April 20, 2009
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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From Surreal Documents:
- From an interview with J.G. Ballard, by Graeme Revell:
- "JGB: Actually, whereas classical mythologies, classical legends, tended to be concerned with explaining origins (where the world came from, how the planets were formed, how life itself was born), I think the sort of mythologies I'm interested in (in, say, Myths of the Near Future) are concerned with ends rather than with beginnings. Certainly they're projections. The title Myths of the Near Future exactly sums up what I think a lot of present writers, musicians like yourself (as far as I can tell), filmmakers, painters like, say, Francis Bacon, are concerned with: the mythologies of the future. Not myths which will one day replace the classical legends of ancient Greece, but predictive mythologies; those which in a sense provide an operating formula by which we can deal with our passage through consciousness - our movements through time and space. These are mythologies you can actually live by: how to cope with the urban landscape, the whole series of enciphered meanings that lie half-exposed within the urban landscape, within the communications landscape we all inhibit and to some extent contribute to. I'm interested in what I think of as a radically new set of mythologies that aren't concerned with the past, even in the sense that psychoanalysis is concerned with the past...".
- J.G. Ballard, our Euripides, has passed away...
The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson[1]
Rick McGrath runs [2], a site dedicated to the work and life of J. G. Ballard.
RIP J. G. Ballard (1930 - 2009)
James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai - 19 April 2009) was a British writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash was made into film by David Cronenberg.
The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.
His work was most recently celebrated in the exhibition J. G. Ballard. Autopsy of the new millennium.
The cover of the first edition of The Atrocity Exhibition used Dali's The City of Drawers - Study for the "Anthropomorphic Cabinet" (1936)
The same picture was used by John Coulthart for Savoy's The Exploits of Engelbrecht, one of Ballard’s favourite books. He contributed a short blurb for the Savoy edition.
John Coulthart added at the time of Ballard's death that "I’ve never seen it stated thus but it’s a good bet that Ballard himself suggested the use of Surrealist art on some of his covers. The use of Max Ernst’s The Eye of Silence on The Crystal World was a perfect match."
The cover reminded me of Alan Aldridge’s poster 1 for Chelsea Girls (1966) . Aldridge must have been inspired by Dali.
Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945)
John Heartfield Hitler Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 1932.
