Ballardian

Image from Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World (courtesy Victorian College of the Arts).

Still in Melbourne, I somehow missed this last year (think I may have been O/S at the time) but it’s worth recording as yet another excellent example of Ballard’s spreading influence in the visual arts.

There’s one apparent error, though — as far as I know Drowned World was written in the early 60s, not ‘the 50s’…

From the ABC website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Copeland: Painfully so.

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

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

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