Slip-case designed by David Pelham for a Penguin boxed set of four 1974 Ballard reprints.

by James Pardey

The idea that the world and everything in it is made from the four ‘elements’ of earth, air, fire and water endured among philosophers from antiquity to the Renaissance. All things, they said, were a combination of these four building blocks, and whether something was one thing or another – a rock, say, or a leaf – depended only on the relative amounts of each element in it. The idea was not so naïve as it seems, for when wood burned it was seen to release fire, air and water, as steam, until only earth remained as ashes, and in one sense the philosophers were not so very wide of the mark, since nowadays these ‘elements’ are known as solid, liquid, gas and energy.

It has often been said that J G Ballard’s quartet of disaster novels published in 1962–66 draws on these four classical elements for the natural catastrophes that destroy civilization in each of the books. In The Wind From Nowhere a global super-hurricane (air) reaches speeds of several hundred miles an hour, toppling trees, reducing cities to rubble, and darkening the skies with debris and topsoil. In The Drowned World rising sea levels (water) have flooded most of the Earth’s populated areas, and London lies submerged beneath steaming lagoons and primeval swamps that are ringed by jungle and overrun with reptiles. The Drought presents a future where rain is a thing of the past and the Sun (fire) has dried up the lakes and river beds, creating a parched landscape of ghost towns and burning cities. And in The Crystal World a bizarre transmutation of matter (earth) is turning everything into a coruscating mineral realm where plants, animals and people are mutating into sculptures of glass and quartz.

This analogy is almost always noted without further comment, although in fact it may be taken further. For just as Plato and Aristotle had posited the existence of a mysterious and immaterial fifth element, or quintessence, that suffuses all things, so something similar pervades much of Ballard’s early fiction, which, in addition to the four novels, includes two collections of short stories, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare in 1963 and The Terminal Beach in 1964. So what in a Ballardian context is this quintessential element?

Ballard himself pre-empted the question in a guest editorial that he wrote for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1962. In it he argued that it was time for sf to turn its back on outer space and its standard paraphernalia of rockets, ray guns and aliens, and strike out in a new direction that, by analogy with outer space, had become known as inner space. This was not a reference to the hollow earth stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs as Brian Aldiss later quipped[1]. The term had previously been used in 1953 by the English novelist J B Priestley whose essay, They Come From Inner Space[2], presented a critique of sf as he saw it at the time. Priestley argued that the move into outer space was a move ‘in the wrong direction’ and maintained that sf should instead be ‘moving inward’ to explore ‘the hidden life of the psyche’. He singled out the American writer Ray Bradbury as a pioneer of inner space[3] and added that although Bradbury used traditional sf motifs such as spaceships and Martians, he did so in order to ‘show us what is really happening in men’s minds’. Priestley held that men are not as rational as they like to think they are, but are also driven by the desires, urges and irrational instincts of the subconscious mind. For Priestley, the idea that people’s actions are dictated solely by their conscious selves was akin to the equally fallacious assumption that ‘what can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it’.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

Priestley saw the flying saucer legend and sf’s other trademark tropes as a product of society’s collective unconscious. Rocket ships, he wrote, ‘no longer represent man’s triumphant progress’ but instead have come to symbolize his attempts ‘to escape from himself’. Likewise for aliens, which as metaphors for humanity’s ‘deep feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt’ can be traced back to the scientific romances of the nineteenth century[4]. So inner space is not a physical space at all but a psychological one. It is the dimensionless world of the subconscious mind or, as Priestley called it, the Unconscious.

Ballard’s editorial, Which Way to Inner Space? [5], did not mention Priestley’s essay but may nonetheless be regarded as a sequel to it, for he took up where Priestley left off, describing Bradbury as ‘a poet’ and reiterating that ‘it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored’. But Ballard did more than merely echo Priestley. He also argued that for sf to avoid falling by the wayside it must discover new routes to inner space that draw on more abstract, speculative and experimental techniques like those used in other media such as modern art. As such, he was not just offering a commentary on the state of sf, he was issuing a manifesto that would need to be adopted if the genre was to secure its place as ‘the literature of tomorrow’.

Ballard ended his editorial with an anecdote about Salvador Dalí delivering a lecture in a diving suit. When asked how deep he proposed to descend, the artist had announced, ‘To the Unconscious!’ and Ballard’s editorial was a unilateral declaration of his intent to follow Dalí there[6]. That he was true to his word may be seen in the novels and many of the short stories that followed, though by the time his editorial appeared he had already made a few forays into inner space with stories such as ‘The Waiting Grounds’, ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Overloaded Man’. A notable exception is his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which was also written before his New Worlds editorial but was structured as a conventional action adventure. Ballard later disowned it and referred instead to The Drowned World as his first novel, and it is here that inner space comes to the fore as a quintessential force in his fiction.

The Drowned World is a lushly atmospheric novel that takes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the lagoons and jungles of post-diluvian London, where half-submerged hotels and office blocks rise out of the water, and cars sit rusting in the streets sixty feet below the water’s surface. Reptiles now dominate the submerged city and the jungle teems with an even greater profusion of wildlife. Alligators patrol the lagoons and iguanas bask three deep in the upper windows of department stores. With humans gone, the flora and fauna are reverting to that of the Triassic period some 250 million years earlier.

Cover painting: The Palace of Windowed Rocks by Yves Tanguy. Penguin Books, 1965 paperback edition.

Amidst this febrile environment, Dr Robert Kerans and several other members of a survey team begin to experience strange dreams, like distant echoes of their surroundings, prompting one of them to ask, ‘Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons’. From this the realisation follows that the dreams are being triggered by primitive organic memories within their collective unconscious. These ‘neuronic’ memories were encoded in the nervous systems of man’s earliest ancestors during the original Triassic period and have endured at a cellular level through the ensuing epochs of human evolution. But now, in response to the emergence of a new Triassic age, these dormant memories are finally resurfacing, leading the earlier questioner to conclude that ‘we really remember these swamps and lagoons’.

As these dreams and memories take hold so those affected become increasingly introverted, and when the survey team departs these few individuals remain behind. Left alone, they avoid each other and withdraw into their own internal worlds, accepting that ‘their only true meeting-ground would be in their dreams’. Thus they regress through ‘archaeopsychic time’ and ‘a succession of ever stranger landscapes’ towards the prehistoric past of their cellular evolution, until ‘the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable’.

This exploration of inner space continues in The Drought, a novel that is thematically similar to The Drowned World and may even be seen as a reworking of it with a new catastrophe, a change of location and other nominal differences. For example, Dr Robert Kerans is now Dr Charles Ransom, and the deluge has become a drought that has scorched the earth and turned the landscape into a cracked desert of dead trees, long- gone lakes and empty rivers. Dust chokes the air, as do clouds of ash and smoke from the burning towns and cities whose populations have departed in a mass exodus to the coast. Here they eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in makeshift settlements around the water desalination plants that the government has set up.

But beneath this superficial similarity there is a deeper divergence, for while The Drowned World describes the internal landscapes of Kerans and his colleagues, The Drought takes a more oblique approach as Ballard turns his attention outwards to focus instead on the external landscape and the wreckage that is strewn across it. This change of perspective is echoed by the reader, who switches from an observer of The Drowned World to a participant in The Drought. As an observer, the reader is psychologically detached from Kerans and reads his dispatches from inner space like those of a Reuters correspondent. Ransom, however, has less to say about his state of mind in The Drought and is more like a tour guide, taking the reader with him during his journey to the coast, his ten years of ‘dune limbo’ and his eventual return inland to the ruins of the town in which he once lived. It is a desolate journey, fraught with danger, through an alien environment ravaged by destruction and decay. Abandoned vehicles clutter the highways, boats sit high and dry on the sun-baked river beds, and everything that was once familiar is now being destroyed. This in itself is bad enough but in fact it merely sets the scene, for the novel’s core concern is existential and its theme is the uncertainty of physical and psychological survival. Death lurks everywhere, and prowls the landscape in the form of wild animals that were once caged in zoos, while psychosis threatens in the unpredictability of others – men whose minds are disintegrating like the world around them. As such, The Drought does not present a single, Ballardian version of inner space like the neuronic memories and archaeopsychic time of The Drowned World. Instead it sends its readers there, for it is their responses to this nightmarish world that the novel elicits, their feelings of alienation and vulnerability that it evokes, and their inner spaces that it explores. Like The Drowned World, The Drought is a psychic odyssey, but one that must now be undertaken by the reader.

Having examined inner space in terms of both its internal and external landscapes, Ballard adopted an altogether different approach in his next novel. The Crystal World is an extended version of ‘The Illuminated Man’ which had appeared in his second collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach. In the story a man named James B— travels to the Florida Everglades to investigate reports of a bizarre phenomenon that is turning the region and everything in it to crystal. Similar outbreaks have been reported in the Pripet Marshes of Byelorussia and the Matarre region of Madagascar, and it is the Matarre to which Dr Edward Sanders travels in The Crystal World, although by then Ballard had relocated the Matarre into Cameroon in a move that recalls the story’s famous precedessor, as Sanders journeys upriver through the steaming jungles of West Africa towards a new Heart of Darkness.

Cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst. Panther Books paperback edition, 1968.

The crystallization process is similar to a cancer and seemingly unstoppable. As the ground underfoot and the slow-moving waters of the river begin to vitrify, so too do the flora and fauna. Like a game of animal, vegetable or mineral with only one outcome, everything succumbs and nothing is immune. This strange metamorphosis is in some way connected to reports by astronomers that distant galaxies are ‘doubling’ – a phenomenon that is dubbed the Hubble Effect and attributed to the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter. These subatomic events are cancelling out the equivalent temporal components of time and anti-time, thereby ‘subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time’ and depleting ‘the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system’. So time is quite literally running out, and as it does the plants, animals and people in each affected area change into scintillating new forms that freeze them in ‘a landscape without time’.

This emphasis on time is a recurring theme in Ballard’s fiction. He had given notice of it in his New Worlds editorial, where he cited time as ‘one of the perspectives of the personality’ and it is this subjective sense of time that shapes The Drowned World, as archaeopsychic time, neuronic time and a ‘descent into deep time’. It is present in The Drought to a lesser extent, but in The Crystal World it again takes centre stage, transforming the external landscape as vividly as it does the dreamscapes of Kerans & Co. in post-apocalyptic London.

The Crystal World is also an intensely visual novel and the inspiration for it is easy to establish. For in 1966, the year that the novel was first published, Ballard wrote an article for New Worlds titled The Coming of the Unconscious[7] in which he equated ‘the images of surrealism’ with ‘the iconography of inner space’. It was a view he reiterated in his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life, describing inner space as, among other things, ‘the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting’[8]. But this belief that surrealism offers a window onto inner space was not confined to two statements made more than forty years apart. His writing repeatedly references artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy[9], and their paintings feature frequently in his fiction. Notable examples include a cameo for The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ and an appearance by The Echo, Delvaux’s time-lapse painting of a ‘triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city’ in ‘The Day Of Forever’[10]. Likewise ‘The Overloaded Man’, which extends the images of inner space to the neo-plastic compositions of Piet Mondrian. These provide a powerful metaphor for the mental breakdown suffered by the story’s protagonist as ‘object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract’[11].

As in his short stories, so in his novels. The Drowned World features a Delvaux painting ‘in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bone-like landscape’ while on another wall ‘one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious’. Later in the novel Kerans reflects on how the jungle around him increasingly resembles the one in Ernst’s painting, while the dreams that he and his colleagues are experiencing are ‘the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting’. With Ernst and Delvaux[12] featuring prominently in The Drowned World, the use of a Tanguy painting, The Palace of Windowed Rocks, on the cover of the paperback edition published by Penguin Books in 1965 might have seemed off-key were it not for The Drought which also appeared that year. Two of the novel’s chapters, Multiplication of the Arcs and Jours de Lenteur, take their titles from paintings by Tanguy, and like The Drowned World there is a feeling that the external and painted landscapes are converging, as Ransom sees in his surroundings the ‘drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time’ in Jours de Lenteur.

Given these and other references to art and artists, their absence from The Crystal World may at first seem surprising. Readers who have come to expect such references may see in the novel’s two main themes a tacit connection between ‘the petrified forest’ and Ernst’s painting of the same name, or an allusion to Magritte’s Time Transfixed in the depiction of a world without time, but the novel makes no mention of these or any other paintings and the reason for this soon becomes apparent. Ballard excluded the art of others because its presence would have obscured the bigger picture that he was creating, for if a picture paints a thousand words then in The Crystal World it is the other way round and greatly magnified. The novel reads like a journey through a surrealist canvas, and its resemblance to one in particular seems more than coincidental. In The Coming of the Unconscious Ballard had singled out Max Ernst’s painting, The Eye of Silence, as one of ‘the key documents of surrealism’ with ‘a direct bearing on the speculative fiction of the immediate future’. For Ballard, the painting’s ‘frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp’ have ‘the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are – the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness’. With this in mind it is hard to ignore the resemblance of Ernst’s jewelled ceramic structures and bright green biomorphic forms to Ballard’s crystalline forest ‘loaded with deliquescing jewels’ and living statues ‘carved from jade and quartz’. The painting is suffused with a timeless, dream-like quality that is shared by Ballard’s novel as the forest and everything in it slowly solidifies. This convergence of painted and written landscapes recalls those in The Drowned World and The Drought, though unlike these two novels it is not made explicit. As time is removed from The Crystal World it becomes increasingly surreal, until finally all movement ceases and like Ernst’s painting there is silence. If, as Ballard believed, the painting is a window onto inner space then Sanders in the novel climbs through it, pulling aside a curtain of tinkling lianas and shimmering glass foliage to penetrate deep into the heart of the petrified forest. He eventually re-emerges, but at the end of the novel he is seen heading back upriver, and it is tempting to imagine what he might discover on his return. For somewhere, glimpsed perhaps through a gap in the trees, there is surely a remote clearing surrounded by organic rocks and vitrified vegetation. It is the source of the outbreak, and it looks just like The Eye of Silence.

Given this similarity between Ernst’s painting and The Crystal World it was no surprise that when the novel was first published it was The Eye of Silence that filled the dust jacket, as it did the front, back and spine of the paperback edition published by Panther Books two years later in 1968. It was an improvement over the lurid sf imagery used on other covers[13] though it was not without precedent. The idea had first been introduced in 1963 when Penguin Books launched a new sf series. Penguin’s then art director, Germano Facetti, had noticed a similar connection between The Eye of Silence and A Case of Conscience by the American writer James Blish and used a detail from the painting on the book’s front cover. This use of twentieth-century art became a defining feature of the Penguin sf series and, in addition to the pairing of Ballard and Tanguy mentioned earlier, Facetti studiously matched Ray Bradbury’s The Day it Rained Forever with Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Trap, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity with Tanguy’s The Doubter, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s Fifth Planet with Magritte’s The Flavour of Tears and so on, extending the idea to other artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Picasso[14].

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

For Ballard the images of surrealism served a more specific purpose as one of many possible routes to inner space. Such images informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre. That was inner space in its wider, quintessentially Ballardian form and to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself. The books were sold individually or as a boxed set in a slip-case that Pelham also designed, and it is these iconic images that have become most strongly associated with Ballard’s fiction.

So why is this? The answer is three parts English to one part French. First, Pelham was already familiar with Ballard’s work and a great admirer of it, being drawn to what he later described as its ‘apocalyptic imagery’ and ‘depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay’[15]. Second, it no doubt helped that Ballard and Pelham were friends, having been introduced some years earlier by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The three men met regularly at Ballard’s home in Shepperton, a suburban town south-west of London near to Heathrow Airport and the M25 motorway so, third, Pelham was able to discuss his ideas for these new covers with the author himself. Add to this Pelham’s fourth ingredient – a generous amount of je ne sais quoi – and the results were more than merely eye-catching.

Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly[16], these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.

An American WWII bomber lies abandoned and half-buried by the shifting sands on Pelham’s slip-case[17] while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb’s tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger’s cat inside Pandora’s box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as Dalí’s melting clocks or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so both bomb and slip-cased bomber have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

In contrast to this The Drowned World presents a peaceful scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tranquillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis. Elsewhere The Wind From Nowhere makes a mockery of a spotless Centurion tank, while The Drought has turned a Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile.

The use of such icons to signify apocalyptic ruination is nothing new of course. The Statue of Liberty, in particular, has borne the brunt of numerous cataclysms that have left it in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation. Ballard himself could not resist the temptation in The Wind From Nowhere, while the Statue’s cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock, but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham’s images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled. Aesthetically these images mesmerise, and on closer inspection they tantalise, but as in Ballard’s fictional worlds, answers are avoided and ambiguity abounds. And this is perhaps the key to Pelham’s images, for they occupy a twilight zone between the landscapes of the outer world and those of inner space. Like the contemplation of a surrealist painting it may take several attempts to ‘get’ Ballard, but Pelham got him to perfection, creating a union of text and image that has never been bettered. With these classic covers the art of J G Ballard reached its apotheosis.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2009 issue of Vector magazine. Reproduced with permission.

NOTES

[1] Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p.162.
[2] ‘They Come From Inner Space.’ In: J B Priestley. Thoughts in the Wilderness. London: William Heinemann, 1957, pp.20-6.
[3] Ray Bradbury may have been the first sf writer to visit inner space but an earlier pioneer outside the genre was Joseph Conrad in his 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness.
[4] Perhaps the best example is the invasion of Earth by murderous Martians in H G Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, which reputedly caused widespread panic in the USA when a radio adaption narrated by Orson Welles was broadcast in 1938.
[5] ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ New Worlds, May 1962. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.195-8.
[6] Ballard playfully alludes to Dalí’s lecture in his novel, The Drowned World. As the central character is putting on a diving suit he is told that he looks ‘like the man from inner space’ and is warned not to ‘try to reach the Unconscious’ as the suit ‘isn’t equipped to go down that far!’.
[7] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious.’ New Worlds, July 1966. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.84-8.
[8] J G Ballard. Miracles of Life. HarperCollins, 2008, p.215.
[9] Mike Bonsall’s concordance of Ballard’s oeuvre lists 110 references to Dalí , 40 to Ernst, 22 to Magritte, 14 to Delvaux, 11 to Chirico and 9 to Tanguy (http://bonsall.homeserver.com/concordance).
[10] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2. HarperCollins, 2006, p.151.
[11] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1. HarperCollins, 2006, p.336.
[12] Paul Delvaux was a particular favourite of Ballard’s and in 1986-87 he commissioned the artist Brigid Marlin to reproduce two Delvaux paintings, The Rape and The Mirror. Both were painted in 1936 but were thought to have been destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. In fact The Mirror had survived the war and was auctioned by Christies of London in 1999 for a hammer price of almost £3.2 million. Marlin’s portrait of Ballard, also painted in 1987, is at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
[13] Many of Ballard’s book covers are displayed in Rick McGrath’s Terminal Timeline at www.jgballard.ca/terminal_collection/terminal_timeline.html.
[14] The relationship between text and cover art in Penguin’s sf series is explored in a series of three articles in The Penguin Collector; see ‘Not Quite Nowhere Backwards’ at www.penguinsciencefiction.org.
[15] David Pelham, speaking at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in June 2005. A transcript of this talk appears in Penguin by Designers. London: The Penguin Collectors Society, 2007, pp.127-53.
[16] Science Fiction Monthly, September 1974, pp.6-7.
[17] In 1974, the year that Penguin published this boxed set, a short story by Ballard appeared in Ambit magazine. ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ tells of the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space and his convalescence at an abandoned resort where he becomes obsessed with excavating an American B-17 Flying Fortress that lies buried beneath the sand dunes.

+ More by James Pardey on David Pelham’s cover designs for Penguin’s Ballard reprints.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

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.

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

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

ARTIST STATEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon O’Carrigan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ More info: Simon O’Carrigan

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

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.

Ed Ruscha. Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas. 30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches (76.5 x 91.8 cm).

CRASH: HOMAGE TO JG BALLARD

Press Release
Gagosian Gallery
6-24 Britannia St London WC1X 9JD
t. 020.7841.9960 f. 020.7841.9961

Gallery hours: Tue – Sat: 10:00am– 6:00pm

Thursday, 11 February – Thursday, 1 April 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, February 11th from 6 to 8pm

I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society.

JG Ballard

Gagosian Gallery London will present “Crash,” a major group exhibition opening on 11 February 2010, which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard.

Ballard’s novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard’s great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, “Crash” includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision.

Ballard’s first published short story “Prima Belladonna” appeared in 1956, the same year as the celebrated Independent Group’s exhibition “This is Tomorrow” at the Whitechapel Gallery, which marked the birth of Pop Art in Britain. It was here, and in the work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux, that Ballard found the seeds of what he called a “fiction for the present day”. With its dystopian depictions of the present and future, its bleak, man-made landscapes and the recounting of the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments on humans, his work has resonated strongly among other writers, filmmakers and visual artists. The exhibition “Crash” brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown and Mike Nelson.

The exhibition is organised in association with the Estate of JG Ballard.

List of artists: Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

For further inquiries please contact the gallery at london@gagosian.com or at +44.207.841.9960.

More information here.

The following are the full versions of three book reviews originally published elsewhere in edited form.

The BLDGBLOG Book, by Geoff Manaugh. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. ISBN: 0811866440.

This review was originally published in Blueprint, September 2009, p. 67.

Geoff Manaugh has been described by fellow futurist Bruce Sterling as ‘the world’s greatest practitioner of “architecture fiction”’. His online ideas factory, BLDGBLOG, attracts descriptors like ‘promiscuous’ and ‘omnivorous’. His new book-of-the-blog, beautifully designed, delivers more of the same. It even features cartoon renderings of his trademark ‘urban speculation’, maybe the only medium flexible enough to capture the onslaught. There are four components treating eclectic aspects of the built environment: subterranean worlds, music/sound/noise, ‘landscape futures’, even climate (the ’space between buildings’). The section on ‘noise’ works best, considering something many architects seem to disregard: the acoustic footprint of urban areas and how this might be ‘tuned’ to satisfactory ‘user’ experiences (discussing the psychological effects of the built environment, Manaugh’s self-acknowledged debt to J.G. Ballard is most apparent). That’s the value of Manaugh’s work. At heart, he’s an outsider, perhaps, an enthusiast armed with a surplus of imagination and creative latitude, voicing ideas a professional ‘insider’, armed (burdened) with all the right references, might miss (or wilfully ignore).

He’s written a lot of new material, and some has been reworked from online. If you know the blog, you’ll know the style: breathless, italicised for emphasis, exhorting ‘you’ to consider video games and spam email as ‘architecture’ as much as actual buildings. Such writing might work best in the cross-linkage of the online matrix, although it doesn’t suffer noticeably on the page. Among the thoughtful features and interviews (with the likes of Mike Davis, Patrick McGrath and Lebbeus Woods) are numerous sidebars, allowing the reading experience to fold in on itself. Take Manaugh’s discussion of ‘a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors’. He contemplates how a man with no soul could walk into the infinite non-space generated when two mirrors reflect each other, but then we’re suddenly aboard the International Space Station and he’s conjured up an astronaut, ‘crazed with loneliness’, who sets up two mirrors before wandering inside them, never to return, while back on Earth children sing hymns in remembrance. The hall-of-mirrors metaphor is apt: follow Manaugh, and you never know where you’ll end up – a long way from home, certainly. The man should write a novel.

There’ll be protests: ‘That’s not architecture!’ But surely all architecture is fantasy on the drawing board until it meets the harsh reality of governance, big business, the real world. And, as Manaugh points out, ‘If architectural critics can get people to realize the everyday spatial world of earthquake safety plans and prison break films – and suburban Home Depot parking lots and bad funhouse rides – is worthy of architectural analysis, and that architecture is everywhere and everything, then perhaps we’ll learn to stop taking those spaces for granted’. Besides, his burgeoning popularity might help to finally break Ballard in the States, no bad thing.

But why no index? It’s annoying: Manaugh chews through so many topics, but good luck finding them in a hurry.

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

Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, editors. City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-84718-153-8.

Jeannette Baxter. J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-6267-9.

This double review was originally published in Colloquy, issue 17, August 2009, pp. 108-12.

City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair

It is perhaps surprising that Iain Sinclair has courted less academic attention than might be expected from a writer of his stature. His circular excisions of the written word, rewoven into the circuitous labyrinth of London’s urban fabric, his insistent intertextual frameworks and syntactic ambiguity seem to beg, at the least, a type of speculative literary criticism. Yet, as City Visions’ editors, Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, propose, perhaps Sinclair’s critical absence is a result of the peculiar tension his body of work engenders — tension between genres, between film, poetry and literature, between critical and commercial success and obscure, small-press inaccessibility, all of which he straddles. For Bond and Bavidge, “the multidiscursive and multi-encyclopaedic range of his sources and references … has made it difficult for commentators … to grasp the scope, and identities, of Sinclair’s various colliding projects” (2). However, it is in this fluidity that the various contributors to City Visions, which collects papers given at the University of Greenwich’s 2004 conference of the same name, find a way in. According to the editors: “Sinclair suggest[s] that the river could teach us a way of interacting with urban history and culture – a fluid imagination-work, as it were … as playful, democratic and formless as nature itself: as organic, grounded and experimental as the city could continue to be” (8). Accordingly, City Visions is far away from opaque literary theory, typified by Ben Watson, who admits to being stung by, and then colluding with, “Sinclair’s scorn for the patronising academic ‘overview’ [that] burn[s] occult insignia on the back of [my] neck” (82).

The anthology has four sections with titles that give an indication of the focus: Contexts, Culture and Critique, Connections, and Space. “Resistance” is a recurring concept, embodied, it is claimed, in Sinclair’s micro-detail. Because there are no real narrative arcs in his writing, the overarching critical strategy on display involves deep excavation of the mechanics of discourse. Kirstin Seale suggests that Sinclair “alienates the reader through use of digressive narrative, which, in its Blakean insistence on cyclical shapes, resists the linear structure of rational imagination” (105). Robert Hampson charts connections between Sinclair’s mapping of urban space, intertwined with the latterly reborn pyschogeography movement, and Sinclair’s sense of evasion of the all-consuming gaze of late capitalism: “The ‘fresh’ relations of collage coincide with visions of a transformed city” (113). David James skilfully picks apart Sinclair’s “cryogenic narrative” logic (a “bolting together of clauses,” like cryogenic suspension), where the artificiality of prose language is attacked, and reordered, to counter the “violence” it wreaks upon “felt experience,” resulting in what Sinclair in Dining on Stones describes as the “futility of fixing the present moment, instead of experiencing it” (157).

Indeed, “dispensing with the sub-clause,” to use Hampson’s term, comes to have macroscopic significance, paratactical resistance that might well be a “fidelity to the writer’s unconscious” (88), as Watson asserts regarding the dissent in Sinclair’s early poetry. Brian Baker, too, holds that “it is in fact the poetry that is vital to an understanding of Sinclair’s writing practice” (133), an experimental freezone where many of Sinclair’s core obsessions are developed.

I was disappointed by the lack of interest in Sinclair’s film work with Chris Petit, a long, fruitful and ongoing partnership. Although the films are mentioned sporadically throughout City Visions, only Esther Leslie’s essay on London Orbital (the Petit/Sinclair film of Sinclair’s book) applies any kind of weighty critique. Yet while her analysis is perceptive, dubbing the filmmakers’ interest in image overload and recovery as an “aesthetics of refuse” (refuse as both garbage and resistance), she misses a trick by failing to mention the overarching influence of J G Ballard, such an acknowledged influence on the film he may as well be credited as the third director.

David Cunningham rectifies this, albeit referring only to Sinclair’s written work. While many commentators tend to simplify the Ballard/Sinclair symbiosis, smelting it down to an effortless story of compatible writers, Cunningham deftly challenges that assertion by exposing the Ballardian influence as the grit in Sinclair’s work, a productive f(r)iction that allows Sinclair to revivify Ballard’s archetypal non-place: “re-plac[ing] the fictional spaces of Ballard’s novels through what is described as a tenuous act of re-enchantment … as if the lexical variety and richness of [Sinclair's prose] might overcome the emptiness that it confronts” (142).

All up, this is a very impressive collection (despite the niggling problem of multiple typos that renders some footnotes unintelligible). It meets Sinclair’s work on its own terms, becoming state-of-the-art literary theory that is intelligent and deep, but never anything less than playful, engaging and revelatory.

J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship

In contrast to Sinclair, Ballard has been very well served by academia. J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination represents the fifth book-length, critical analysis of his work (alongside numerous essays) and the second by Jeannette Baxter, who also edited Continuum’s collection of essays, J G Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2009). One wonders what Ballard himself might have made of it all. In 1991, he penned a wonderfully distemperate letter to Science Fiction Studies, in which he denounced the critical consciousness surrounding SF (a genre he is strongly associated with) as “bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance.”

What more can be said about his work? Quite a bit, according to Baxter, especially regarding his highly developed visual sensibility. The work of surrealist artists, Dalí especially, corroborated his decision to invert the standard tropes of science fiction in the 1960s, to explore inner rather than outer space, using the language of dreams to remap the reality of a burgeoning, mass-mediated consciousness — a parallel excavation of McLuhan’s global village. Yet, as Baxter points out, while “‘surreal” and “surrealist” have become standard terms for reviewers and critics when describing Ballard’s work … remarkably, no sustained analysis of the extent and order of Ballard’s Surrealism exists” (1).

While this may be true — “surrealist,” like “dystopian,” undeniably forms part of the clichéd critical lexicon surrounding Ballard’s material — is it that “remarkable” that a sustained analysis of his Surrealism doesn’t exist? (If by “sustained” Baxter means “book-length”). After all, how many authors have entire volumes devoted to a single element of their work? In J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, this becomes problematic in that, over the course of Baxter’s 237 pages, the thesis sometimes stretches thinly. For example, discussing Ballard’s novel The Crystal World (1966), she asserts that it offers a “critique of emergent US Neo-Imperialism within ‘decolonised’ Africa” (39). The Crystal World clearly draws on Surrealist technique, resulting in some of the most striking and uncanny imagery of Ballard’s career. But to suggest it has an extratextual political, postcolonial dimension seems more a result of Baxter adapting the novel to her critical framework, which avowedly aims to explore the “historical, political [and] visual dimensions” of Ballard’s Surrealism, rather than simply the “aesthetic (and purely) textual aspects” (13).

All the same, the book is commendable in its desire to parse the entirety of Ballard’s output: not just his novels, but also the numerous interviews he gave, his journalism, his short stories and particularly his graphic art. This imbues Baxter’s analysis with considerable depth, typified by her discussion of Ballard’s experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which returns the Atrocity chapters to their original sources as standalone “condensed novels,” often accompanied by collages, in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine.

J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination is recommended to those already familiar with Ballard, and who want to examine his influences in more detail. Otherwise, the dense, single-subject approach and the equally dense writing, tightly compacted with substantial academic language, might not be the best entry point. Like City Visions, typos plague it, surprisingly, given how long Ashgate has taken to release it. According to Baxter’s endnotes, the manuscript was finished in 2006 and published three years later, highlighting the perils of academic publishing, which can be slow to match the pace of the outside world. The book misses out on Ballard’s last novel, Kingdom Come (2006), and his autobiography, Miracles of Life (2008), omissions that immediately date any overview of Ballard published in 2009. The former would have slotted in well — according to Baxter’s prerequisites, it is blackly funny (she adroitly teases out the sly humour in the rest of Ballard’s work, locating it as an index of the Surrealist influence), political and highly visual — while the latter offers extended insights into the sway of Surrealism in his life.

The bibliography, as in most academic appraisals of Ballard, is somewhat predictable (at least in the material directly concerned with the writer), a feedback loop that references a select few, visible publications. This becomes apparent when Baxter discusses Jean Baudrillard’s article on Crash, returning to the same vehement reactions to Baudrillard’s interpetation that were levelled within academia back in 1991. Recently, there have been some productive re-readings of the Ba(udri)llardian symbiosis online in both blog and non-mainstream academic formats. These would surely have enhanced Baxter’s research in that they share her admirable central ideal: to rejuvenate the ossified critical shorthand that so often marks readings of Ballard.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ From Shanghai to Norwich: An Interview with Jeannette Baxter

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.

Gareth says:

I emailed the Times of couple of times and put a few comments on the competition page but heard nothing. Snooping around the Harper Perennial website I located the email address of Siobhan Kenny, the Communications Director, next day I received the following response, the end is in sight?

“Dear Mr Buxton

I do apologise for the lack of update on the competition to design a cover for a special edition of JG Ballard’s Crash. Unfortunately, changes to our publishing schedule resulted in our not being able to put the special edition into production in 2008 as planned. Instead therefore we hope to publish the new edition, complete wtih the winner’s artwork, as part of the series of events celebrating the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate in 2009. As soon as the details are finalised, we will of course inform the winner and publicise it more widely togethr with Times Online.

We are sorry for this delay but we hope that the greater prominence the book will receive by being part the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate will give the winner and the book more public profile.

Best wishes
Siobhan Kenny, Communications Director”

I also asked her to contact the Times and put an update on the competition web page, she agreed to arrange this.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Announcement: Crash Cover Competition
+ Crash Kama Sutra
+ Crash Cover Conundrum
+ Design a cover for Crash

by Mike Holliday

Ballard’s oeuvre has many highlights: the 1960s ‘disaster trilogy’ of novels, Crash, Empire of the Sun, and short stories such as ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. Not surprisingly, much of the secondary literature tends to concentrate on these key works. But even the most unremarkable of Ballard’s writings can repay close attention. One of the best examples is his ‘Court Circular’, which appeared in 1968 in Ambit magazine.

The first I heard of this curio was whilst idly perusing the ‘Bibliographies’ section of RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard. There I saw an advertisement for back-issues of Ambit, including the following:
No. 37 (1968) — ‘Court Circular’; and ‘Love — A Print-out for Clair Churchill’ (Rare: $25).
Not just one, but two items by Ballard that I’d never heard of! I traced the second piece, ‘Love – A Print-out’, to David Pringle’s 1984 bibliography, where it is described as ‘concrete poetry’ … but I was left wondering what on Earth the ‘Court Circular’ might be.

Eventually I got hold of a copy of Ambit #37, and found both items on the same page:

At first the ‘Court Circular’ appears to be a straightforward, rather ordinary, concrete poem, with a bit of artwork added to fill up the space. But one thing that bothered me was the apparently minor matter of the titles: the heading for the concrete poem — ‘Love: a Print-out for Claire Churchill’ — is in a much smaller typeface than ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’, almost as if the latter were the title for the entire page.

That this might actually be the case was suggested in the previous issue of Ambit where there is an announcement of a forthcoming newspaper-styled issue:

Do not miss number 37 a big blown-up Ambit (to newspaper size). All usual newspaper features but no journalists. J. G. Ballard reserved whole court page for an advertisement. Edwin Brock appointed Sports Editor. Henry Graham education correspondent. Lots and lots of pictures by all your favourite Ambit artists. Plenty of real news of the Going World.

(Ambit #36, 1968)

But if the ‘Court Circular’ was some form of advertisement, what might it be saying?

In order to understand that, we have to go back to the sorts of things that Ballard was working on during the period 1967 to 1968. In a cultural milieu where experimentation was almost mandatory, Ballard now counted among his friends and companions in experimentation: Eduardo Paolozzi — the Scottish sculptor and artist, Dr. Christopher Evans — the ‘maverick scientist’ who would partly inspire the character of Vaughan in Crash, and Martin Bax — a London paediatrician whose main off-curricular interest was editing Ambit, a magazine which he had started in 1959 to provide a mixture of poetry, fiction and art.

Inspired in part by these new friendships, Ballard’s work had gone well beyond prose fiction. A prime example — and particularly significant if the ‘Court Circular’ is some form of advertisement — is the series of what Ballard described as ‘advertiser’s announcements’, the first of which had appeared in the summer of 1967. Eventually a total of five such announcements would be published during the period 1967 to 1970.

The fourth of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements: from Ambit #45, 1970.

The concept behind these announcements was to advertise ideas, as Ballard explained in a 1968 interview:

It occurred to me about a year ago that advertising was an unknown continent as far as the writer was concerned [and that] 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.

Interview with Jannick Storm, Speculation #21, recorded July 1968.

Another of Ballard’s interests in this period was textual and visual collage. Martin Bax has related how both he and Ballard were fascinated by the archive of their friend Paolozzi:

Eduardo has a huge image archive of material – which I think fascinated Jim very much. I suppose what Jim was interested in was Eduardo’s style of collecting images of the 20th century … I’ve been in his studio when we were doing some images, and he said, ‘What about a playing card, Martin?’ I said, ‘A playing card?’ And he opened a drawer which was totally full of packs of playing cards which he’d bought all over the world – some extremely sexy ones of ladies with nothing on … Eduardo’s used that type of material in his silkscreen work, and Ballard saw this as a way in which you could use this material in texts. There was a piece by Eduardo called ‘Moonstrips’ and ‘General Dynamic Fun’ that was published in Ambit. He had collected 300 or 400 pages of texts, and Ballard and I went through this huge pile of texts together and we cut and arranged it so it has some sort of curious logic. It starts off with a piece about internists locking up wealthy women in Long Island mental hospitals, and goes through a curious range of material.

Interview in ‘Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard’, recorded in 1983.

Advertisement for Volume 1 of Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips’: from Ambit #33, 1967.

The photograph of the models that formed part of the ‘Court Circular’ had originally been included in the Paolozzi/Ballard/Bax piece ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’, where it had been accompanied by a babble of ad-copy:

ALSO AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, A ROMANTIC BIT OF MAQUILLAGE, VIENNA ROSE LIPSTICK-IN-THE-ROUND WITH A SABLE CONTOUR BRUSH TO DIP IN THE LITTLE ROUGE POT AND STROKE COLOR ON YOUR LIPS. THEN, READY TO LET GO FROM A WELL-PACKED QUIVER, THE INFINITE POWERS OF ATTRACTION THAT ARE UNIQUELY YOURS. THE WALTZING DRESS IN PURPLE SATIN (BELOW)-A LUXURIOUS CONCOCTION–SKIRT, BILLOWING FROM A TINY STRAPLESS BODICE, COVERED WITH A JACKET OF LIGHTS-CATERPILLARS OF CHENILLE, TWINKLING WITH FIREFLIES OF CRYSTALS, SILVER AND BLUE SEQUINS. BY SARMI, AT BERGDORF GOODMAN; NAN DUSKIN, PHILADELPHIA; NEIMAN-MARCUS BOTH PAGES; JEWELRY BY KENNETH LANE. KISLAV GLOVES. THESE PAGES: ALL COIFFURES BY THE ANTOINE SALON OF NEIMAN-MARCUS

Photo of models plus ad-copy, from Paolozzi’s ‘Moonstrips – General Dynamic F.U.N.’; Ambit #33, 1967.

When we turn to Ballard’s prose fiction output in 1968, the year the ‘Court Circular’ was published, we find that he was in the middle of writing the short stories that were to form The Atrocity Exhibition. The previous issue of Ambit had contained one such story, ‘The Great American Nude’, from which many of the usual ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ themes are missing: there’s no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards, and Kline, Coma and Xero — the ‘couriers of the unconscious’ — are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, ‘Great American Nude’ concentrates on the theme of the erotic. Central to the story is a gigantic abstract sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Taylor, and there are some humorous asides on the male’s perception of the female; for example, one of the characters, Captain Webster, is afraid to ‘climb up on her’ in case he falls into ’some unpleasant orifice’.

Cover of Ambit #36, 1968, which included Ballard’s ‘The Great American Nude’.

Ballard’s emphasis on the erotic during this period may be in part due to Paolozzi. Michael Moorcock has recollected that in 1967/8, ‘Jimmy fell in with Paolozzi [and] shifted in that direction. Techno stuff. Women with big tits and guns’ (quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 1999).

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. This idea is put into the mouth of Dr. Nathan in ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, which was published in mid-1967 under its original title ‘The Death Module’. It had first appeared, using many of the same phrases, in comments that Ballard made in a BBC radio interview with George MacBeth:

… one has many layers, many levels of experience going on at the same time. On one level one might have the world of public events, Cape Kennedy, Vietnam, political life, on another level the immediate personal environment, the rooms we occupy, the postures we assume. On a third level, the inner world of the mind. All these levels are, as far as I can see them, equally fictional, and it is where these levels interact that one gets the only kind of valid reality that in fact exists nowadays. The characters in these stories occupy positions on these various levels. On the one hand, a character is displayed on an enormous billboard as a figment in a CinemaScope epic; on another level he’s an ordinary human being moving through the ordinary to-and-fro of everyday life; on a third level he’s a figment in his own fantasies. These various aspects of the character interact and produce the main reality of the fiction.

‘The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J. G. Ballard and George MacBeth’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 29th March 1967.

Pulling all this together, we can see that in 1967/8 Ballard was particularly interested in the advertisement of ideas, in textual and visual collage, in eroticism and the male’s perception of the female, and in the idea of three levels of experience. And all of this is present in the ‘Court Circular’ in Ambit #37. Here’s what we see …

Firstly there is the concrete poem ‘Love: A Print-out…’. This is explicitly personalised — it’s ‘for Claire Churchill’. It deals with the everyday facets of sex and love — ‘hair’, ‘fuck’, ‘girl’, ’suck’. And it presents itself as having a structure: firstly because it is laid out in the form of a regular grid, and secondly because it can be read in the form of a ‘boy meets girl’ story, ending with ‘wife’ and ‘baby’. (Of course, we have to impose that linearity on the poem ourselves by reading it from the top left and then consecutively down each column — it’s actually just a series of separate words spaced out in a regular display.) So this is sexuality, or the perception of the female by a male, on the level of everyday life.

Next, there is the photograph of the models. The girls all look much the same, and have a ‘classic female figure’ of the time; they all wear underwear that is designed to say ’sexy’ but without actually being especially erotic; they all wear a broad and meaningless smile. And the photo is an ‘image’ — it’s presumably from Paolozzi’s archive, and it has even appeared in Ambit the previous year, as part of ‘Moonstrips — General Dynamic F.U.N.’ This is sexuality at the level of mediatised reality, ‘a figment in CinemaScope’ as Ballard puts it.

Finally, there are the drawings by Bruce Mclean. Here the individual features of the woman cannot be seen … what we have instead are the elements of erotic fantasy: the long hair, the arched back, an open mouth, the over-emphasised thighs in various positions, the arm hanging languidly down from the body, a glimpse of the pudenda (it seems to be a black blob, perhaps the ‘orifice’ that worries Captain Webster in ‘The Great American Nude’). This is sexuality as perceived by a man on the level of the imagination.

Two of Bruce Mclean’s drawings from the ‘Court Circular’.

So the ‘Court Circular’ displays sexuality — or, more specifically, the perception of the female by the male — in terms of all three of Ballard’s levels of reality. And perhaps Bruce Mclean’s drawings symbolise the power that the imagination has to flow into the interstices and create a meaningful reality in the gaps and angles between the different levels of our existence.

This, then, is the advertisement within ‘J. G. Ballard’s Court Circular’. Perhaps it is a touch didactic … but Ambit #37 is, after all, a newspaper.

Front page of the newspaper issue; Ambit #37, 1968.

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

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

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

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

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

From the Light Project interview with Ann:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Murray Guy:

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

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

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

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

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

Cover scan via Moorcock’s Miscellany.

David Pringle reports that the fantasy and SF illustrator, James Cawthorn, has died. Cawthorn was a fixture of the New Worlds era, and had a strong link to Ballard’s work. He illustrated Ballard’s ‘Equinox’ for NW #142 (above), and also wrote in 1967 what is surely the very first JGB pastiche, a fragment entitled ‘Ballard of a Whaler’, for New Worlds #170. I’ve reproduced the piece below, in a move that is bound to enrage further the killjoys who have attacked this site for running the occasional pastiche in the past. But as ‘Ballard of a Whaler’ demonstrates, the Ballard pastiche actually has a long and noble history.

For more on Cawthorn and his work with New Worlds and Savoy Books, see John Coulthart’s commemorative post.

BALLARD OF A WHALER
by ‘J. Cawthorn’

Each morning Konrad would go down to the edge of the moraine and gaze across at the skinners stripping the blubber from the whales. Architectural rather than organic, the white bones of the stranded monsters traced the structural relationships of underlying strata with the world above the ice, counterpointing in their curved sequence the prismatic and crystalline complexity of the glaciers, embodying the forms of all sequential aspects of duration. Engrossed by their fundamental geomorphic resonance with the rib-cage of Ulrica Ulsenn, he did not immediately notice the towering figure of Urquart the whale-hunter by his side. The harpooner’s eyes were sombre and brooding and when he spun his eighteen-foot lance end-over-end in a characteristic gesture and drove it splinteringly into the ice, he betrayed by no flicker of a muscle that he had impaled his left foot.

New Worlds #170, 1967.

It’s a shame Guy never designed a Ballard cover. JGB, after all, appreciated Chris Foss’s lurid airbursh overload as it applied to Crash. Surely that’s not a million miles away from the Peellaert ideal?

[ via {feuilleton} ]

BELOW: Guy Peellaert’s cover for Diamond Dogs.

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: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ’spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

ABOVE: Drowned World exhibit (photo: Rick McGrath).

Further to his enthralling Letter from Barcelona, Rick McGrath, our white-suited man on the ground, has now posted many more of his photos from the Ballard exhibition.

They come with captions and are helpfully organised into separate autopsy folders.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

by Rick McGrath

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

Hola, Simon, and buenos dias from Barcelona.

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

It’s a great place to be…

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

OK, you ready? Visitor’s pass showing?

ABOVE: CCCB exterior.

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

ENTERING THE EXHIBITION

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

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

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

ABOVE: Martin Amis pontificates; the media records.

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

AUTOPSY #1: What I Believe

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

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

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

AUTOPSY #2: From Shanghai to Shepperton

ABOVE: After the 1937 bombing.

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

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

ABOVE: Watching Shanghai Jim.

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

AUTOPSY #3: Landscapes of Dream

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

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

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

ABOVE: From the surreal image “machine”.

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

AUTOPSY #4: Inner Space

ABOVE: Pixelated Ballard.

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

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

ABOVE: From Rick’s JGB collection.

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

AUTOPSY #5: Disaster Area

ABOVE: Drought car in sand.

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

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

AUTOPSY #6: Technology and Pornography

ABOVE: Cronenberg’s Crash.

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The big visual wall display.

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

AUTOPSY #7: Asepsis and Neobarbarism

ABOVE: Infinity drenched in blue.

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

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

AUTOPSY #8: The Ballard Library

ABOVE: From my JGB collection.

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

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

ABOVE: Donovan Wylie’s photography.

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

AUTOPSY #9: Ballardian Art

ABOVE: Michelle Lord with her Ballard-inspired art.

I believe in nothing.

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

ABOVE: Mike Bonsall’s Ballardian home movie.

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

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

You can keep the surgical mask as a souvenir.

THE MEDICAL TEAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that, Simon, is just about it.

From Barcelona, adios!

– Rick.

Rick McGrath 2008.

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

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

J.G. Ballard: Update
Because we were overwhelmed by the tremendous quality, as well as the sheer quantity of entries, the judging of this competition is taking a great deal longer than originally planned. We wil be posting a picture gallery of the most impressive images from the very strong shortlist later this month.

[ thanks, L.J. ]

… Previously:
+ Crash Kama Sutra
+ Crash Cover Conundrum
+ Design a Cover for Crash

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Please enjoy the CCCB’s wonderful promotional film for the exhibition, a Lynchian, impressionistic cut up with main ingredients: Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, Ballard’s mellifluous tones, snatched Aphex Twin, what looks like James Dean’s car and a severe case of the night terrors.

And below is the prologue to the exhibition catalogue, a deep tribute to JGB composed by Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layout of the exhibition

WHAT I BELIEVE

Photo via RE/Search Publications.

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

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

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

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

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

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

J.G. Ballard

FROM SHANGHAI TO SHEPPERTON

Photo via CCCB.

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

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

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

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

LANDSCAPES OF DREAM

Dali meets Ballard. Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

INNER SPACE

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

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

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

DISASTER AREA

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

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

TECHNOLOGY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

ASEPSIS AND NEOBARBARISM

Photo by Ana Barrado.

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

THE BALLARD LIBRARY

Scan via The Terminal Collection.

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

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

BALLARDIAN ART

Image by Michelle Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GENERAL INFORMATION

DATES
22 July – 2 November 2008

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

PRICES

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

FURTHER INFORMATION
CCCB – www.cccb.org

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

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

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

Here is some much-anticipated and very exciting news.

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. It will feature stage sets and audiovisual installations inspired by Ballard, a library of Ballard’s writings, and works by Ballardian-inspired artists, filmmakers, sound artists and more.

It runs from 22 July to 2 November 2008 and coincides in October with Kosmopolis, Barcelona’s annual international literary festival at the CCCB. For 2008 Kosmopolis will feature two sessions devoted to Ballard, thereby integrating itself within the exhibition. The first session looks at Ballard’s influence on Hispanic writers and the second focuses on his influence in the English-speaking world. Participants in these sessions will include Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo, V. Vale … and, gulp, myself (as a late addition, so my name is not yet on the website in case you’re wondering if I’m making it all up). I feel privileged to be among such esteemed company, and I hope I can do ballardian.com — and of course Mr Ballard himself — justice among this selection of sheer heavyweights!

There has been a little more crosssover with this site and the exhibition. I was more than happy to help the organisers with some of the research needed to set ‘Autopsy of the New Millennium’ up. This site’s focus on Ballardian-inspired visual art, for example, led to some of the artists I’ve featured (including Michelle Lord) being invited to exhibit their work at the CCCB, and the contestants in our 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies will also have their 1-minute films screened throughout the exhibition’s run. In addition, the CCCB are running another Ballardian Home Movie competition, the Catalan version, inspired by ours, and once the exhibition is over I will be hosting those movies over here. Finally, I wrote the catalogue notes for the Home Movie screenings and also curated and wrote the catalogue notes for a selection of Ballardian sound art and music to be played in various cubicles throughout the exhibition.

To celebrate the opening of this wonderful event, I will be devoting most of this week and sporadic posts throughout the next few weeks to a selection of articles to do with the autopsy being performed on the new millennium at the CCCB. This will include an interview with the exhibition curators, a fabulous essay on Ballard’s significance written by the Conference Commissioner, Jordi Costa, a video made by the CCCB to commemorate the event, an interview with Solveig Nordlund, the director of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (Low-Flying Aircraft; 2002), the little-seen Swedish/Portuguese Ballard feature adaptation that will be screening at the exhibition, roving reports from our man on the ground, Rick McGrath (whose massive collection of rare and valuable Ballard first editions will also be on display), and perhaps the catalogues I wrote for the sound art selection accompanied by a mixtape/muxtape of selected tracks.

Of course, also visit the official exhibition blog for much more information as the exhibition goes on.

From the CCCB:

This exhibition offers an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his times and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic dystopia and disaster.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has many revelations in store for his readers and the capacity to throw light on the course of our future. An author with an enormous influence on later generations of creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music, Ballard is the author, among many other works, of The Empire of the Sun and Crash, adapted for the cinema by Spielberg and David Cronenberg, respectively.

The sections of the exhibition are:

• “What I believe”
• From Shanghai to Shepperton
• Landscapes of Dream
• Inner space
• Disaster area
• Technology and pornography
• Asepsis and neo-barbarism
• Epilogue
• Bibliographical area
• Ballardian art

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

ABOVE: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

Peter C. emailed to tell me of his discovery of the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to ‘paint themselves with small amounts of barium (that liquid used in x-rays for digestion and such like) and then be “photographed” having sex in medical clinics. The resulting images are… striking’ (according to Joseph Brett).

Peter says:

I feel a bit weird submitting this, and you might not find it relevant at all, but I just discovered this “X-Ray Porn” and it, for whatever reason, reminded me of Ballard! It’s rather striking how unpleasant it is!

Actually, it’s very relevant, given Ballard’s medical background and his observation in the introduction to Crash that we live in a time in which ‘Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.’

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science itself is the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc. will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in the 1940s wildlife documentary films.

JGB, quoted in Linda S. Kaufman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1995.

Of Ballard’s books, it’s The Atrocity Exhibition that most clearly makes the case for this fusion, something the RE/Search edition of Atrocity brilliantly enhanced with its anatomical art from Phoebe Gloeckner, art that very much anticipates the spirit of Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’. See for yourself: I’ve interspersed some of Gloeckner’s illustrations with a few of Delvoye’s x-rays, along with the usual allotment of Ballard quotes (although I think the one heading this post says it all, really).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

A preoccupation with forensic detail characterises [Ballard's] writing: one thinks of the numerous accounts of sex in his extraordinary autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women. “I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation 10 years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis.”

Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Traven sees pornography as a kind of hyper-analytic response to sexuality. Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. Traven takes the view ‘What is actually going on?’ — his own body and the body of his wife and of his on-off girlfriend, Karen Novotny, he sees their sexual identity as a mystery that needs to be decoded and dismantled. He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Science is moving into an area where its obsessions begin to isolate completely its subject under the lens of its microscope, away from its links with the rest of nature. This is always the risk with science as a whole. The pornographic imagination detaches certain parts of the human anatomy from the human being and becomes obsessively focussed on the breast or the genitalia, or what have you. That sort of obsession with what I call quantified functions is what lies at the core of science; there is a shedding of all responsibility by the scientist who is just looking at a particular subject with a tendency to ignore the contingent links.

JGB, quoted in Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, Volume 20 Numbers 1&2, 1991.

PS: Good old Wim, when not tattooing pigs, even turned the ‘Kiss’ series into a stained-glass window…

Wim Delvoye
Euterpe, 2002
steel, x-ray photographs, glass, lead
78 3/4 x 31.5 inches
200 x 80 cm
SW 02299

ABOVE: Eltham Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed ’safety’ of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height.

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Here are some more Ballard-evoking images: drained swimming pools as photographed by Gigi Cifali in his Absence of Water series.

Via BLDGBLOG:

The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called “Absence of Water.” The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali’s own website.

I’m reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun:

“Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?”

Why, indeed.

ABOVE: Erith Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

Royal, eyes almost closed, one hand gripping Laing’s shoulder, pointed towards the swimming-pool.

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

Disturbed less by the sight of these mutilated bodies — residents who had died of old age or disease and then been attacked by wild dogs, Laing assumed — than by the stench, Laing turned away. Royal, who had clung so fiercely to him during their descent of the building, no longer needed him, and dragged himself away along the line of changing cubicles. When Laing last saw him, he was moving towards the steps at the shallow end of the swimming-pool, as if hoping to find a seat for himself on this terminal slope.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise (1975).

ABOVE: Uxbridge Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

For the next ten days the expedition pressed on down the New Jersey Turnpike, heading south-west towards Washington. The endless ribbon of the highway unwound into the haze, lined with mile after mile of abandoned cars and trucks. Each evening they left the road and spent the night in one of the hundreds of empty motels and country clubs along the route, resting around the drained swimming-pools that seemed to cover the entire continent.

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

ABOVE: Weldstone Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

During the night the swimming-pool had drained itself. Jim had never seen the tank empty, and he gazed with interest at the inclined floor. The once mysterious world of wavering blue lines, glimpsed through a cascade of bubbles, now lay exposed to the morning light. The tiles were slippery with leaves and dirt, and the chromium ladder at the deep end, which had once vanished into a watery abyss, ended abruptly beside a pair of scummy rubber slippers.

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

ABOVE: London Fields Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Car parks surrounded a shopping mall lined with stores and restaurants, and I pointed with surprise to the first pedestrians we had seen, unloading their supermarket trolleys through the tail-doors of their vehicles. To the south of the plaza lay a marina filled with yachts and powerboats, moored together like a rnothballed fleet. An access canal led to the open sea, passing below a cantilever bridge that carried the coast road. A handsome clubhouse presided over the marina and its boatyard, but its terrace was deserted, awnings flared over the empty tables. The nearby sports club was equally unpopular, its tennis courts dusty in the sun, the swimming pool drained and forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996).

ABOVE: Flooded London, by Squint/Opera.

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

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

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

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

Via De Zeen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: Kevin Levell’s entry.

We still have no official announcement on the Crash Cover competition, but responding to my enquiry, Kevin Levell wrote to tell me of his own entry. Referring to the unpublished Henry Yee design I previously pointed to, Kevin says: ‘I hadn’t seen this approach with dummies, but it’s remarkably similar to my entry in the final competition…’

Kevin also says, ‘I’ve done a number of searches but have uncovered only a few other entries. My fave is Leona’s but good luck to all who entered anyway.’

I’ve included these below (myself, I love Kevin’s).

ABOVE: Leona Clarke’s entry.

ABOVE: Daniel Gray’s entry.

ABOVE: George Pollard’s entry.

Leigh P. emailed to tell me of this odd stamp sci-fi set issued in Sam Marino in the late 90s. Among the hard-SF names like Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov are not only Ballard but also Burgess and Orwell (both of whom, as far as I’m aware, wrote just one ‘SF’ novel apiece, while Ballard distanced himself from the genre a long time ago).

Leigh says:

I was procrastinating earlier (I’m in the process of completing a doctoral thesis, so this has indeed become somewhat of an artform) when I came across a picture of a bizarre 1998 stamp issue from San Marino, which depicted Ballard’s ‘The Drowned World.’ It might be worth posting something about it for philatelically-inclined Ballardians out there. Or not.

Thanks Leigh. I know what you mean about the procrastination. Not only am I also labouring through the last stage of a doctorate, but it’s taken me two months to get around to posting this.

In the words of Burgess, appy-polly-loggies!

Can anyone shed light on this?

While we’re waiting, I’ve uncovered a few related items that will be of interest…

I’ve previously featured book designer Henry Sene Yee, so I was interested to see the following on his blog:

I found these early ideas I had for J.G. Ballard’s CRASH on a bunch of SyQuest 44 MB cartridges. Sketches by Stanley Martucci of Griesbach / Martucci.

The first one was to depict crash test dummies in Kama Sutra poses. I wanted to illustrate a chart of multiple positions but Sales thought that this would never fly in Wal-Mart so I never got beyond this sketch stage. Hmm, when was the last time you saw J.G. Ballard’s sold in Wal-Mart?

There’s another of Henry’s Crash designs in that post, and there are more of his Ballard covers (that actually got published) here.

And this from Alex Pines:

This was the first assignment for my Advanced Design 2 class at MICA. I missed putting in some other stuff, but this is a pretty broad overview of my process for this project. I really just wanted to see how a post like this would look in a blog format.

1. Project Description
Design a book cover for one of J.G. Ballard’s novels. Research Ballard’s books and read essays by Rick McGrath and Rick Poynor.

2. Research
The novel I picked was Crash. Crash was written in 1973 by Ballard. It is one of Ballard’s more controversial stories. The story is about car-crash fetishism. The characters are sexually aroused by staging and participating in car crashes. The main character is Dr. Robert Vaughn, a former TV scientist. In addition to reading about the story, I gathered images of all the previous covers.

Alex goes on to detail the various rounds he undertook to get to a final design, with examples from each and his rationale along the way. I found it very interesting to negotiate. I wonder if Alex knew about the competition, though?

Alex’s Crash covers: second round.

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

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

Simon Sellars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballardian for sure!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

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

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

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

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

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

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

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMON: Do you work fast?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above: the offending vehicle.

The Zodiac 3000 exhibition in Birmingham, dedicated to and inspired by Ballard, has already drawn first blood, severely disrupting the stasis of surrounding Brum suburbia. As my snout, Tim C., notes, “in a minor mirroring of the moral outrage occasioned by Ballard’s 1970 Arts Lab exhibition, the Birmingham Mail is on the case”:

THIS clapped-out car may look ready for the breakers’ yard, but angry Birmingham families have been told it is “art”. Fuming residents at Maple Road, Bournville, today blasted art centre bosses for allowing the “eyesore” to be left yards from their homes.

The Mercedes is on display outside Bournville Centre for Visual Arts as part of a month-long exhibition devoted to the work of British author JG Ballard, who wrote the controversial novel Crash.

Residents said it lowered the tone of George Cadbury’s model village. Cadbury worker Robert Potter, aged 59, said: “It’s an eyesore. This is a nice area, and we are trying to keep up standards. It would be towed away if it was parked on the street.”

Crash, published in 1973, features characters who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. It was later filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg.

Art exhibition curator Andrew Hunt said: “Art is meant to be provocative. “Ballard is fixated with white, middle-class suburbs, which Bournville is. It’s holding a mirror to the idea of white ghettoes and the ideology behind them.

Dan Mitchell of Hard Mag writes with news of a very interesting exhibition he’s co-producing called “Zodiac 3000″ at the International Project Space in Birmingham. It’s one of a plethora of recent JGB-themed events, and sounds like it’s one of the more elaborate, too. According to Dan, “Ballard gave us permission to use his name and that of two of his characters for the show. There is also a publication featuring an essay by ‘Dr. Robert Laing’ titled ‘The Emerging New Psychology’”.

The J. G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research presents: ‘Zodiac 3000′
Curated by: Dr Robert Laing and Karen Novotny.
Including: Merlin Carpenter, Alastair MacKinven, Dan Mitchell, Josephine Pryde, and Rachel Reupke.

+ 26 April to 31 May 2008. (Preview: Saturday 26 April 3.00pm to 5.00pm).
+ Open Monday to Saturday 12.00pm to 5.00pm. (Wednesday 12.00pm to 7.00pm) Closed Sunday.

International Project Space
Bournville Centre for Visual Arts, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design
University of Central England, Maple Road, Birmingham B30 2AA
tel +44 (0) 121 331 5785
info@internationalprojectspace.org
http://www.internationalprojectspace.org/current.htm

From the press release:

Introduction to ‘Zodiac 3000’
by Karen Novotny, April 2008

‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

‘You see, people these days, who give the impression that their minds are a complete vacuum – no dreams or hopes of any importance, even to themselves, emanate through the sutures of their skulls… But that doesn’t matter, in a sense, because the environment does the dreaming for them.’ J.G. Ballard, 21C (1997)

In April 2007 I met Dr Robert Laing at Kingston University, and it was from this initial encounter that the exhibition ‘Zodiac 3000’ has formed. At the time, we were visiting a series of talks for another exhibition; one based on the theme of new forms of criticism, which took place at Stanley Picker Gallery, the university’s contemporary art space. After the event we both went our separate ways, but it wasn’t very long until we spoke again; affected by the critical context of the exhibition, Laing proposed that we meet about the potential of a project based on J.G. Ballard’s literary oeuvre, and most of all the suggestion of a New Psychology within his writing. Laing referred to the power of the surrounding suburban area of our initial encounter – Ballard has resided in Shepperton close to Kingston in South West London for the majority of his life – and so our discussions moved on to explore a series of contemporary visual representations that might suggest a deeply Ballardian view of the world.

The decision to use the International Project Space (IPS) became pertinent for the context within which the gallery is set. One could say that the original utopian philanthropy of George Cadbury’s Bournville Estate, within which Bournville Centre for Visual Arts (BCVA) and IPS are situated, holds a darker side. When functioning as a factory village, the generous architecture of the workers’ houses masked the area’s purely economic function of creating an effective workforce. In fact, slave labour effectively operated in Birmingham in the 20th century because people in Bournville felt trapped for a whole host of reasons, including not being able to escape the institutional confines of Cadbury’s ‘philanthropic’ enterprise. Now a predominantly well-to-do population occupies the area, one that is at odds with the wider demographic of Birmingham. On the one hand, the contemporary nature of Bournville still contains a utopian flavour; its Quaker run committee insists on the area being maintained to a high degree. It is dry, has no pubs, and recent achievements have included the blocking of a planned Tesco Express on the edge of the estate’s boundaries. However, the area is desirable and increasingly bourgeois, and it’s perhaps this fact that situates the area as appropriate for the theme of this exhibition. If the utopianism of Cadbury’s original endeavour is historically embedded in Bournville’s architecture or plan, then its current population might be relevant to Ballard’s theme of unexpected revolutions, which take place in middle class suburbs or ghettos. In this sense the exhibition deals with the flip side of the utopianism represented by places like Bournville and the dystopian class-based split contained in Ballard’s oeuvre.

One of the persistent themes in Ballard’s writing is an investigation into the heart of things, a fact that stems from the writer’s internment in a prisoner of war camp as a child in the Second World War. Rather than attempting to escape the boundaries of his given circumstances – to jump over the fence of his confinement, or escape the frame of the picture, so to speak – he attempts to burrow into the centre of his captivity and incarceration, to achieve a solid and disturbing investigation of his institutional surroundings. With this in mind, the exhibition attempts to enquire into the nature of the gallery’s environment, its position within a university, and the possibility of applying a new set of institutional parameters to contemporary art. To carry this theme further, IPS has been turned into the foyer of the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction. This subterranean institution, constructed by Laing, will effectively try to explore and enhance new psychological tendencies.

Within this context, Dan Mitchell will focus on middle class sexual boredom and its relationship with the desired prize of interior design. This obsession dominates time and represents occupational therapy as a battleground of castle decoration, together with a fight for survival. In this respect, the floors of products on display at Habitat become sacred, full of brooding vibrancy, and contain dark and textured themes of repressed rage.

Alastair MacKinven’s project for the exhibition will physically divide the gallery in two. A partition will extend through IPS to the gates of BCVA, across into Cadbury’s chocolate factory, and out through the entire estate. Indicated by wooden pegs holding flat signs, MacKinven’s work intends to socially segregate the area, and aims to provoke a division between two future warring communities – The Cocoshuffters and The White Chocolateers – within the currently peaceful Bournville Estate.

Along with his Burberry flags of style, which represent notions of class and consumer identity (these works, The St. George’s Cross, The Homecoming and The Riot take their titles from Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006)), Merlin Carpenter has proposed a ready-made sculpture redolent of Ballard’s fetishised fixation on sex and disaster, and contemporary Britain’s obsession with royalty, celebrity, death, and unresolved conspiracy theories. He plans to drive a dilapidated black 1997 S-type Mercedes at high speed straight into IPS’ interior sign situated within BCVA’s courtyard. The resulting crash scene will become a prop for the duration of the exhibition.

Rachel Reupke has chosen to use found images gleaned from billboards and posters on the street. Her video, or rather her animated ‘presentations’, announce the promise of a new society filled with lifestyle choices – a modern arcadia of high-rises, shopping malls and parkland. Based partly on Eden-Olympia, the high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes in Ballard’s Super Cannes (2000), and on illustrations of architectural developments on construction boom hoardings in Beijing, her work speaks of the future inserted into the present. Containing the strange yet banal directorial feel of a corporate video, faith in these images’ vision falter, as symbolic motifs become unreadable and the architecture remains generic. We are left to observe a half true record, and a half faux artifact.

Similarly, Josephine Pryde takes her photographs into the darkroom and beyond. Ballard’s thoughts on photography questioned whether the camera was a ‘Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing,’ and observed that the planet was drowning ‘in an ocean of photographic emulsion.’ Pryde’s images surf above this wave of recorded and flattened photography, which clutter our imaginations; they flood the drained mind with fantastic scenes that render our consciousness open and changed. As Pryde has said in her 2004 Secession catalogue ‘…all this fantastic image stuff and style, and the consumer world, can leave me very confused and over-excited, and making my own photographs is quite a good way for me to try to stay calm.’

At a certain point during the research for the project, Laing and I wrote to Ballard in Shepperton to ask his permission to make a project based on his concept of a New Psychology. He responded with a message written on the back of two postcards that depict surrealist paintings; Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) and Paul Delvaux’s La Rue du tramway (Street of the Trams) (1938-39). ‘All I ask is that you keep my “participation” within reasonable bounds… there are too many madmen out there who think that they are completely sane.’ he wrote. Taking Ballard’s advice, we have attempted to take an ethical stance on our motivations for this exhibition, and have tried to do justice to the disturbing view of the world represented in the writer’s work. What follows in this exhibition is a series of projects that try not only to open up a contemporary psychological viewpoint on our surroundings, but which also attempt to present new possibilities for psychology through the effect of contemporary sociological, cultural and political tendencies that we are we can all see around us on an increasingly powerful level. We hope that you enjoy the exhibition.

For further information and images please contact International Project Space curator Andrew Hunt tel +44 (0)121 331 5785 / +44 (0)7828 537 989 email info@internationalprojectspace.org

This project has been generously supported by Arts Council England and Birmingham City University.

Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series featured on Ballardian here and here, is participating in a new exhibition entitled “Relocating Absence”, which runs from 18 April to 4 May 2008.

RELOCATING ABSENCE
Elevator Gallery
Mother Studios, Queens Yard, White Post Lane,
Hackney Wick, London E9 5EN

www.elevatorgallery.co.uk
www.myspace.com/elevatorgallery

“Future Ruins” appears alongside the work of Brada Barassi, Craig Cooper, Amelia Crouch, Hondartza Fraga, Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz, Anastasia Loginova, Erin Newell, Ellakajsa Nordström, Anahita Razmi, Erica Scourti, Mikio Saito and Youngho Lee.

The exhibition is curated by Elisa Tosoni, Cherie-Marie Veiderveld and Simon Reuben White.

Relocating Absence is a group exhibition showcasing the work of thirteen internationally emerging artists. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, video, photography and drawing, the exhibition offers a series of artistic interpretations of the theme, often playing with the constants of space and time. Absence, in fact, is essentially temporal – it is located where something was: it lies between the realms of Being (object) and Knowledge (perception, creation of a mental image).

Absence can be intended as a state of being, as a period of time, as a lack, or even desire, or as the inattention to present surroundings or occurrences. All these connotations are encountered in the exhibition, which, in fact, proposes an open-ended investigation of the concepts of belonging, displacement, repetition, visual and literary narrative, emotional and physical distance, as well as archive, memory and diary keeping.

The artists have created presence from absence, erased the pre-existent iconography of presence, drawn the viewers’ gaze to details that would otherwise have remained long unnoticed. These acts of relocating, of replacing, collecting or remembering what was there continue absence into the future: new tangible objects now substitute or relocate a previous absence, soon to leave room to new absences, in the viewer’s mind.

Elisa Tosoni, 2008.

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996).

Fabulous Banksy mural. I think Ballard would approve.

From the Daily Mail:

Banksy pulled off an audacious stunt to produce what is believed to be his biggest work yet in central London. The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera. Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ Trompe-l’oeil corridors

Deep Ellum gallery and artists’ residency Centraltrak, part of The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, is launching its first show Saturday, April 19, from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is free.

Inspired by the media-scape in J.G. Ballard’s 1969 novel, Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A, the show, “False Space and Time of the Apartment,” will exhibit forms that are interactive, spatially bold and ambiguous. Neither purely art nor purely architecture, the works fall somewhere in between.

Charissa Terranova, Centraltrak’s director and curator, called Ballard one of the greatest chroniclers of the urban imagination.

“Ballard gives voice to Centraltrak’s ambitious momentum and its investment in the vast and diverse urban culture of Dallas-Fort Worth,” said Terranova.

Nine artists and architects from the Europe and the U.S. will show their work in the inaugural exhibition.

More info here.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

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

Mike Bonsall

Mark Lawson: The work of the novelist JG Ballard divides fairly neatly into two sets, there are the novels which draw clearly on his own experience of the world, including the Booker prize-winning Empire of the Sun, which describes his internment in a Chinese prisoner of war camp during World War Two, and The Kindness of Women which fictionalises his experience post-war of being widowed with three young children. And then there are stories which take place in a distorted, warped, surreal version of the modern world, such as The Unlimited Dream Company and Crash — about sexual fantasists involved in car wrecks, which became one of the few modern movies to be widely banned. But confusingly, books of both kinds are likely to include central characters called Jim Ballard. Readers and critics though, who are policing the line between Ballard’s life and writing, are now helped with their enquiries by the author himself with the publication of his latest book, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, an autobiography. To discuss it, I’m joined in the studio by the writer Iain Sinclair, whose books include Downriver, and from Oxford by the writer and critic Professor Hermione Lee. Iain Sinclair, we have to get this out of the way really, for any readers of Ballard, or admirers, the book contains a shock. In that calm voice that he’s used about so many terrible things, he explains he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, his oncologist has made it possible for him to write this book. It’s another example of the unflinching way in which he can describe what happens to him.

Iain Sinclair: Yes, and he holds that revelation back until the end of the book, although in some senses it underwrites it, because this is a very generous book, it’s amazingly warm hearted, and although it is very similar to Empire of the Sun in some ways, and other books, there are these little glancing details that give you more of himself than he’s offered before. The parents appear in the prison camp, the sister appears. It’s very subtly done, I think it’s wonderfully crafted and in the classic Ballard way; it’s also a tremendous page turner.

ML: Hermione Lee, he’s always played, as we’ve said, with the boundaries between fact and fiction — Jim Ballard — in books which seemed autobiographical, and ones which almost certainly can’t be. He does, as Iain says, he does provide useful footnotes here.

Hermione Lee: Yes, it’s terribly interesting to set it against Empire of the Sun, which came out in 1984, when he was in his 50s, and which, as you say, drew on that childhood experience of being, you know, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, and being in the internment camp. And what Ballard fans remarked on then, when that novel came out, was how close the images of that experience were to the fantasy novels, novels like The Drowned World. And now he goes over that time again and shows how haunted he’s always been by that mental furniture — as how could he not be — but also what’s gripping about it is that he shows what actually he made up in Empire the Sun, you know, which people said — oh, it’s much autobiographical than the other novels — and here, now you can see from, as Iain says, the extra things he tells us, how much he actually invented and imagined in Empire of the Sun. So it’s really fascinating to hold the two together

ML: Iain, having discussed that, give me an example of something that you learned from this that you hadn’t known about him… Or which changes the way…

IS: Um… the figure of his sister for example; I didn’t know about. And then there’s this extraordinary surreal image of the sister — when he’s a child — he builds a plywood barrier that goes onto the dinner table so that he doesn’t have to look at his sister, it as a peep-hole in it — this is like something out of Dali. And underwriting everything Ballard does, goes back to a remark he made many many years ago, which was that he tries to obey the surrealist formula, which is — to place the visible at the service of the invisible. And this is a very visible book, but beneath it are these shadows of the invisible that he’s releasing for the first time, and I find that quite moving.

ML: Hermione, on that point of surrealism…

HL: Yes, I was just going to say, that’s such a brilliant image to pick up, because that little spy-hole, which is so weird, is actually like Ballard’s eye, because elsewhere there are little tiny places that he crawls into, like the cockpit of a disused plane, and he’s looking out, he says, as if through a small window into a dream, and he talks very fascinatingly about the influence of dissecting corpses when he’s a medical student and Francis Bacon and Kafka and film noir. And he talks about Freud and surrealism as the key influences on his work and he calls them: ‘a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world’, so he’s really giving you a kind of interpretation of his whole work here.

ML: And Iain, he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian — lots of writers used that after the death of Princess Diana, in that week. The artist Marc Quinn, on Front Row the other day, who’d made these impossible flowers, he said: ‘I think of them as Ballardian’. And he has — it’s apparent throughout this book, and the others, as Hermione was saying — that way of looking at the world and describing it.

IS: Yes, he says, often, he wanted to be a painter. He was a great friend of Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor, and I think the dominant figures in his influence over the years were Paolozzi and Chris Evans, who was the kind of rogue scientist who provided him with outprints of scientific matters and who is the figure behind Vaughan, to some extent, in his novel Crash. Ballard really is like a kind of Delvaux — famously he has an imitation Delvaux in his house — and here, I think that there are key images that come back repeatedly in his fiction, as with the famous drained swimming pool. There’s also the figure of a Chinese man who’s strangled with wire on a railway station, who comes back in this book and comes back in the fictions. There’s, as Hermione said, there’s this moment when the boy gets onto an airfield and climbs into the cockpit of a plane. There is the bicycle ride through the streets of Shanghai — these things just come back again and again and again…

ML: Also, Hermione, the amazing revelation that he almost died in a car crash after writing Crash, and he reflects on what would have been made of that, in his life, if it’d happened.

HL: Absolutely extraordinary, he writes his own obituary — as in a sense he’s doing here, I feel. I mean, there is a kind of — benign benediction — going on in this book, but that, what I’m left with is this sense that, when he was a little boy, the mothers of his friends used to complain that he was always rearranging the furniture in their in their houses, and this is what he does, he rearranges the furniture.

+ From Joanne:

You might want to take a look at the newest issue of Modern Painters (Feb 08.) There is an article about writers that inspire visual artists, and Ballard is mentioned several times. (“The reception of literature in the art world is partly a matter of adjectives: today any work that raises the topic of technology and catastrophe, for example, is automatically Ballardian.”)

Very intriguing. I’ll be expanding on the points raised in this article some time soon.

+ From Simon:

Drained swimming pools!

+ From melb psy:

I wondered if you’d seen this [girl films her attempted murder of her parents].

rather ‘Running Wild’….

+ From John:

Ran across this, ‘abandoned wonders of the former Soviet Union’, and thought it would interest you (if you haven’t already seen it).

+ From Alan:

I thought you might find this of some interest/use! Tis a pity it’s too late for your site, but they have, if you’ll excuse the pun, more in the pipeline!!! Great site by the way.

Toilet duct and other diminutive issues
January 23rd, 2008

Resonance FM’s Amenity Space is the only regular series on British radio dedicated to architecture, in this week’s edition Nicky Kirk and Tony Broomhead examine the acoustic spaces of toilets, ventilation shafts and other utilitarian spaces in some of London’s most well known public spaces. In next week’s edition Kirk and Broomhead discuss micro-architecture and look at some of the smallest projects making the biggest headlines in a show that will no doubt be of gargantuan quality.

Amenity Space broadcasts every Thursday between 1 and 2pm.

+ From Andy:

I linked your site from an article I did for Shanghaiist.com [about Rick McGrath's recent trip to Ballard's old home in Shanghai]. It’s only a digest style post but just letting you know all the same.

+ From Anonymous:

Ballard-related exhibition in Barcelona.

Note: I will be writing more about this when the time comes, ie, June/July this year; I’ve already written something about the event, speculating on the shape of it, some time ago.

+ From Darin:

I write to offer you a link to the current issue of an e-zine I edit. While not specifically “Ballardian,” the latest issue, “Dietrologia” of Farrago’s Wainscot features fiction that touches on themes that I think you might find worthwhile. I first heard of your site when you reviewed/blurbed the first issue of Diet Soap, in which my story “The Basement, Borges” appeared.

Urls: http://www.farragoswainscot.com
[current issue]: http://www.farragoswainscot.com/current.html

+ From Greg:

Extreme Ballardian tourism — The Island of Prora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=563
http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm

Did Hitler invent mass tourism…?

+ From JD:

Hi, not sure whether this would interest you, but a guy called Paul Torrens has a project for modeling urban panic.

Some quotes . . .

“the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”

“4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death;5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d’état — regime change through landscape architecture.”

Link:
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/06/modeling-urban-panic.html

P.S. Loving Ballardian.com BTW.

+ From Mr. Nobody:

Sex Offenders Set Up Camp

+ From Joe:

Simon, there’s a terrific video of JGB at home giving a kind of ‘greatest hits’ performance for the Italian publishers of Millenium People. I don’t think you have a link to it on the website, if you’re interested it can be found here.

Keep up the fine work, Ballardian.com is truly the website the great man deserves.

+ From Anonymous:

Greetings, Mr Sellars

If I may, Phantom Shanghai, an exquisite book of photography by Greg Girard. China’s hyper-economy is eerily represented by a ravenous building boom which is literally devouring all traces of the old. These new buildings loom threatening over what little is left, as if deliberating upon their next move towards total domination. William Gibson offers a brief introduction.

An interview with Girard is here.

Love The Ballardian!

+ From electric:

Black Friday Die Die Die: America’s most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!

+ From Peter:

Something from Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” has begun to come true.

+ From Thomas:

cockroaches–first creatures conceived and born in space

+ From Mark:

Audi TT, and a model, in a swimming pool for a fashion photo shoot

Like the car wash scene from Crash, but wetter.

+ From Henry:

‘Letter bomber who bore a grudge’: The fightback begins.

In the autumn of 1954 we sailed on one of the Empress liners, then spent a month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. We were all eager to embrace the North American way of life. We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. A wilderness of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. For long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me going. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar boom. I had read little, apart from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later realise most professional SF writers, British and American, were keen fans from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for fanzines. I was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the mid1950s there were some 20 SF magazines on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. Nobody in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. Nobody in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. Nobody in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

And in this one, Ballard discusses the stimulus for Crash:

In 1970, I began to write Crash. This was more than a literary challenge, not least because I had three young children crossing Shepperton’s streets every day, and nature might have played another of its nasty tricks. I have described the novel as a kind of psychopathic hymn, and it took an immense effort of will to enter the minds of the central characters. In an attempt to be faithful to my own imagination, I gave the narrator my own name, accepting all this entailed.

Two weeks after I had finished, my tank-like Ford Zephyr had a front-wheel blowout at the foot of Chiswick Bridge. The car swerved out of control, crossed the central reservation and rolled onto its back. Luckily I was wearing my seat belt. Hanging upside down, I found the doors had been jammed by the partly collapsed roof. The car lay in the centre of the oncoming carriageway, and I was fortunate not to be struck by approaching traffic. Eventually I wound down the window and clambered out.

Looking back, I suspect that if I had died, the accident might well have been judged deliberate, at least on the unconscious level. But I believe Crash is less a hymn to death than an attempt to buy off the executioner who waits for us all in a quiet garden nearby. Crash is set at a point where sex and death intersect, though the graph is difficult to read and is constantly recalibrating itself. The same is true of Emin’s bed, which reminds us that this young woman’s beautiful body has stepped from a dishevelled grave.

Earlier in this extract, Ballard talks about the violent reception his infamous exhibition of crashed cars received, where spectators attacked the cars and the hostess, and how that reaction gave him the ‘green light’ to go ahead and write Crash:

It occurred to me I could test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars. … The cars went on show without any supporting graphic material, as if they were large pieces of sculpture. A TV enthusiast at the Arts Lab offered to set up a camera and closed-circuit monitors on which the guests could watch themselves as they strolled around. I suggested we hire a young [topless] woman to interview the guests about their reactions.
…
I have never seen the guests at a gallery get drunk so quickly. There was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring. Nobody would have noticed the cars if they had been parked in the street, but under the unvarying gallery lights these damaged vehicles seemed to provoke and disturb. Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac (or so she claimed: she later wrote a damning review headed “Ballard Crashes” in the underground paper Frendz).
…
My exhibition had been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed.

Interestingly, the Guardian is currently featuring a story about ‘13 unlucky works of art’. Hirst and Emin (with her storied bed) appear, but not Ballard and his crashed cars:

11 Damien Hirst is rubbished and inked

Art not recognised as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare’s bin-bagging at London’s Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst’s installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. ‘I didn’t think for a second it was art,’ explained Asare. Hirst found this ‘hysterical’. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labelled the piece Black Sheep. ‘I was providing an interesting addendum to his work,’ said Bridger in court.

13 Tracey Emins bed springs are tested

In 1999, at Tate Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. ‘Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks,’ said witness Harry Pye. ‘They realised we were serious artists – doing it purely from a creative point,’ said Xi. ‘Don’t take seriously Emin saying we were “like failed artists threatening to jump off Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery” – probably she got drunk.’ In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp’s La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.

The little I’d read about the exhibition made me naively expect a large pile of sand in the midst of a damp and mouldy cellar. While the mould is indeed resplendent (the smell, appropriately grotesque) the approach is not explicitly interpretative or collaborative. Rather, the installation is more of a pastiche of individual artists’ impressionistic reactions to the text: childlike sketches of the giant’s body parts; a line of disembodied footprints trailing down a staircase to nowhere; an audio reel of violent retching juxtaposed with a projection of a CCTV video of a massive construction site, with scrolling text across a PC screen providing commentary.
…
Ballard’s text itself gets slightly short shrift – my word-centric brain would have appreciated some notes on how the artists worked with the narrative as their point of departure. But despite this, the exhibit evoked exactly the same guttural, unsettled feeling in me that the story does. Rather than find the experience didactic, I’m prompted now to read the story yet again and see how my own response has now been altered.

From unnamed Dsquared2 campaign, by Steven Meisel.

Love among the Mannequins. Unable to move, he lay on his back, feeling the sharp corner of the novel cut into his ribs. Her hand rested across his chest, nails holding the hair between his nipples like a lover’s scalp brought back for him as a trophy. He looked at her body. Humped against his right shoulder, her breasts formed a pair of deformed globes like the elements of a Bellmer sculpture. Perhaps an obscene version of her body would form a more significant geometry, an anatomy of triggers? In his eye, without thinking, he married her right knee and left breast, ankle and perineum, armpit and buttock. Carefully, to avoid waking her, he eased his arm from beneath her head. Through the apartment window the opalescent screen of the open-air cinema rose above the rooftops. Immense fragments of Bardot’s magnified body illuminated the night air.

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

John C. informs me of a campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. As John says, it’s ‘the usual “god, we need a new thrill” stuff from the fashion industry but it’s difficult not to see this as Crash-inspired.’

Click on ‘Campaign’: this Dsquared2 campaign doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling?

From ‘State of Emergency’, by Steven Meisel.

The photographer is none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel, who has featured on Ballardian.com thrice before: here, here and here. One thing I like about Meisel is that he seems to be slyly sending up the fashion industry each time. In the ‘State of Emergency’ shoot, I rather fancy reading into it an account of the fashion industry declaring war on the anorexic models that have tainted it, all the better to introduce something even more robotic and inhuman. In this crash-test campaign, I am imagining similarities with Paul Verhoeven’s approach to Starship Troopers: casting beefcake and catwalk queens, oiling them up and fetishing them…then decapitating them with extreme prejudice.

Well, maybe not quite — no one beats Verhoeven for sheer creative cynicism — but there is a certain tension at play in Meisel…maybe. Or is there?

Or have am I just become another fashion victim, swallowing Meisel’s bling-orgy aesthetic hook, line and sinker and trying to justify it to the artless masses?

From ‘Make Love, not War’ by Steven Meisel.

What’s certain, though, is that nothing has quite pushed the envelope like the ‘dead girls’ shoot from America’s Top Model, and I still can’t make up my mind about that one…

I must away and consult The Atrocity Exhibition at great length, as it’s been a while since I read it.

I have a feeling it holds the key to everything.

Image from America’s Next Top Model.

Forwarded message from Valentina Ferrandes:

“12 Steps Down”
Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 16th to 20th January

Private view
16th January 2008, 6-10 pm

The body of a giant is found on a beach. Curious about the event, a small crowd from the nearby city, gathers to observe the process of decomposition. If the first reaction is surprise and reverential respect, as days and weeks go by, the citizens’ explorative interventions become increasingly frequent and invasive. Graffiti swastikas appear on the giant’s body, his limbs amputated and trucked away for fertilizer, his dry bones dismembered to reappear as gigantic architectural ornaments. A miraculous event becomes object of exploitation, abuse, and eventually of no consequence.

25 artists have been invited to produce a site-concerned work inspired by the short story “The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard and by the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement. The result is a stunning exhibition that exploits the dialogue between space and narrative through Ballard’s concerns. Decay, fragility and relativity of human morality, as well as representation of body through architecture, violence and sanity are some of the conceptual directions taken by the artists.

Justyna Borucka, Valentina Ferrandes, Kiwon Hong, Clare Wallis, Daniella Hutchinson Kemall, Beth Collar, Hugo Sterk, Cat Vitebsky, Charlie P, Clive Rowat, Dorothea Magonet, Eirini Bachlitzanaki, Elizabeth McTernan, Gareth Barnett, William Brock, Graham Hughes, Giles Hinchcliff, Matt Blackler, Hannah Newell, Mathilda Homqvist, Keiji Ishida, Alice Evans, Henrietta Hall, Michael Pollard, Tom Walker, Hannah Terry, Valentina Lari, Paul Good, Kirsty Wood.

The Basement
Shoreditch Town Hall
380, Old Street, EC1 V9LT

Info:
Valentina Ferrandes
(e): terminalbunker@gmail.com
(ph): +44 0792 9248657

By Underground or rail: Liverpool Street or Old Street stations (10 minutes walk from either).
By Bus: Routes 5, 22A, 35, 47, 48, 55, 67, 78, 149, 242 and 245 stop nearby.

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

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

Image from ‘The Drowned World’
by Jon Cattapan

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

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

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

‘Matteo Bittanti’s Crash’
by Matteo Bittanti

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

‘High-Parkade’
by Rick McGrath

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

J.G. Ballard Flickr Pool
various photographers

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

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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

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

‘Crystal Forest’
by Maia Valenzeula

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

‘Crash’
by Marie Meier

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

‘The Drowned Giant’
by Shafeen Alam

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

Illustrations by James Nicholls

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

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

Take note: it’s only open to UK residents. Unfortunately.

On the competition home page the Times links to a list entitled ‘10 tips on how to design an eye-catching book cover’, but may I also suggest, given Ballard himself will be deciding on the winner, that another plan of attack might be to study Rick Poynor’s feature on the way Crash has been adapted to book design over the years. In it are some very helpful clues, including examples of Crash cover art that Ballard specifically hates. But Rick details other examples that are more successful in Ballard’s eyes, so it could be worth a look.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Crash by J.G. Ballard Design Competition

..:: FURTHER
+ J.G. Ballard: The Visual Tribute

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN
+ ‘Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash’ by Rick Poynor
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on Ballard Cover Art
+ The Kindness of Henry

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 ‘rising sun’ motif, a continuum with Empire of the Sun, to which Kindness is the sequel).

According to Henry:

The latest addition in the J.G. Ballard redesigned series for Picador. A semi-autobiographical sequel to Empire of the Sun. I finally heard from Ballard’s agent that he liked this cover. He actually said he liked it. Nice. This is high praise since he wasn’t fond of any of my other redesigns for him. Or for that matter, any of his covers ever published anywhere.

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on Ballard’s Cover Art

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 I know Drowned World was written in the early 60s, not ‘the 50s’…

From the ABC website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Copeland: Painfully so.

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

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

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

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 visual artists, writers, film-makers, performance artists and all others are invited to submit proposals and/or send works which might be considered Ballardian, as for example:

(adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments (Collins English Dictionary)

We welcome any image, photograph, text, collage, movie, experimental novel, sound piece installation or performance instructions, semaphore, sculpture (singing or otherwise) cd, dvd, that can be sent here via email, post, balloon, submarine, bicycle pigeon or intercontinental ballistic missile…

Or presented in person at:

KURB gallery
310 William Street
Northbridge Perth
WA 6000
Australia.

No practical contribution will be refused, however unreasonable.

Contributors may wish to consider Ballard’s single reference to Perth, the most isolated city on the planet, the nearest thing we have to a moon base on the planet. They may also wish to reflect on the central role played by Perth and Australia in the Cold War and its aftermath.

We intend our exhibition to follow Ballard’s prescription for an autopsy on reality—

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)

BALLARD DEADLINES/GUIDELINES

There are no strict deadlines for this event; we will accept work for the exhibition and contributions to the forum up to January 11, the opening date for the exhibition. After that we will accept responses to the exhibition until the day it closes.

Forum Participants: November 30 2007

It would help us if participants in the forum could let us know their intention to participate by November 30 2007.

We do not expect that many will choose to travel to Perth. We are happy to read contributions and/or project or play tapes. Those who may intend to travel here should let us know. We will able to help with finding accommodation and so. Visitors should note that this is the sunniest, hottest period of the Australian summer.

Exhibition participants: January 5 2008

If would help us if exhibitors could let us have their works or instructions in any form by January 5 2008. For further information or to express interest please contact KURB at:

KURBgallery@westnet.com.au

or write to:

KURB gallery 310 William Street. Perth WA, 6000 Australia

Those who wish to follow up the range of our interests may like to read Pippa Tandy’s 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.

+ MORE INFO: Ballard at KURB.

We look forward to hearing from you

Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield (co-curators: Ballardian Art)
(PS Pippa did finish the doctorate)”

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 have the pleasure of presenting Ann Lislegaard (b. 1962).
…
Some of Lislegaard’s works invite us into a cinematic or virtual space in which uncomplicated means such as spatial displacement, the combination of traditional film and animation, or the interplay between light and shadow, capture us in an almost meditative experience. Although often constructed in simple ways, these works contain striking aesthetic qualities. Lislegaard moves about in a digital landscape, exploring the possibilities of her media in order to create alternative experiences of place. In the new works Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) and Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany), viewers are invited to enter a fascinating cinematic room in which they encounter monumental digital animations. It is science-fiction
literature’s ability to create alternative places that fascinates Lislegaard and functions as a backdrop for some of her best works.”

[thanks, Chris; via Bruce Sterling]

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, with a second poster reinventing Cruise as a Godardian neo-noir anti-hero, we are promised that ‘it will begin’…in five days’ time.

Will jaded shoppers respond?

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 reconstructed for the camera to represent an unbuilt, literary environment.”

Michelle’s work continues to impress.

For a succinct summary of the Borges story and this adaptation, try the one and only BLDGBLOG.

Michelle Lord has emailed me with some more information and stills from her show ‘Future Ruins’, now exhibiting at The Birmingham and Midland Institute, Margaret St., Birmingham B3 3BS UK. It’s on from June 15-23 and is part of Architecture Week 2007; see www.architectureweek.org.uk for further details.

I’m fascinated by Michelle’s images, with their gently jarring, transmogrified quality — surreal ruptures, like little “vents of hell” (a favourite Ballard phrase), smoothly integrated into the furniture of late capitalism.

Now, if only I didn’t live 17,000km from Birmingham…

————————————————————————————————————
FUTURE RUINS
by Michelle Lord
————————————————————————————————————

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

Ballard often described the beckoning future of the modern metropolis in terms of the utopian ideology of Brutalist concrete architecture. Brutalism was an architectural movement originally associated with social idealism that is now criticised for disregarding the communal, historic and surrounding built environment. Set against a backdrop of Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures such as Spaghetti Junction, Central Library and New Street Station signal box, Future Ruins aims to highlight the temporality of our landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007.

Exploring the impact of the modern world upon the urban built environment and its inhabitants, Ballard’s stories evoke images of cityscapes increasingly transformed by science, technology and design. Using handmade models and rear-screen projection, scenes based upon Ballard’s apocalyptic narratives such as ‘Ultimate City’ or Concrete Island are relocated within Birmingham. Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.

Birmingham offers an interesting working example of urban regeneration as it strives to build a new city image. Positioned between architectural decline and growth, the landscape of the city is a collage of old and new, revealing stark contrasts of industrial and post-war brutalism with groundbreaking structures like the Selfridges building.

By resituating some of Ballard’s fictions, this project hopes to reflect and provoke debate about both the architectural past and future of Birmingham, at a time when the city has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself. With the recent destruction of the old Bull Ring, the proposed demolition of Central Library and potential redevelopment of New Street Station, the project is perhaps a timely reflection of its now lost or soon to disappear architectural history, while questioning whether the concrete legacy that remains is still a necessary part of the architectural fabric of the city.”

Michelle Lord

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007.

————————————————————————————————————
All images are for sale. Contact Michelle for details.
————————————————————————————————————

——————————————————————————————————
+ 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 environment.

The Birmingham and Midland Institute
Margaret St.
Birmingham B3 3BS
UK

Further detail available here.

——————————————————————————————————
+ BALLARDIAN ART IN THE ANTIPODES

Press release:

In Jan 2008, KURBgallery in Perth, Western Australia, will hold an exhibition programme and events in celebration of J.G. Ballard. Interested visual artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, performance artists and others are invited to submit proposals for works which might be considered ‘Ballardian’, that is:

…of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”. (Collins English Dictionary.)”

The organisers welcome any image, photograph, text, collage, movie, experimental novel, sound piece or installation or performance instructions, semaphore, sculpture (singing or otherwise), CD or DVD that can be sent to KURB via email, post, low-flying aircraft, balloon, intercontinental ballistic missile or presented in person.

No contribution will be refused however unreasonable.

For further information or to express interest, please email KURB. Alternatively, write to:

Pippa Tandy & David Bromfield
KURBgallery
310 William St,
Perth WA 6000
Australia

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 I type them up on my old electric [typewriter]. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.’

Predictably, a phalanx of bloggers leapt on this detail, including:

+ David Rothman at TeleRead:

So it harms literature when you can more easily shuffle around sentences and paragraphs and chapters? I can recall writing pre-computer, and it was not nearly as much fun or efficient. How many other TeleBloggers remember composing on paper in single-space, then snipping and pasting the results together? Of course, the classic defier of Luddites was Mark Twain, who used a then-newfangled device known as a typewriter. Meanwhile, horror of horrors, J.G.’s Crash, described by one reader as “about car-crash sexual fetishism,” is available as an e-book, and at least several other works are as well.”

+ Crayola Thief at Death on the Installment Plan:

JG Ballard … [makes] a rather idiotic assertion… The reason this makes me flinch is because it attributes the value of art to its tools. A writer captures the ideas pouring out of the brain. What difference does it make whether those ideas are recorded with computer, typewriter, fountain pen, dictation, quill, bloody finger, or chisel and clay tablet? If Ballard finds writing by pen the most effective for his craft, more power to him. But to suggest others must follow suit is a little too Stalinist for comfort. Might as well claim no good poetry can be written lefthanded.

I’ll wager that following the invention of the typewriter, a few squinty crustaceans grumbled that no great book could be written on one of those either.”

+ Paul at The Joy of Raki:

I read something by J.G. Ballard the other day, where he said that no truly great novel has so far been written on a computer. Bollocks. I bet someone said that a couple of years after the invention of the typewriter.”

+ Saleem, at The Neocrats:

The Guardian has … a running feature of “Writers’ Rooms”… Its effect is entirely other than intended: we see the absurd vanity and self-indulgence of novelists. Consider … J.G. Ballard, having detailed the ancient desk at which he writes long-hand, then transcribes an electric typewriter. “I distrust the whole PC thing … I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.” And so, the usual refrain, that everything needs to be done differently. Especially the writing of books!”

In the comments box, Saleem’s readers relentlessly kick the corpse, like nemoDreamer who says, ‘What a silly remark, Mr Ballard’.

Although reader Dorian Gray is more even:

Even though I love my PowerBook I empathise with this nostalgia for simpler times. I’d think twice before making a one-way journey to 1965 (by the way, I hope we’ve all seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), but why should I not take what was beautiful from that era and combine it with the more moral society we live in today? … A certain kind of artist has always been concerned with the process. It may be a little self-indulgent, but it’s not illegal, immoral or fattening so we should probably indulge them too.”

However, he then goes on to make this baffling statement: ‘By the way, I find Ballard’s room to be an oppressive horror that reeks of Colonialism, but I won’t begrudge him his typewriter.’

Interesting. Where is the oppressive horror in this? It’s a little messy, perhaps, but still.

+ Meanwhile, Matt Merritt at Polyolbion was in two minds:

I was interested to read JG Ballard’s comments … especially his assertion that no great novel has yet been written on a PC. It struck me that I’ve absolutely no idea whether he’s right, simply because I’ve no idea how most writers write. Was he being a bit of a grumpy old man (why should a PC be considered less ‘authentic’ than a typewriter), or was he making a point about the particular way a computer allows you to write? I know a lot of writers, even if they have no qualms about computers generally, like to get their first drafts down on paper by hand, maybe because it makes you think that little bit harder about every word if there’s not the option to delete and rewrite straight away.”

+ While sixteenbynine at Qwerty Dept. sounded a rare note of sympathy (like his novels, Ballard’s latter-day public utterances are treadmilled; he’s made the exact same typewriter claim before, and sixteenbynine is responding to a pre-Writers’ Rooms instance):

J.G. Ballard … threw down [the argument] that no good novel was ever written with a word processor (his drafts are done entirely in longhand). I don’t personally agree with taking it to that extent, but I can understand where all of this comes from. One of the things the word processor enables (along with the Internet, and blogs, and all the rest of it) is uninhibitedly bad writing. Anyone can write anything and publish it in a way that can now be theoretically read by the whole of the world. I saw countless examples of this not just when the web was in its infancy, but even before that — on BBSes, on CompuServe, and on USENET (where a tremendous amount of horrifically bad writing continues to proliferate). This is not simply because there is no professional editorial oversight, but because there is no personal editorial oversight.”

I have a little sympathy with the negative view — it’s a provocative statement, guaranteed to raise the hackles of anyone born with a mouse in their hand. Still, I don’t think we should take everything he says entirely seriously; perhaps this particular backlash is a consequence of the image that’s been thrust on Ballard, that he’s some kind of sage or techno-prophet. Could it be that this statement of his is merely the generation-specific opinion of someone born in 1930? Or perhaps he’s being deliberately reactionary, the literary equivalent of the old Surrealist provocation: firing a gun into the crowd.

——————————————————————————————————

Ballard vs the Guardian’s Readership