SF-TH Inc

Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard

Author(s): Roger Luckhurst
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (July 2010), pp. 338-341
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25746425
Accessed: 16-04-2017 18:52 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies

This content downloaded from 190.18.246.193 on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:52:52 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 338 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 37 (2010)

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE

Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard. The leading private gallery Gagosian held an
impressive exhibition in memory of the author J.G. Ballard at their King's Cross
London space this spring (11 February -1 April 2010). The show was organized
with the full participation of Clare Walsh, Ballard's surviving partner, and Fay
and Bea Ballard, his daughters, and brought together the work of over fifty major
artists. Ballard died in April 2009, and the speedy appearance of this exhibition
shows both the depth of feeling in reaction to his death and the nimbleness of a
powerful private gallery in opening up its space for this homage. Public galleries
have to plan years ahead, and small private galleries in a recession have to think
about profits: Gagosian is a big enough brand to give six weeks over to a non
commercial show.
A previous exhibition on Ballard and art, organized in 2008 at the Centre de
Cultura Contempor?nia de Barcelona and titled "Autopsy of the New
Millennium," has already established Ballard's importance to the visual arts. In
a crucial way, however, the Gagosian show has been the first to test how enduring
Ballard's reputation will be, how his extraordinary work will henceforth be
framed, and how we will grasp the meanings of the adjective "Ballardian."
The exhibition had its highs and lows, mixing the expected and inspired in
equal parts. Press reviews in England were mixed. The entire space of Gagosian's
large gallery, located in an old industrial building near King's Cross station, was
given over to the exhibition, which filled a large lobby area and three substantial
rooms. The sense of ambition was announced in the first found object
encountered in the lobby, the life-size front undercarriage assembly of a Boeing
747, which forms part of Adam McEwen's installation, Honda Team Facial. The
first room was centered on Richard Prince's Elvis, a shell of a car mounted on a
pedestal; and it was possible to pass into the second room through Mike Nelson's
Triple Bluff Canyon installation, a constructed lobby space of studied and
menacing banality, with a proliferation of false doors and fire exits. The third
room was darkened to allow the video projection of the Wilson sisters' video
piece, Proton Launchpad, and to let Mike Kelley's glorious table-top resin
sculptures (each called City and inspired by readings of Ballard's The Crystal
World [1966]) glow in the half-light. The catalogue listed another 170 individual
paintings or photographs. These included major iconic pieces with a breathtaking
range and depth: the Surrealists Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, and Paul Delvaux,
the Pop Artists Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, and
contemporary works by such international figures as Gerhard Richter and Damien
Hirst. It was impressive indeed to bring such major works together at such speed,
many so patently and complexly in dialogue with Ballard's work.
Without chronological sequencing or any discernable thematic organization
(and with no wall-mounted labeling), viewers were forced into parsing this visual
array with their own resources. One route through the rooms was to pick out those
artists who strongly influenced Ballard. A perfectly chosen Giorgio de Chirico
painting (Piazza d'Italia con Arianna), a late Delvaux (Le Canap? Bleu), a single

This content downloaded from 190.18.246.193 on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:52:52 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE 339

Man Ray photograph, and small etchings by Dali and Bellmer neatly covered the
array of Surrealist inspiration in Ballard's early stories and disaster fictions from
the 1960s. Similarly, Richard Hamilton's proto-Pop Hers is a Lush Situation and
Francis Bacon's Still Life, Broken Statue and Shadow each hinted at some of the
postwar English developments that Ballard sought out in the era when Modernist
abstraction was being codified as approved taste. Another grouping features
artists of the same generation as Ballard: sharing the same historical and aesthetic
pressures, they can be seen as working in uncanny parallel with the distinctive
vision of Ballard's fiction. In the lobby were several prints by a friend of
Ballard's, the formative Pop Artist Eduardo Paolozzi. They look like blueprints
for The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a book Ballard sometimes dreamed of
presenting on advertising hoardings. Both men shared the same collage aesthetic,
using the same materials from American popular culture. Malcolm Morley's The
Age of Disaster has a similar Ballardian sensibility.
Scattered through the exhibition were samples of the American Pop Art that
Ballard responded to so strongly: Ray Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed
Ruscha. The curators evidently hoped to convey thematic resonances in each
piece, but with some selections the choices felt forced. Ruscha's late Fountain of
Crystal relies on a literal echo, where his earlier monumental celebrations of Los
Angeles architectural landscapes are the more obvious point of parallel with
Ballard. Warhol's Death and Disaster series is another uncanny parallel project
from the 1960s, although the showing of just one screen-print canvas, Green
Disaster, fails to work on its own: serial repetition is the whole point of both
Warhol's project and Ballard's found-fictions in The Atrocity Exhibition.
Meanwhile, Helmut Newton' s nudes, three images from the mid-1970s of models
in leg-casts or plastic neck-braces for spinal injuries, could just as well have been
interleaved as illustrations to Crash. This does not mean that they are any good:
one can be fairly sure Newton possessed none of the "terminal irony" that Ballard
deployed in this arena.
A more complex group to assess was the contemporary art presented by
Gagosian as registering the influence of Ballard. There are undoubtedly some
contemporary artists who are steeped in Ballard, or in a hazier way share an
interest in the Ballardian. Dan Holdsworth's photographs of empty urban
freeways, service zones, and shopping malls have always been inconceivable
without Ballard. Douglas Gordon's interests similarly overlap with Ballard's:
here, images of Jayne Mansfield and James Dean, their faces burnt out and
replaced with silver, work through the matrix of Ballard's fiction of the 1970s.
Roger Hiorns has for the last few years been transmogrifying objects with fast
growing copper sulphate crystals. This exhibition included his car engine dipped
in the solution, but it was really a stand-in for Seizure, his recent site-specific
work in London, which transformed a whole abandoned public housing flat into
an environment that got very close to imagining the wonderland of The Crystal
World. Tacita Dean's films and photographs of abandoned architectures or her
mixed-media meditations on the life of Donald Crowhurst (a Ballardian figure if
ever there was one, a fantasist who began faking his position in a round-the-world
yacht race and eventually committed suicide with the last message, "It is the

This content downloaded from 190.18.246.193 on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:52:52 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 340 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 37 (2010)

mercy") are another instance of directly shared obsessions; sadly, there was space
for only one photograph from a project Ballard had reviewed favorably. Jane and
Louise Wilson, who mount complex split-screen video explorations of abandoned
technological sites (such as nuclear facilities, Cold War bunkers, and rusting
space-race technologies in America and Russia), choose locations emblematic of
modern and future ruins, an important subset of the Ballardian sensibility.
Yet many of the works included in Crash did not fit quite so well and risked
dispersing the focus of the exhibition. The problems began at the front door with
McEwen' s Honda Team Facial, this brute chunk of a 747. The piece is crushingly
obvious in every sense and revealed a painful literalism in running with the shock
possibilities of the sex, death, and technological matrix of Ballard's Crash (1973).
More broadly, the exhibition need not have been organized around Ballard's most
notorious book, but the curators took the line of least resistance in going for
controversy, prompting a strand of literal car-crash art and also bringing out the
worst in superficial bad-boy celebrations of nihilism and visual pornography.
Damien Hirst, having shown in this Gagosian space several times, gets two bites
of the cherry: the juvenile When Logics Die installation (documentary
photographs of catastrophic head injuries above an autopsy table) and the simply
incompetent painting of Suicide Bomber (Aftermath), depicting a damaged car
smeared with blood. Elsewhere, in the lobby, Jake and Dinos Chapman continued
their exercise in taking major art and scrawling their minor graffiti over it by
issuing a limited edition of the novel Crash, the text chewed up as if by a virus
or terrible software transfer. The novel, thoroughly interfered with and re
functioned as art object, becomes BangWallop by J & D Ballard and is piled in
a block of a thousand copies, your very own edition to take away for ?20. Other
works seemed lazily included because they were concerned with sex and
prosthesis: among these were photographs by Cindy Sherman, John Hilliard, and
Jemima Stehli. Some were vaguely science fictional, such as a vast painting by
Glenn Brown and a conceptual installation by Cerith Wyn Evans. Brown's
elaborate pastiche of a Chris Foss sf cover from the 1970s had little to do with
Ballard and much more to do with the fact that he has had successful shows at
Gagosian in recent years. I developed a mildly bitter taste at this strategic placing
of Gagosian clients in the exhibition.
A final group included works inserted mysteriously, without any obvious
connection to the exhibition theme. I was not clear why paintings by Jenny
Saville or George Shaw or photographs by Cyprien Gaillard were included. There
could be fewer Carsten H?ller sculptures in the world. That last untenable
grouping left me thinking about what was missing. Ballard's fictions of the 1960s
have truly extraordinary affinities with the found-footage films of the San
Francisco artist Bruce Conner, but these were absent?the moving image was
almost entirely absent. There was a mutual exchange of influence between
Ballard and Robert Smithson that deserves exploration. The Ballardian spaces of
empty modernity have been captured by the New German Photography, but there
was nothing from Bernd and Hilla Bechers or Andreas Gursky. There was also
no acknowledgment of another very English line of visionary painters from

This content downloaded from 190.18.246.193 on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:52:52 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE 341

William Blake to Stanley Spencer, vital influences on the lush imaginings of

Ballard's Unlimited Dream Company (1979).
This exhibition was admittedly only a first attempt at assessing the cultural
significance of Ballard's work; more will probably follow by art, architectural,
and cinema curators. A limited-edition catalogue was put together by Gagosian
at the eye-watering price of ?65: this will be reviewed in SFS by Joanne
Murray.?Roger Luckhurst, University of London
The Short Career of Calvin M. Knox. Calvin M. Knox first appeared on the sf
scene in 1958, writing book reviews for the British magazine Science Fiction
Adventures and stories in such short-lived pulps as Original Science Fiction
Stories and Super Science Fiction. In 1958, half of an Ace Double, Lest We
Forget Thee Earth, which consisted of three novelettes, was Knox's first book.
This was followed a year later by The Plot Against Earth, also part of an Ace
Double. Knox did not publish again until 1964?another Ace Double titled One
of Our Asteroids is Missing. And then he disappeared?the name, at least, if not
the writer. For Calvin M. Knox was one of Robert Silverberg's many pen names.
Silverberg has explained to fans at conventions and on his Yahoo Group, "The
Worlds of Robert Silverberg," that the pseudonym was created when fellow sf
writer Judith Merril told him that he would never sell to John Campbell at
Astounding Science Fiction with a "Jewish-sounding" last name. This inspired
Silverberg to come up with the most Protestant name he could conjure: Calvin M.
Knox. Knox sold to Campbell.
From 1959 to 1965, the sf and crime pulp markets were in decline. Silverberg
focused instead on softcore erotic novels written under the names Don Elliott,
John Dexter, David Chall?n, Mark Ryan, and Loren Beauchamp; these were
published by Nightstand, Bedtime, and Midwood Books. He also produced faux
sexology studies writing as L.T. Woodward, M.D. (Belmont and Monarch
Books), and as Walter Drummond he wrote a biography of the Marquis de Sade
and a self-help guide on managing money. (Regency Books, edited by Harlan
Ellison, was Drummond's publisher.) Under his own name, Silverberg also wrote
a series of archeology and history titles for young readers.
Like many sf authors, Silverberg would use a pen name to disguise his
production of multiple stories for a single magazine. In such cases, Silverberg
often used Ziff-Davis house-names such as Ivar Jorgensen. He utilized some half
dozen pen names for Imagination SF, for which he often wrote entire issues
because he had a $500-a-month contract to mass produce fiction.
Knox was not a completely secret faux-identity. Writing as Knox, Silverberg
published a short story, "The Silent Invaders," in the October 1958 issue of
Infinity Science Fiction, but in 1963 he expanded the story into a novel for Ace
under his real name. A year later, One of our Asteroids is Missing was
Silverberg's farewell publication under Knox, a pen name that had served him
well.?Michael Hemmingson, University of California, San Diego
2010-11 Mullen Fellows Announced. The second annual R.D. Mullen Research
Fellows have been selected. The fellowship is funded by SFS in honor of our late
founding editor to support archival research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of

This content downloaded from 190.18.246.193 on Sun, 16 Apr 2017 18:52:52 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms