JG Ballard expert Rick McGrath reports on a Ballard exhibition to be held at Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona from July 2007 (they’ve resisted the temptation to call it ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’). Have a look at the PDF of the exhibition catalogue (it says 2006 but it’s been rescheduled to next year) — it sounds like it’ll be a thorough overview. Rick’s even shipping over some of his rare JGB editions to Barcelona for inclusion.
It’s about time our man got the treatment. From the catalogue:
“A truly visionary writer, 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”.
‘Aseptic anti-utopia’? I’ve not heard that one before…
Curated by Jordi Costa, the exhibition layout is sectioned into nine:
1) What I Believe — Cataloguing JGB’s list of obsessions (Princess Di’s body odours; the Next Five Minutes etc), derived from his published piece ‘What I Believe’.
2) From Shanghai to Shepperton — biographical material and analysis.
3) Landscapes of Dreams — surrealist and visual art influences in JGB’s work.
4) Inner Space — Ballard’s distance from technological, ‘hard’ SF.
5) Disaster Area — Ballard’s embracing of the apocalypse and its transformative power.
6) Symbols — derived from David Pringle’s writings on JGB, and looking at Ballard’s “four essential symbols: water, sand, cement and glass” and his “obsessive images: empty swimming pools, comets, old aeroplanes, desolate places…”.
7) Technology & Pornography — with a big Crash and Cronenberg focus, of course.
8) Vermilion Sands: Utopia — explores Ballard’s “capacity to address light with as much genius as he reveals when engulfed by darkness”. Fair enough — I never thought of Ballard as a ‘dark’ writer anyway. The humour and playfulness in his work is often overlooked, and this sounds like it might explore that aspect.
9) Asepsis & Neo-Barbarism — “middle-class suburbs as a hotbed of chaos”. Not round these parts, they’re not (but I take their point).
So there you have it…all the obvious bases are covered: Shanghai, Crash, S&M, the ‘burbs, Cronenberg, Princess Di, drained swimming pools, surrealism. What about dead astronauts? We’ll see.
The exhibition does sound intriguing, but I wonder what will actually be on display. Crashed cars? Bondage masks? A pad of pubic hair from Princess Di’s corpse? Six detachable mouths? A set of non-chafe orifices? A torn anal detrusor muscle? Slides of vaginal smears? Well, I’m just speculating, here. I don’t have any more details, but I’ll hit Rick and the curators up for more info and report back.