Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Out in the suburbs, the Birmingham-based Ballard exhibition Zodiac 3000 draws first blood…

For this upcoming exhibition, the International Project Space in Birmingham will be transformed into the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, “an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction.”

Details of a new exhibition in London that “often plays with the constants of space and time”. It includes the work of Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series previously featured on Ballardian.

Banksy’s latest masterpiece.

Information on a forthcoming exhibition at The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, inspired by Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.

The Times has two more extracts from Miracles of Life. In the first, Ballard reminisces about his time as a trainee air force pilot. In the second, he discusses the ideas behind Crash.

Guardian columnist Jean Hannah Edelstein reviews the 12 Steps Down exhibition, based on J.G. Ballard’s short story, ‘The Drowned Giant’.

Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.

News of a ’site-concerned work’ inspired by Ballard’s short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ and by ‘the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement’, with 25 artists invited to produce work around these themes.

Here’s a selection of visual art that we’ve previously featured on this site, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work. See Part 1 for more recent discoveries.

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the […]

Here’s a selection of visual art I’ve recently come across, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work.

Harper Collins and Times Online recently announced a competition to design a cover for Crash. Ballard himself will choose the winning design, so what to avoid? Rick Poynor knows.

Book designer Henry Yee has done a few Ballard covers in his time. His latest, for the reprint of The Kindness of Women, is lovely, weaving the erotic possibilities of the text (the curvature of a woman’s breast) with strong design (a prominent orb, enhanced with a block quote) and the persistence of memory (the […]

Steven Meisel’s latest ‘atrocity porn’ is now online.
[ via TimC ]
Previously on Ballardian: k-punk on Steven Meisel.

Image from Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World (courtesy Victorian College of the Arts).
Still in Melbourne, I somehow missed this last year (think I may have been O/S at the time) but it’s worth recording as yet another excellent example of Ballard’s spreading influence in the visual arts.
There’s one apparent error, though — as far as […]

J.G. Ballard at KURBgallery.
Please pass on to anyone who might be interested.
From Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield:
“From January 11 to 20 2008 KURB gallery, an artist run non-profit art gallery, studios and performance space at 310 William Street Northbridge, Perth, Australia, will hold an exhibition, forum, programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard.
Interested […]

News of an installation in Oslo…
Ann Lislegaard Crystal World ( after J.G Ballard ), 2006; Ann Lislegaard: Science Fiction and other worlds
26 May-26 August 2007
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Dronningens gt 4, 0107 Oslo, Norway
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art has in recent years presented a
series of exhibitions with younger Norwegian artists.
This year we […]

© Metro-Centre, 2007.
Something is stirring over at our favourite shopping mall. After lying fallow for almost two months, the official blog of the Metro-Centre shopping centre in Brooklands stirs to life with a rather ominous poster campaign starring the failed talk-show host, David Cruise.
First, we were promised that ‘the wait is almost over’. And now, […]

City of the Immortals, by Michelle Lord (2007).
Besides Future Ruins, Michelle Lord is holding a second exhibition as part of the UK’s national Architecture Week. Titled The City of the Immortals, it’s based “upon the Jorges Luis Borges short story ‘The Immortal’. In a narrative series of photographic images, the fictional city Borges describes is […]

In news just to hand (with hopefully more info to come):
——————————————————————————————————
+ FUTURE RUINS EXHIBITION
June 15-23
Press release:
Inspired by author JG Ballard’s mid-period novels, Michelle Lord’s ‘Future Ruins’ connects the remaining architectural examples of Birmingham’s concrete past with Ballard’s vision of the contemporary landscape, his prophetic views on Brutalist architecture and the technological demise of the urban […]

You can’t help but notice a backlash towards Ballard these days. Here are two of the more aggressive memes.

BACKLASH #1: Ballard vs The Blogosphere
Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then […]

This should have been included in yesterday’s wrapup, but wasn’t.
+ BALLARD/BURROUGHS
This very brief interview with Ballard (scroll down to the end of the V. Vale piece to find it) slipped under my radar when it came out earlier this year, but is definitely worth mentioning for the little extra light it sheds on one of […]

+ IDEAL, RADIANT
In his excellent paper, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’, delivered at the Ballard conference, Owen Hatherley locates JGB’s Vermilion Sands stories as a vision at right angles to the dystopian tradition in which Ballard is normally housed — the Vermilion collection posits, Hatherley writes, ‘an actual, liveable future utopia that is eminently possible’. And yet, […]

Here I present the latest wrapup, not as extensive as I would like as I’m currently in Dubai trying to locate my missing passport, while entertaining the thought of spending a few days, maybe a week in the non-space of the Dubai International Airport until it turns up (hopefully a week; I’m trying to embrace […]

‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’, by 14. Copyright 2006.
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: […]

i.m. Jean Baudrillard
by Benjamin Noys
———————————————————————————————————————-
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 […]

by Rick Poynor

‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission.

J. G. BALLARD’S Crash tests the […]

Nice article by Jonathan Jones tracing the influence of Surrealism, including in the works of Ballard. It’s as neat a summation as you’d want of one of JGB’s major inspirations:
When we speak of something being surreal, we mean something between funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. It is undoubtedly this comic dimension that made surrealism so […]

Interview by Simon Sellars
Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman (which explains the pithy insights to come). He’s also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs […]

‘Storm’ (pencil and watercolour on paper; 2006). © Fay Ballard.
Here’s a link to the wonderful online gallery of artist Fay Ballard (JGB’s daughter). As a couple of people have pointed out, there’s a touch of Ernst in these evocative works.
[via David Pringle]

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 […]

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; […]

Mr Rent-A-Quote is at it again. “I prefer car washes and chinese takeaways” — another classic soundbite.
From The Telegraph, 14/5/06.
“Next month at Tate Britain, John Constable’s magnificent canvases of the English countryside will be shown together for the first time. J.G. Ballard, Jon Snow, Sir John Mortimer and others describe what his paintings mean to […]

BLDGBLOG has a nice piece on painter Angelina Gualdoni’s beautiful oils of an abandoned shopping mall in Chicagoland.
“Terrain Vague”

Thanks to Tim from the JGB Yahoo group for this link…
Saturday February 11, 2006
The Guardian
Ambit 182 Autumn 2005 (£6.50. UK subscriptions £25. www.ambitmagazine.co.uk)
“Edward Paolozzi, the pop artist who died a few months ago, was a contributor to Ambit for many years. In discussions for what would turn out to be his last illustrations for the […]

Artist Accused of Vandalizing Urinal
Jan 06
PARIS
A 76-year-old performance artist was arrested after attacking Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” _ a porcelain urinal _ with a hammer, police said.
Duchamp’s 1917 piece _ an ordinary white, porcelain urinal that’s been called one of the most influential works of modern art _ was slightly chipped in the attack at […]

In 1970, Ballard put together an ‘exhibition’ centred on a number of crashed cars that had been retreived from a London scrapyard. The background to the exhibition, its wider place in Ballard’s ouvre, and the effect on attendees, are all examined by Simon Ford in an article published in the online journal /seconds:
“Ballard’s choice of […]

by William Burroughs (1970)
The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content […]