, 1945, courtesy Smithsonian Institute (National Air and Space Museum) Washington DC

In all probability the airplane is banked and is turning, although your sensations make you feel it is in straight and level flight. Don’t act according to your sensations. Check and cross check your instruments.”

– Pilot’s Information File, 1944: The Authentic World War II Guidebook for Pilots and Flight Engineers, Schiffer Military/Aviation History, Atglen Pennsylvania, 1995, Section 4, Man Goes Aloft, ‘Sense of position in Flight’, Part 9, 1 (Revised August 1, 1944)

For Ballard, the conditions of thought, action and desire are shaped by technology, via the exterior, by technology’s tropes as images and artifacts, in their military form, or, in their familiar domesticated manifestations. They are the sites for ramification of power, authority and sexuality such as the freeway, the cine-camera, the interiors of cars and fighter aircraft and most especially the omnipresent imagery of conflict and technological apocalypse, such as World War II air battles, in particular those of the Pacific war, and images of Vietnam and atomic bomb tests.

Still from Kiss Me Deadly (dir. robert aldrich, 1955)

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 pied across the bunks. Identifiable by their ragged shorts and flowered dresses, and by the clogs embedded in their swollen feet, dozens of Lunghua prisoners lay on the bunks like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse. Their backs and shoulders glistened with mucilage, and the splayed mouths in their ballooning cheeks still gaped as if these bloated men and women, dragged from a banquet, were gripped by a ravenous hunger.

He walked through the darkened ward, the tin of Spam held tightly to his chest, breathing through the magazines cupped over his mouth.”

– J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984)

These figures, actual and imagined, have entered social and individual consciousness as recognizable and meaningful entities. The abandoned motels, rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools and deserted bars of Ballard’s fiction are ’spinal landscapes’, the settings which arouse liminal memories of ‘the formation of the brain’s visual centres’ (‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970), revealing the evolutionary development of vision and consciousness and the informing power of technology over this development.

Still from Alphaville (dir. Jean-Luc Godard,1965)

At dusk on the second day he left the bed and went to the window for his first careful look at Cocoa Beach. Through the plastic blinds he watched the shadows bisecting the empty pool, drawing a broken diagonal across the canted floor. He remembered his few words to the cab driver. The complex geometry of this three-dimensional sundial seemed to contain the operating codes of a primitive time-machine, repeated a hundred times in all the drained swimming pools of Cape Kennedy.”

– J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)

They even suggest a parasitical relationship, in that technology exploits and mimics the structures of human consciousness in order to evolve. Ballard’s practice examines the man-made environment as a field of scientific investigation to discover the shaping processes of human subjectivity.