Tour: 'The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Milennium' (CCCB, Barcelona)

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'This exhibition offers an itinerary through author J.G. 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.' -- official description

J.G. Ballard Homepage
Ballardian
The Critical Exhibition
The Terminal Collection
Ballard @ The Scriptorium
Ballard on Burroughs
The CCCB Site

Entering the Exhibition

photos from Ballardian.com

Tour by Rick McGrath

'The trip into the exhibition itself is a Ballardian experience of corridors and obsessively angled floors. It’s a maze. You first walk along the left wall of the courtyard, noticing what must be medical slogans from the 1700s painted on the ornate tiles, then you’re suddenly at a hidden entrance. Turning right, you walk down a long, slow incline, mirrored on the right wall, to a set of hidden doors. Entering, you reverse direction and descend again down another long incline which empties into to a large auditorium with information booths, ticket sales, and a large screen showing the CCCB’s specially-made promotional video for the show. We’ll pass thru here and then climb a series of long, open stairs, which leads us into the new glass tower and onto Spain’s longest escalator – a three-story monster right out of Kingdom Come – which delivers us to the Exhibition’s entrance.' (continued)
















Video tour w/ Spanish language commentary (2:37)

from the Exhibition Catalogue

courtesy of & thanks to Pisycaca

The Billboard Novel

'(These are) a series of four facing-page spreads that were specimen pages I put together in the late 50s... sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes... The pages from the Project For A New Novel were made at a time when I was working on a chemical society journal in London, and the lettering was taken from the US magazine Chemical and Engineering News -- I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories from Chem. Eng. News to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalized by the headings around them.' -- JGB






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Advertisements

'Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…' -- JGB

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Crashed Cars (1970)

''Crashed Cars' took place at the gallery IRAT between 4-28 April 1970.19 The cars – a Pontiac, an Austin Cambridge A60 and a Mini – were hired from Charles Symmonds's knacker's yard, Motor Crash Repairs. 'They don't appeal to me as art,' Symmonds told the Sunday Times. 'I detest cars. But maybe it's a good idea to show crashed cars. It's frightening.'20 Ballard's choice of car was far from accidental. The Pontiac was a model from the mid-fifties, and thus represented a particularly baroque phase in American car styling, while the Mini symbolised the fun-loving mobility of the swinging sixties. The sober and conservative saloon, the A60, stood for the Mini's exact antithesis.21 All however, through the catastrophe of the car crash, were now in a sense equivalent; smashed and levelled to the raw material of their crushed metal, broken glass, and stained upholstery.' -- Simon Ford

'At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done.' -- JGB




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Negative Acoustic Space

'For the CCCB exhibition, I curated a selection of Ballardian inspired sound art and music: 46 tracks in all. I tried to cover everything: the early 80s postpunk era, when Ballard’s influence was at its zenith; the found-sound sound art that echoes themes of urban degradation in Ballard’s work; recent Ballardian stuff such as Burial and kode9; the mid-90s world music strain; title and incidental music from Ballard film and TV adaptations, including all the obscure productions; the late 90s indie homages … even JGB’s Desert Island Disc selections.' -- Simon Sellars

Playlist, Muxtape (featuring 12 of the 46 tracks), and more information




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Visual Art Inspired by Ballard




Mike Bonsall 'Day of Creation'


Ana Barrado'Future Ruins'


various


Ann Lislegaard 'Crystal World'


Michelle Lord 'Future Ruins'


Ana Barrado 'Extraterrestial Tikis'


Ana Barrado 'Roman Girl Statue'

The Non-Attendee

J.G. Ballard BBC profile (36:31)

'J.G. Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.' -- Stuart Wavell, Sunday Times

'Apparently Ballard's cancer has spread from the prostrate to his spine and ribcage, and has Ballard placed himself in the care of one the leading cancer specialists who has made Ballard’s last few years as painless as possible, enabling him to embark on what may well be his last book. Although the author appears characteristically optimistic I fear that the recent cancellation of public events to promote his new work implies a worsening of his condition. Sadly he may not have much longer…' -- Phil Huntley, Ballardian

Excerpt:

To return to Shanghai, for the first time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy. (cont.)
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