Ballardian

Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary

Jordi Costa — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:44:52 +0000

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

ABOVE: Promo video for Autopsy of the New Millennium, alternate/parallel version. Directors: Benet Roman & Alicia Reginato, La Chula Productions. The previous versionasked us to decode an assemblage of cyphers; this longer, fuller version works in reverse, taking the scalpel to grand narratives.

BELOW: ‘Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary’, an essay by Jordi Costa. First published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium, currently at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Jordi Costa is the curator of the exhibition.

All cover scans via The Terminal Collection.

1
“HOW DO I LOOK?”, ASKS DAVID CARRADINE, in the guise of the fierce killer Bill, aka the Snake Charmer, in the final minutes of Kill Bill, Volume 2 (2004), a film that J. G. Ballard didn’t like at all. “You look ready”, Uma Thurman replies, possessed by the abstract character of The Bride, after tapping her lover/executioner in the middle of his chest using the five-point-palm exploding heart technique. When you reach the end of Miracles of Life — which may be the last book J. G. Ballard leaves us with — the Ballardian reader feels they are in a similar situation: over a 50-year, unflagging literary career, the writer has applied to our subconscious the five-minute technique which will project us into the future. And there is no going back. There is no doubt that the Ballardian reader is prepared to decipher the profound structure of the world they inhabit and to foresee, with a scant margin of error, the internal logic of the immediate future.

J. G. Ballard is a writer who came from the limits of human experience — his years in Shanghai — touched by the secret power of reading the visionary present, to tell us what the next five minutes (or next 50 years) were going to be like. This means that being a Ballardian reader is a blessing and a curse at one and the same time: the blessing of understanding exactly what is happening — or what is being hatched — and the curse, which has its counterpart in Ray Milland’s character in Roger Corman’s The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), who is unable to look at life other than with a Ballardian gaze. Just like David Carradine in Tarantino’s film, the Ballardian reader is, in fact, preparing for what is ahead: he also knows that, in the next five minutes, there is only space (or time) to take a few last steps before the inevitable happens.

2
This Ballardian reader recalls his keen childhood admiration for an author who he only read through expurgated texts or adaptations to the language of the comic strip or cinema: Jules Verne. At that time, Verne was, without a shadow of a doubt, that prophet of the last century who had seen a future of submarines, journeys to the moon, and skies dotted with aerial devices which now formed part of the present. In his adult life, the Ballardian reader has no alternative but to attribute the same prophetic precision to J. G. Ballard, a writer who is able to dazzle, define and catalogue another form of future. Not the technological future, but something more intangible and complex. The spiritual future, our coming states of mind. J. G. Ballard hasn’t stopped revealing layers of our future until the stopwatch has reached zero: when the writer put the final full stop on the last page of Miracles of Life, the world had become something essentially Ballardian, something foretold from the very first sentence of The Drowned World: “Soon it would be too hot.” Bruce Sterling summed it up much better in the pages of Time magazine in 1999:

Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities — how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you’ve read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I dare say that’s the best the SF genre will ever do — and no more should ever be asked of it.

There are many ways of reading Ballard, but only one of them adopts the form of a journey of semi-initiation, punctuated with strategic twists and discoveries leading up to the all-important final revelation: the path must run through his entire body of work, in an exhaustive, ordered and chronological way. Not for nothing — however dreamlike, inverted or perverted — is logic one of the guiding concepts of Ballardian sensitivity, and the writer’s discourse has always advanced (against the tide, upstream) without making any concessions to arbitrariness. Today, many books later, the Ballardian reader can affirm that everything, absolutely everything, has been necessary: even the repetitions, the bombshells disguised as apparent changes of genre, the succession of veils and masks leading up to the concise final autobiography… When Ballardian readers reach the terminus station of this imaginary universe, they understand that, in principle, J. G. Ballard is a science fiction writer — he has no other destiny other than to become what he had always been, deep down: a realist writer. It could be argued that he is even a hyperrealist writer, because his raw material has always been hyperrealism, or realism intensified or heightened by this ability to see and understand that what is reserved for a few. In a certain sense, at the end of his journey, the Ballardian reader is a little like Charlton Heston at the end of The Planet of the Apes (1968): the traveller who finds himself on the start square of a board game, who assumes he never moved from there. A Ballardian character (and, by extension, a reader) would never succumb to the final angry outburst by the heroic Heston, because the journey would have helped him understand that there was no other possible solution to the equation: the interesting part doesn’t lie in showing resistance, but in exploring the new horizon of possibilities from this terminal beach.

ABOVE: Still from Planet of the Apes (1968).

3
We can summarise J. G. Ballard’s life’s career as the bare essentials, until we come to the moment when the pages of his autobiography Miracles of Life formulate something akin to poetry: J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai on 15th November 1930, to an affluent, influential family living in the British colony on the west side of the city. The splendour of Shanghai — a synthetic city avant la lettre, a hedonistic limbo that looked like the blueprint for the soon-to-be-built Las Vegas, a mediatised landscape before Ballard himself thought up the concept — bewitched his childish gaze, although the poverty, illness and death that marked its streets worked as a counterpoint and early source of transmitting guilt. Shortly afterwards, the underlying hell was unleashed with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, opening up a linked sequence of horrors which continued with the Second World War and the internment of the British settlers — including the Ballard family — in prison camps. From March 1943 to August 1945, the Ballards were confined to the Lunghua Camp, where the future writer found a sort of private and perverted Arcadia, a gated mirage of tranquillity in the midst of the desolation and chaos of war. Towards the end of this anomalous initiation phase, the white light of the atomic bomb — which was to become part of the agreed mythologies of the 20th century as a synonym of the horror — was interpreted by the young J. G. Ballard as a sign of liberation. Four years after the bomb was dropped, Ballard was studying medicine at Cambridge University. He was yet to become a writer but, when he looked back over his career in Miracles of Life, he realised that he had found his poetics at this stage:

Now, in 1949, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead human beings, paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach the muscles below, then separating these to reveal the nerves and blood vessels. In a way I was conducting my own autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the roadside as I set off for school. I was carrying out a kind of emotional and even moral investigation into my own past while discovering the vast and mysterious world of the human body.

Herein lies the key to understanding why Ballard is a poet who writes like a forensic scientist. Someone who remembers, narrates and weaves together a fiction like someone performing an autopsy on themselves. Or the autopsy of what is still to come: he has been able to see our future as a dead body and it has taken him a lifetime (and an entire body of work) to dissect it, to diagnose its diseases and to catalogue even the — seemingly — most unimportant organs.

4
The paradigm of the cult writer, loved by minority groups of readers who were quick to set up something similar to a circle of initiates in a secret society — all of them tourists in perpetuity at the health spas of Vermilion Sands, white as a fossil skeleton — J. G. Ballard has also experienced one of the clearest forms of glorification that mainstream culture can provide: to see his work adapted as a superproduction directed by the so-called King Midas of Hollywood, Steven Spielberg. We can thank the director of Empire of the Sun, the film (1987), for the fact that the name of the author of Empire of the Sun, the novel (1984), triggered a spark of recognition among those who had never been — and may never be –– Ballardian readers.

Nevertheless, the most hardcore faction of Ballardian readers opined that Spielberg’s saccharine gaze had softened and devalued the extreme harshness of the original novel. In part — for instance, in the scene when Lunghua becomes almost like a theme park where Jim runs around to the emphatic sounds of John Williams’ soundtrack — they were right, but perhaps they should have spotted a fundamental detail: light, one of the aesthetic identifying signs of Spielberg’s films, which has traditionally been associated with some kind of mystical or religious epiphany, expanded (or modulated) its meaning in the extraordinary sequence in which young Jim, in Nantao Stadium, which the production design team were able to transform into a purely Ballardian space, thinks he is seeing the flash of the atom bomb. Basically, Spielberg’s light, this light that makes us think of God taking a photograph, still meant the same thing — the moment of epiphany — but the Ballard factor revealed its own footnote — its cargo of death and destruction — which redefined it as the foundation of this ambiguous and troubling future which Ballard’s works will never cease to explore. Spielberg is perhaps living proof of an irrefutable truth: it is impossible to approach Ballard without being transformed in essence.

Empire of the Sun, the film, is, basically, the perfect opposite of the films Spielberg branded onto the collective imagination between the late 70s and early 80s: faced with the conquest of an Arcadia of immaturity through the precise handling of a sense of wonder, Empire of the Sun talks of the premature, traumatic death of the inner child, of the early entry into adulthood by the Jim who was to become J. G. Ballard. Until then, the children in Spielberg’s films had represented the spectacular form of our own inner child, but Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun brought about the extreme transgression of the archetype: he is the one who buries his inner child with his own hands, while still a child. The metaphor becomes explicit in the scene which, in Ballard’s own words in Miracles of Life, condenses the essence of his novel: the attempt at resurrecting the dead kamikaze pilot who, for a few seconds, becomes the corpse of the child Jim once was. It is one of the two scenes in Empire of the Sun which make it clear that Spielberg’s film is basically about the birth of a writer.

ABOVE: Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.

The other is perhaps the best known and most often quoted scene in the entire film, the one in which Spielberg saw the film he was going to (and wanted to) make: young Jim being dazzled by the Mustangs bombing Lunghua Camp. At the end of the scene, Dr Rawlins — who is called Dr Ransome in the original novel — rescues Jim from the roof. Jim starts talking to him in a highly emotional and excited state about the landing strip being paved with the bones of the prisoners. The same landing strip which could also have been paved with Jim and Dr Rawlin’s bones, had things worked out differently. The doctor grabs his arm and shouts at him “Try not to think so much! Don’t think so much!” There are two possible definitions of a writer. Or at least of the writer J. G. Ballard: a) someone who has been condemned to think too much, not to look at reality without interpreting it, without getting right to the bottom of it; b) someone who strives to bring something dead, something that has been lost, back to life. Even though what has died or been lost is, in fact, oneself. Or one of the forms of oneself.

5
Ballard’s writing, which some — with a certain degree of short-sightedness — have defined as functional, has its own canonical form, something like the buzzing, the background noise which the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977) listen to but are not aware of; a canonical form which, at times, has released eruptions of baroque, bejewelled and sensory lava — The Crystal World (1966) was the paradigm of this — and, in other cases, has become fractured through the effect of inner earthquakes of a considerable scale. The most severe of these earthquakes is the one that resulted in Ballard’s most radical and insular work: The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), a collection of short stories or an atomised novel, which was paginated and printed at the exact moment when it burst onto the scene — a constantly exploding book — or a set of atonal variations on an obsessive theme.

The narrative model that is repeated over and over again in the book could be linked to one of the (many) possible readings of a film that fascinated the writer: Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961). Some people interpret the elusive narrative of the film, directed by Resnais and written by Robbe-Grillet, under the light of the psychoanalytical mechanics geared to create the emergence of a traumatic event the memory has suppressed: in other words, what happened “last year in Marienbad” between X and A — two characters who, like Ballardian figures, function as numbers on an abstract landscape — may have been, for instance, a rape which A has tried to forget and which X wants to replay in the form of a therapeutic ritual. This model recurs obsessively in the different chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition: a character with a fractured identity — who will keep changing his name in his different manifestations — moves towards the cathartic, ritualistic and spectacular representation of his trauma, between the demiurgic gaze of a mysterious doctor and the magnetisation of what might well be the Ballardian version of the femme fatale in the film noir genre. Just like a film by David Lynch deciphered by Zizek, Ballard’s characters always sound like film noir archetypes recycled as functions of the subconscious: passion, which in the classic film noir model usually drives the plot, here becomes a fossil that has seen its meaning eroded in the desert of affection.

In The Kindness of Women (1991), the second of J. G. Ballard’s pseudoautobiographical — or, if you prefer, falsely autobiographical — books, the author seems to read the adaptation of Empire of the Sun in a similar key. This traumatic event, which the writer took 20 years to forget and a few more to remember, was exorcised in the most spectacular way possible: as a Hollywood super-production with the interiors shot near his home in Shepperton, where many of his neighbours at the time were hired as extras. Ballard’s life, between his years in Shanghai and the premiere of Empire of the Sun, could be the expansion of one of the fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition: his entire body of work until then could be read as a sequence of rehearsals leading up to the Grand Final Performance. What remains afterwards is the Real which, at that moment, has already become something tremendously Ballardian: the cycle that opens with Running Wild (1988) and closes with Kingdom Come (2006), a guided tour of the landscapes of contemporaneity that bring about that death in life that is an invitation — a provocation — to a traumatic awakening.

6
Ballard states that the protagonist of Empire of the Sun is perhaps his most sophisticated literary invention. Jim is and isn’t Ballard, in the same way that Ballard is and isn’t the homonym of the Ballard who is the main character in his novel Crash (1973), just as Ballard is and isn’t Travis, Talbot, Traven, Talbert, etcetera… in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s work is a succession of masks culminating in the sober, moving and anti-climatic nakedness of Miracles of Life: its pages make us aware, once and for all, that there was invention in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, but we confirm that the psychological and literary truth of both works is completely safe. Miracles of Life doesn’t contain scandalous revelations, or excessive digressions with regard to what we already knew: the important thing, as always, is in the details, in the subtle variations and in the way the gaps are finally filled and all the pieces fit together. The Ballardian reader who is writing this text was, at any rate, surprised at the keenness of the burgeoning young writer J. G. Ballard to provide a new voice, to forge his own style, to avoid the tautology of what has already been said. From the very outset, nothing has been done by chance. Ballard’s singularity isn’t the result of chance, but of a painstaking search, of his connection to the responsibility of the writer to the spirit of his age.

Martin Amis associated the cautiousness with which some Ballardian readers received the (supposed) change in register of Empire of the Sun with the disappointment the public would feel if a magician revealed the machinery behind his tricks. The novel revealed that some recurrent images in Ballard’s imagination — empty swimming pools, abandoned hotels, desolate landscapes, planes — had their origins in experience: nevertheless, the magician who reveals his tricks would be unable to explain fully the meaning (or meanings) inherent to these images as they emerge from the darkness of the subconscious. The interesting thing about Ballard’s work is the way in which everything always looks the same, to reveal itself in the end as different: the meanings are modulated, twisted, mutating… In short, only their appearance and rhythms are enriched in their perpetual, languid and indolent movement.

In “Myths of the Near Future” (1982), the story that opens the anthology of the same name, Ballard seems to propose a summa of Ballardian motifs: there is, for instance, the recurrent post-noir triangle formed by the Ballardian anti-hero, the wicked doctor and the enigmatic woman, as well as by the empty swimming pools, an abandoned Cape Canaveral, the strange geometries of desire abandoned by passion, the flying devices, the dead astronauts, the lysergic visions, the unruly vegetation, the exotic birds, the phosphorescent night club… On the one hand, Ballard’s literature is the writer’s long negotiation with his own founding trauma: with his own premature death. On the other, Ballard’s literature is also the gradual recycling of images, motifs, themes and symbols which he has been able to draw from his own well of trauma in order to put together, as the title of the story underlines, a universal mythology for the imminent future: that moment when we will close all the doors to the outside world in order to devote ourselves, with a psychopathic zeal, to the inner tourism on the landscape of our obsessions. In other words, the (future) moment when our (present) death will become clear.

When J. G. Ballard closes his case (so to speak) by attending the premiere of Empire of the Sun, he sees — to put it in Monterrosian terms — that the dinosaur is still there. Or that reality has caught up with his imagination. Deep down, everything had been there from the very beginning: the gated communities in Running Wild, Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come are the echo of that British colony in Shanghai encapsulated in its social rituals, cocktail parties and games of golf, completely removed from the background noise of Shanghai, from its dazzling lights at night, and the horrors of the poverty in its streets. A mirage of order, peace and civilisation that will be reproduced, by other means, in the Lunghua Camp, with its paths named after streets in London, and its signs mimicking the logotype of the Underground network.

The Lunghua Camp survivors took exception to the book Empire of the Sun: according to them, the routine they managed to establish inside the camp — which included an educational plan, theatre performances, sporting activities and other echoes of life in peacetime — bore witness to the strength of this community which was able to rebuild itself in adverse conditions. To their mind, J. G. Ballard’s way of looking at these years, applied a veneer of alarmism which bore no resemblance to the reality. Perhaps something else happened: inside this limbo (this gated community of codes, rituals and ordered behaviour), young Jim encountered another possible world, his private universe, his Enormous Space, peopled with pilots in flames, wanderings through the undergrowth and panoramic vistas of the underlying landscape of the fight to stay alive and human misery. Once again, Ballard saw the profound structure of the thing. In a by no means literal, but probably revelatory, sense, the young J. G. Ballard was to the Lunghua Camp what the tennis player Bobby Crawford is to the Marbella resort town of Estrella de Mar in Cocaine Nights: the one who reveals what lies beneath, the one who activates what nobody wants to see.

7
When the calendar marked the turn of the new millennium, the orthodox readers of science fiction had the childish reaction of feeling they had been conned: of all the things they had been promised, the only one that had become a reality was the ersatz tricorder first seen in Star Trek (1966-1969) which we know as the mobile phone. A device which, in the long run, turned out to be much more sophisticated and versatile than the original model. The Ballardian reader, however, knew that this future that had already been conjugated in the present was exactly as the Prophet had told us it would be, right down to the last detail. A future that was more like a film by Antonioni than a space opera, with characters immobilised in a temporary limbo, as if in a pan shot from Last Year in Marienbad, while they consider the different geometric possibilities of the dissolution of their identity. Basically, the infinite views of a surrealist landscape, where the fossils of the everyday project the shadow of new calligraphies that are ready to be deciphered. Everything seems quiet in this image of the future: the important thing is in the interior, with these psyches polished by the incessant erosion of a barrage of images in which the assassination of Kennedy merges with Marilyn Monroe’s pubis, and the napalm showers over the Vietnamese jungle, and the enlarged effigy of Mickey Mouse, and the regular orbit of a dead astronaut, and the erotic angles of a crashed car, and the after-effects of a terrorist attack on the sex life of an affluent middle-class family, and the images of boring sitcoms that will conquer outer space while, at the same time, down here, a chosen few can at last feel they are the masters of their no less enigmatic and ungraspable inner space. Ballard once said that the future would be fundamentally boring: a suburb of the soul inhabited by ghosts who have become disconnected from their instincts. The writer has also repeatedly denied that he is a pessimist: utopia is beating in the background of his works, although it might not be pleasant or comfortable. Once again, the interesting thing is inside: in the landscapes of disconnection there continues to exist the overwhelming potential of the imagination, obsessions and psychopathology. In short, the parallel universe of unlimited possibility which, of course, also has its venomous side.

8
“What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths”, observes J. G. Ballard in his introduction to Crash. In this text, the author articulates another possible poetic form, developing some of his postulates which are already present in his important founding essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” published in the magazine New Worlds in 1962. In it, Ballard confronts the members of his tribe — science-fiction writers — advocating a generic model open to experimentation, and focusing on the immense speculative possibilities of subjectivity:

The first true science fiction story, and one I intend to write myself if no one else will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel, trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them.

This story suggested by Ballard could have become “The Terminal Beach” (1964), an important point of inflection in his career and the first (successful) essay of his career based on this aesthetic of fragmentation which is sublimated in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash and many short stories written afterwards.

In the introduction to Crash, J. G. Ballard is no longer affirming himself in the face of the philotechnological trends of current science fiction, but he wishes to restore science fiction as the central discourse in a literary context that must free itself from the inheritance of 19th-century literature in order to face up to the demands of the 20th century, with all the consequences this entails. Ballard tries to deal with one of a writer’s most onerous responsibilities: to find the voice of his era. And his era is, precisely, the most problematic of territories: a place where fiction has poisoned everything and the novel (or fiction) has no other way out other than to become the only space of reality. The dizzying leap that realising this entails and, to a great extent, resolving it, bears out Ballard’s true importance in the context of 20th-century culture and, by extension, the turn of the millennium. With The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, Ballard shapes the voice of his era and, inevitably, a sort of literature of the boundary which reveals the impossibility of going any further. Ballard’s career could be read as the trajectory in a straight line towards the radical disintegration expressed in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, followed by a fascinating corollary of variations and revelations designed so that the Ballardian reader will gain a deep understanding of all the meanings and implications of the journey.

The tandem formed by The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash also attests to the fact that some of the inherited concepts used to assess his work are no longer valid. It is surprising that, at the end of the introduction to Crash, Ballard underlines the fact that “the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary”, because, as the sentence which opens this section allows us to understand, morals are no longer useful in order to decipher the spiritual state which these novels take us to. In the world described by these works, logic has supplanted morals and, at the same time, it becomes clear that this logic is new, it isn’t the one we once knew, maybe because, until that time, the logic had always been subordinate to morals. Ballard’s literature reveals that there exists a logic which moves in the opposite way to the one that has articulated our knowledge until now: this is why, everything that appears in his fiction takes on a Ballardian meaning that cancels its previous significance passed on by tradition. It is an irresoluble question to decide if Ballard is a moralist or just perverse: the only certainty is the ambiguity, and a good example of this are the subtle variations — applied, for instance, to something as important as the ideological context — which the same template of conflict in Ballard’s most recent novels is subject to. However, neither morals nor ideology are the right instruments for approaching Ballard. Anyone who reads his early novels about disasters and tends to believe that the writer predicted, in a poetic key, climate change, has not yet found the right key in order to enter the Ballardian sphere: ecology is a concept that cannot be applied to inner space.

The author uses the extreme metaphor as the instrument whereby his literature can take us to that (a)moral territory where we would never go, following the dictates of our reason, although, without us knowing it, we are already submerged in this territory. Ballard definitively conquers this spiritual sphere announced by the Compte de Lautréamont when he suggested introducing prostitution into the family home. De Lautréamont’s fantastical vision needs to find in Ballard its geometry in order to show itself to be truly effective. Logic is the only strategy that can bring each extreme metaphor to a satisfactory conclusion. This is the secret of Ballard: the primitivisation of the sophisticated building in High-Rise (1975) is true to life, because, at no time has he strayed from his own logical guidelines, such as the passage from Concrete Island (1974), a traffic island cut off from the rest of the world by the road network, to the limitless landscape which the protagonist will travel on the back of an animalised giant… If the only possible reality which demands to be turned into literature, here and now, is inside us — the world of our imagination, dreams, obsessions and psychopathologies — only the particular logic of each subjective landscape can provide the right road map in order to travel it.

There is a stunning novel by Ballard which translates all these codes into the universal language of the adventure story: Hello America (1981), a western, pure and simple, which, in reality, is a western in reverse. The adventure no longer lies in the discovery and conquest of virgin territory, but in the rediscovery of a culture in ruins, reformulated as an inner landscape. The geography has mutated in order to adjust to the new parameters: the desert begins in New York and the road ends in the leafy jungles of Las Vegas, which are so similar to the destination in Heart of Darkness (1899).

9
When J. G. Ballard had written his first novel (which, in fact, it wasn’t: he wrote The Wind from Nowhere (1961) before but has made every effort to forget about it), his publisher Victor Gollancz took him out for lunch and rewarded him with one of those double-edged compliments that would lower the self-esteem of any budding author: “It’s an interesting novel, The Drowned World. But of course, you’ve stolen it all from Conrad.” Ballard hadn’t read Conrad at the time, but he soon filled the gap and saw in this long journey from Marlow to Kurtz the pattern that could govern the movement of every Ballardian (anti)hero: always heading upstream, on course for destruction or horror, or self-knowledge. After Empire of the Sun, the novel that revealed the secret driving force behind his fictions, which widened his readership and opened the doors of literary recognition to him, Ballard wrote The Day of Creation (1987), one of his strangest, most unfathomable books, almost like a mirror image of Heart of Darkness in the key of metaliterary self-exploration. The central character in The Day of Creation, Dr Mallory, believes he is responsible for the birth of a river — a third Nile — which could reshape the surrounding landscape. Mallory embarks on a delirious odyssey in search of the source of the river, and becomes caught up in the confrontations between two rival factions in a local war: in the end, the last drops of this figment of his imagination dry up in his hands, heralding the final triumph of the desert. The Ballardian reader soon realises that The Day of Creation is a book about the act of writing, about the potential for madness and self-destruction inherent in the act of creating, about the tragedy of tracing and taming the fruits of our imagination. Its denouement may talk about the inevitable exhaustion of every creative source: Ballard makes out the death certificate of his own imagination and prepares the Ballardian reader for the culmination of the discourse in the territories of the real. In the end, the wonderful creator of metaphors used to explain our era, creates the twilight metaphor of himself.

Ballard as a metaphor is also the core subject of a previous novel, whose title echoes self-definition in a corporate key: The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), another mysterious interlude on the road, between the steel and cement phase and before the off-course excursion Hello America. In The Unlimited Dream Company, the main character, Blake, crashes a stolen plane into the waters of the Thames, by the riverbank near Shepperton, and emerges from the water like a lubricious, pan-sexual Messiah, who can fertilise the vegetation with his own sperm and teach all the inhabitants in the neighbourhood to fly. The Unlimited Dream Company is a sort of perverse gospel, which describes the passion, death and resurrection — not necessarily in that order — of an apostle of the febrile imagination who seeks to be deciphered as an extreme metaphor of Ballard himself. The Unlimited Dream Company is the shining face of The Day of Creation: both novels in which the author invents himself, providing substantial keys in order to understand the beneficial (and terrible) properties of his literature and, by extension, of literature. The imagination according to Ballard is the source of redemption and transcendence — what makes us fly — but it also contains the dangers of obsession and self-destruction — what absorbs our identity and reduces it to nothing.

10
A car explodes inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York and multiplies into successive forms of itself, which rise up through the central atrium of the rotunda to the top floor. That was the spectacular welcome the exhibition I Want to Believe by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang gives to the visitor: one of the many Ballardian traits that anyone could detect in lands which are not necessarily aware that our era has been lucky enough to have had someone like J. G. Ballard, who embodies a sensitivity and a gaze that are in a permanent viral expansion. The Ballardian reader who is writing this text doesn’t know if Cai Guo-Qiang has ever read J. G. Ballard, but he has no doubt that opening an exhibition which freezes the explosion of a car in space and time is something unequivocally Ballardian. Likewise, Cai Guo-Qiang’s theory, which interprets the archetype of a suicide bomber as a ready-made artist, or his paintings which bear the traces of burnt-out gunpowder, or the huge, unfeasible projects which dream of drawing a Wall of China in flames on the surface of the Moon on a night when there is an eclipse, or digging an inverted pyramid out of the lunar surface which, while it is orbiting the Earth, will align itself perfectly with the angles of the Pyramid of Giza.

When J. G. Ballard wrote in The Atrocity Exhibition that “in the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace” he was also intuiting the sensitivity which, many years later, would crystallise in this Louis Vuitton boutique placed in the middle of the exhibition the Brooklyn Museum devoted to the Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami. While some sectors of the press were being scandalised at Murakami’s witty exhibit — which was nothing more than the inevitable corollary of Warholian logic — the London Barbican was bringing together a selection of contemporary artworks following the also highly Ballardian criteria of applying the linking thread of the anthropological gaze of a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilisation.

In a scene from High-Rise, J. G. Ballard describes a female character with varying levels of dishevelment in her physical appearance, “as if she were preparing parts of her body for some gala to which the rest of herself had not been invited”. To a certain degree, all of us, Ballardian readers or those who have never been (or ever will be), are as unsuitably attired as this character is to attend the night-time gala that is the future (or, already, the present) according to J. G. Ballard. This is why we tend to think, with a clear margin of error, that our world is becoming increasingly Ballardian, that reality is taking on the forms of a fiction imagined by J. G. Ballard. And we don’t want to realise that the answer has always been there: it isn’t life that imitates Ballard, but Ballard who has had the gift of seeing life as it was going to be. As it already is. As it was already written on the body of that dead child he left buried in Shanghai. In other words: the only person who is dressed appropriately for the occasion is this quiet gentleman, who lives in Shepperton, who, for a long time now, has been waiting for us in the doorway to the future, slowly savouring a glass of whisky with ice, telling us with his dry humour what was going on inside at the party, with the calm and assuredness of someone who knows that, sooner or later, we will all get there, because, as Criswell would say, the future is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

Admin note: There is a new Ballardian forum: please enjoy.

J.G. Ballard: In the Raw

Ballardian — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:18:41 +0000

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.

IN THE RAW
by Josep Ramoneda

Photo via CCCB.

For a long time he was consigned to the ranks of science fiction. Afterwards, Spielberg brought him out of the shadows by making a film of his novel Empire of the Sun. Nevertheless, these forays, made through indirect means, are usually highly misleading. James Graham Ballard is part of the classical literary family whose talents the British Empire spread throughout the world and which drew on its colonial experiences to find the necessary energy to tackle the creative adventure. These are the origins, but from this point Ballard becomes a strange writer who transforms that experience in a very different way to other writers from the same background. Indeed, Empire of the Sun is his only work that fits in, more or less, with the canon. This is why it should come as no surprise that it is the book that has brought him the greatest recognition.

However, Ballard isn’t only Empire of the Sun, notwithstanding that it is his most explicitly autobiographical work. Ballard is, first and foremost, a way of looking at the world and is able to penetrate, with a premonitory acuity, the squalid face of change, the sinister side of history, from a persistent reading of the logic of events. His settings are often the places of everyday life that seem the most banal, but his gaze is like a scalpel that peels away everything the skin conceals. The raw flesh: this could be the meaning of Ballardian writing. And his metaphorical, often surrealistic, displays are nothing more than ways of trying to say something that isn’t ready to be understood, because we are at a time when this something is being formed and built.

Photo by Ana Barrado.

It has been said that Ballard is a writer of negative utopias. This isn’t true. Utopias are in fact mental constructs which have nowhere to place themselves. Ballard’s world is reality: the reality of today and the reality of tomorrow, which are inseparable, particularly in an elastic tense we could call the present continuous. There is nothing in Ballard that isn’t anchored to the reality of today, and in this regard his literature is a literature of the present, or, if you prefer, current writing. He describes the mental and sensorial conditions of our present – in which fiction is the natural medium and literature has to strive to create a reality – which a human condition emerges from, shifting between the experience of limits and the banality of the masses. What can this particular Ballardian gaze be ascribed to? Jordi Costa is quite right in his explanation with its psychoanalytical slant: it is the gaze of a child who got lost too soon.

Ballard is a fundamentally urban writer focusing on the contemporary urbanity in which the “urbs” often absorbs “civitas” to lead us to the emergence of chaos in Crash or High-Rise. Above all, his is a gaze marked by a state of mind: the lucidity of one who refuses to reap the consolations humankind constructs for itself, of one who refuses to divert attention from the piles of bodies, wreckage and frustrations humans generate, of one who, in the end, is always able to find the viewpoint that illuminates, unexpectedly, the perception of the situation. Ballard isn’t a pessimist. He is a conscious hyperrealist. And his presumed strangeness stems from difficulties in empathising with his gaze. There are readers who don the Ballardian reading glasses straightaway and others who only see a blur. And there’s almost nothing we can do about it. Ballard’s gaze is like Christian grace: you either have it or you don’t.

Be that as it may, the CCCB is putting Ballard centre stage to provide a different view of a world in which the real forces – the ones that weave together normativity and experience – aren’t always patently obvious. During the preparation of the exhibition I was able to enter into correspondence with the author. After his initial willingness, he gradually shifted to voice his reservations – which were always expressed with British elegance – as if, as the project began to take shape, he felt a growing need to distance himself from it. He would probably prefer it if other people told the story so as to avoid being trapped within it, in order to look, with a Ballardian gaze, at this particular story about his work, without having contaminated it beforehand. Or to put to the test our ability to don the Ballardian reading glasses and not see darkness. Sadly, his illness has worsened over the past few months and the last thing I heard is that he won’t be able to come to the exhibition. We’ll probably never know how Ballard views this exercise in Ballardoscopy.

2008, Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.

…:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:

+ New Millennial Autopsy
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release

…:: FURTHER INFO:

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

Admin note: There is a new Ballardian forum: please enjoy.

J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release

Ballardian — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:11:21 +0000

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

Admin note: There is a new Ballardian forum: please enjoy.

Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

Simon Sellars — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:21:55 +0000

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

Admin note: There is a new Ballardian forum: please enjoy.

Black Plaque for Dr Robert Vaughan

Simon Sellars — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:45:40 +0000

Photo by Dr Champagne.

Work has started on a Black Plaque for Robert Vaughan, anti-hero of JG Ballard’s Crash. When English Heretic started one of its intentions was to commemorate psychopaths. Of course, the aim was never so obvious as to glorify serial killers in the tired tradition of industrial culture, but to draw attention to the archetype of the psychopath, the immutable weird of the nightmare. There is no better example in modern fiction than Ballard’s hoodlum scientist, fallen TV angel of the M4 corridor.

As part of the project a sister blog has been set up: The Hoodlum Scientist’s Fieldbook.

Though the idea of a Black Plaque for Vaughan was seeded at the beginning of English Heretic, much of the recent impetus and structure for the research has been inspired by the wonderful Ballard related blogs and articles constructed by Simon Sellars at Ballardian, Nina at Infinite Thought, and Owen at Sit Down Man, you’re a bloody tragedy.

The first location research centres around Northolt in Middlesex, which Ballard’s genius somehow manages to transform into the erotic suburb of a Paul Delvaux painting. The following entry is a personal rendering of Northolt through English Heretic’s Ubu absurd lens…the usual obsessions: toponymic conspiracy; Osirian descent, urban Fulcanellian hermeticism…

In carrying out these researches I would love to hear and have join in, collaborators who share an interest and passion for Ballard. The project is a conscious homage to the great man himself.

English Heretic celebrates the self-saucing psychopath, the Hoodlum Scientist, Dr Robert Vaughan, voyaging to the dark heart of Crash, the M4 corridor, in ‘Final Churches of the Northolt Apocalypse’, this oversaturated photo essay, stalking the alien underbelly of tombstone streets and derelict petrol pumps…

I am terribly flattered to be linked to this crew. Both Nina and Owen are writers that make me feel like I’m forever catching up, such is their skill, while English Heretic is one of the more compelling blogs I’ve run across of late.

This photo essay from the good doctor is suitably lurid and pulpy, like the acid scene in Crash. Like Chris Foss’s cover for Crash. A strange and obsessive incantation… and something is stirring beneath the tarmac.

Photo by Dr Champagne.

The cars in the afternoon light look that school of dead dolphins duped into Falmouth bay by Naval sonar or so the conspiracy went.

More at English Heretic…

Admin note: There is a new Ballardian forum: please enjoy.

Chris Marker: Imperfect Memory

Simon Sellars — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:12:22 +0000

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence — a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream — the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.
…
This familiar theme [time travel] is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard ‘La Jetée: Academy One’, New Worlds, 1966.

Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.

We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).

ABOVE: Still from La Jetée (1964; dir. Chris Marker).

Meanwhile, we leave the academic penal colony – to which we once belonged and from which we no doubt still bear the scars – to crunch through the seemingly inevitable canonization process, as it has done so well with Walter Benjamin. That may be just what awaits epigonically for the rare few who scribble & bricole in a deep, careful, dedicated, crafty and continuous manner with a master’s brilliance and an asystematic approach, in whatever medium, ahead (or outside) of their time.

You may notice that some of the material initially appearing on this site is a port of resources from the old and crumbling edifice of silverthreaded presents chris marker, once housed at a so-called tilde account at silcom.com, now still hanging around for old time’s sake at a nowherenear relevant domain called vajramedia.com, in and amongst the rubble of a disastrous project once known as Cinema Paranoia. Upon this shaky base we build, quoting mostly, writing little, ever fascinated by and admiring always the oeuvre of Chris Marker, le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.

Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

ABOVE: Still from Sans Soleil (1983; dir. Chris Marker).

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Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft

Simon Sellars — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:39:48 +0000

ABOVE: Back cover from The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

I have been curious about Lovecraft for some time. When I was younger I saw the film of Reanimator. When I was a little older, I got beaten up by headbangers who loved Metallica’s ‘The Call of Ktulu’ and were offended that I, as a card-carrying Mohican, only knew of Master of Puppets, a crossover fave with chaospunks but the liking of which was seen as a symbol of a tryhard bandwagon jumper according to them. Later, when I was a travel writer, I visited on assignment the Pohnpei island group in Micronesia, which includes the ruins of Nan Madol, inspiration for some of the setting of the Cthulhu Mythos. And now, during my tenure as curator of ballardian.com, I have been most intrigued by the re-modulation of the Lovecraft frequency on my radar, calibrated via the online acquaintances I’ve made through the site.

But how exactly does Lovecraft speak to Ballard aficionados? Don’t the two writers in fact speak to separate audiences? Could you really imagine an Alcoholica fan banging their head to Ballard’s Crash while listening to Ride the Lightning? In fact there appears to have been a certain critical tradition of sorts that equates some aspects of Lovecraft’s work with some aspects of Ballard’s. As far back as 1959, Ballard’s story ‘The Waiting Grounds’ was introduced by Ted Carnell in New Worlds like so:

Not for a long time have readers seen a story quite like this one. Those with extensive collections or good memories will remember the impact H.P. Lovecraft made in the middle 30s with his all-too-few science fiction stories, particularly ‘At the Mountains of Madness.’ Undoubtedly author Ballard has a touch of that same genius which eventually made Lovecraft great.

And in 1994, Ballard’s 1965 short ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ even appeared in a Lovecraft tribute volume, The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, edited by D.M. Mitchell, although, as wiki notes, ‘Some of the stories in the collection — notably those by Burroughs and Ballard — were not inspired by Lovecraft, but were seen by Mitchell as sharing his “visions of cosmic alienation”.’

More recently, I have noted that k-punk (Mark Fisher) and Ben Noys, both Ballard scholars and also past contributors to this site, were involved in the conference ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory’ in April 2007. Cousin Silas, whom I interviewed in 2007, told me that his music is inspired by both Ballard and Lovecraft. And at the Ballard conference in Norwich in May 2007, Mark Williams gave a paper on Ballard and New Worlds that contained, as I noted at the time, ‘a surprising diversion into Lovecraft territory’.

In fact, Noys, over at his excellent new blog, No Useless Leniency, goes some way to explaining why Ballard, a writer not primarily known for horror or Gothic fiction, is so frequently aligned with Lovecraft:

In the formation of “reactionary novelties” (Badiou) Lovecraft can be aligned with those forms of “High Modernism,” such as T. S. Eliot’s, that constituted themselves, in Peter Nicholls words, as “an attack on modernity” (251). The difficulty, in terms of Badiou’s evental tracings, is how Lovecraft’s “novelty” is something artistically “new” while at the same time “politically” reactionary (and reactionary against other artistic innovations); it suggests the intersection or imbrication of events: in this case art, science, politics.

His reaction against these currents of the new produces a “reactionary novelty,” but actually also a true novelty of disruption that exceeds its primary evental site – Gothic fiction; this may be why that it only outside of the Gothic that we find Lovecraft’s true disciples: William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Michel Houellebecq, artists like H. R. Giger and John Coulthart, and muscians like The Fall and Patti Smith. The Lovecraft event therefore problematises Badiou’s formulation of the artistic event by being a reactionary event that produces something new.

ABOVE: Front cover illustration for The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

Wanting to know more, I was inspired to approach John Coulthart himself, a contributor to the aforementioned Lovecraft tribute volume and the foremost visual interpreter of Lovecraft’s work today. Coulthart is an operative of Savoy Books, and as such, given the Savoy trajectory, is well placed to comment on Ballard’s work, too.

Given that John’s art is included in A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft, the mighty volume that has just been released, the timing could not in fact be better to ask him for his own take on the Ballardcraft crossover:

ABOVE: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1984), by John Coulthart.

JOHN COULTHART: One of the earliest works of mine I can stand to see displayed in public is my drawing from 1984 intended to accompany the story (as opposed to the book) of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was going to be part of a series of drawings illustrating each chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition collection with each picture joining to the next to form a single long work. I completed the second one, The University of Death, then ran out of steam, and the whole idea was completely negated by the superior RE/Search edition of TAE, and then dropped in favour of my starting work on the Lovecraft stuff.

There are some vague parallels between the two writers: both are very imitable writers in terms of superficial style yet that style is at the service of a unique imagination. Both have a very identifiable inner landscape (to borrow a Ballard phrase), sufficiently notable to give us the terms Ballardian and Lovecraftian. Both transcend the genres they started out in; HPL moved from horror to a kind of visionary sf more concerned with conveying the sublime feeling of the vastness of space and time than generating a horror thrill. And both have their own readily identifiable mythology, of course. It irks me the way Lovecraft’s mythology, at least where Cthulhu is concerned, has been rendered cuddly by Americans. Have you noticed how they do this with everything, putting monsters on cereal packets and kids’ TV? I keep telling people that Hannibal Lecter (and the inferior Jigsaw from the Saw films) will be next to be absorbed by this process. Hannibal is already on his way after the last book and film.

ABOVE: ‘Haunter of the Dark’ from The Haunter of the Dark and other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart’s book of Lovecraft adaptations.

There are a couple of other parallels although the trouble with these discussions is that you can stretch the comparison too far and then it breaks. However…. HPL was the first writer to move the content of horror stories away from the Gothic with its ghosts and vampires into the 20th century. I’ve noted elsewhere how he was grasping (albeit in a pulp fashion) after an articulation of horror that parallels some of Kafka’s writing; the concerns are with the point at which our existence in three-dimensional space becomes disturbing and threatening, a fear of unusual angles and paranoia inflated to a cosmic scale. He’s known generally as an inventor of a pantheon of monsters but its that reinvention of the medium which makes him important. As Ballard did with sf, he found a way to take the tools of a popular genre and use them to say something new about our perception of the world. And like Ballard, eventually the genre trappings lost their interest. Lovecraft’s later work has little overt horror content, it’s more a kind of sublime sf with a vague horror atmosphere; At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time were both published in Astounding magazine after Weird Tales rejected them for not being scary enough.

ABOVE: ‘The University of Death’ (1984) by John Coulthart.

So there you have it — thanks John. Some of these comments back up what Ben Noys wrote about Lovecraft’s ‘true novelty of disruption that exceeds its primary evental site – Gothic fiction’, and all of it helps me to understand a little better for I am very far from a Lovecraft expert.

To end, I’ll leave you with a quote from Ballard himself, probed in 1991 by Paul Di Filippo (on the ball as always):

PAUL DI FILIPPO: Could I get your reaction to the rather bizarre assertion that your work bears secret affinities to that of the cult horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, with its emphasis on “alien geometries,” “the outsider,” and landscapes as symbols of mental states?  

J.G. BALLARD: I’ve never read him, but there may well be correspondences.

‘Ballard’s Anatomy: An Interview by Paul Di Filippo’, SF Eye, 1991.

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Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno

Simon Sellars — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:31:00 +0000

ABOVE: Ballard, late 60s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

Vermilion Sands is a kind of cross between Palm Springs and Juan-les-Pins, a version of the leisure society we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments… could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

Owen Hatherley, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’.

It is a great injustice that Eno tends to be best known for either the “invention” of ambient music or for putting a slightly avant-garde gloss on sundry rock superstars. His records, and attendant theories, in the decade from 1972 to 1982 exhibit an astonishing range of modes and ideas, from the preening glam rock of Here Come the Warm Jets to the opiated drift of Discreet Music, the apocalyptic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the deliberate blankness of Music for Airports. Without Eno as catalyst and protagonist, the landscape of popular music would be a far less interesting place: he popularised, through his own records and work with Bowie, Talking Heads and others, noise, sampling, studio-as-instrument, surface over “depth” and manifold other strategies against what was, by the early 1970s, a form in danger of becoming a hidebound arena of proper songs played on real instruments.

Owen Hatherley, ‘Father of Invention’.

ABOVE: Dionysian Eno. Photo via Kontrapunkt.

In another corner of his mind [Eno] was inventing ambient music. Recuperating from an accident, he asked a friend to leave a harp record on, and the one working speaker let its faint strings blend with wind and bird-song. Subliminally, he recognised that this was music. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) announced a theory with, as the title suggested, much in common with JG Ballard’s eerie mundane modernity.

Nick Hasted, ‘Brian Eno, the professor of rock’.

SIMON SELLARS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SIMON REYNOLDS: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

‘”Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling”: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard connection’.

ABOVE: Ballard, mid-70s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

SIMON SELLARS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

COUSIN SILAS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

‘Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard’.

ABOVE: Eno in 1975. Photo via Creative Technology.

SIMON SELLARS: How successful do you think Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was in providing a soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘future cities’? Eno wanted – in part — to reassure travellers who might be contemplating their death in a possible air crash, although Ballard seems to see the modern airport as a self-sufficient organism that already possesses this inbuilt function.

MIKE RYAN: If no airport is using his music, then I guess it was not successful. I own that CD, but I’ve never sat through the whole thing. I just get bored with it. If I want to contemplate death, I want complete silence, which of course we never can achieve. John Cage once recounted his experience in an anechoic soundproof chamber. When he was in there he asked the sound engineer what all that whooshing and thumping was that he could hear. Turned out that it was the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating.

In regards to ‘future cities’, judging by recent articles by Nick Tosches and Mike Davis, it sounds like Dubai is the city of the future. Eno should do ‘Music for Dubai’ and see if it catches on. Maybe he could be the first Dubai superstar in the post-Las-Vegas world.

‘”No-one Dances in Ballard”: An Interview with Mike Ryan.’

ABOVE: Ballard in 1991. Photo by Craig McDean.

ABOVE: Appollonian Eno. Photo by Tom Pilston.

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Untitled part 4

Simon Sellars — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:58:59 +0000

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Untitled part 3

Simon Sellars — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:41:24 +0000

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