Ballardian

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. 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 [...]

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

There has been a Ballard backlash. Here are two of the more aggressive memes. 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 [...]

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

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

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

‘If Dali Had Painted Angelina Jolie’, by 14. Copyright 2006. I’ve just discovered the Gallery of the Absurd, maintained by the artist known simply as ’14′ and devoted to her sharp, witty and frightening caricatures of A-list celebrities. There’s TomKat recast as TomRat — two furry, grotesque rodents cradling their hideous offspring; there’s The Three [...]

i.m. Jean Baudrillard by Benjamin Noys ———————————————————————————————————————- In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 [...]

by Rick Poynor ‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken). NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission. J. G. BALLARD’S Crash [...]

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

Interview by Simon Sellars Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written [...]

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

OPENING LINE: “In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’). From the 1996 Harper Collins edition: The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, [...]

OPENING LINE: “I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’). From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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