Ballardian – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 17

Aladdin Sane (1973). Cover photo by Brian Duffy who died this week.

• Among the obituaries this week: artist Louise Bourgeois; poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky; film director Joseph Strick, a man who dared to film James Joyce’s Ulysses; photographer Brian Duffy.

• The dustbin of art history: “Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project—and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence.” Admirable sentiments but galleries and dealers have far too much invested in the corrupt edifice to let it collapse any time soon.

• Edinburgh film festival to screen ‘lost and forgotten’ British movies including the director’s cut of Jerry Cornelius film The Final Programme.

Delectable Bawdville burlesque boy Chris “Go-Go” Harder. Via EVB who have more pics.

• Homobody by Rio Safari, “a scrappy diy zine about queerness”. Obliquely related: Lizzy the Lezzie, animations at the Sundance Channel.

• Richard Norris aka Time and Space Machine puts together a psychedelic mixtape for FACT. Fab stuff.

• Diamanda Galás has a message for critics: “Stick to reviewing plant life and leave the Witches alone.”

• Brion Gysin: Dream Machine will be the first US survey of Gysin’s work in NYC next month.

• Geeta Dayal’s study of Another Green World by Brian Eno reviewed at Ballardian.

• For type-heads: font anatomy wallpaper by Sigurdur Armannsson.

• If it was my home: visualising the BP oil disaster.

• Antony Gormley’s Breathing Room III.

• The Paris Review has a new blog.

• Bizarre juxtaposition of the week: John Martyn’s sublime Small Hours with, er… The Clangers.

Weekend links 1

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the AIDS awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format‘s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The random circles no doubt relate to those which the doomed Stevie Verloc occupies his time in drawing. More at Caustic Cover Critic.

• Artspeak? It’s complicated. Jon Canter at The Guardian makes a blazingly obvious point which few in the art world would ever admit: that the specious pronouncements of many galleries and contemporary artists are the worst kind of bullshit.

• I helped judge the Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition whose winners were announced last week.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook enjoys Neu! and Wendy Carlos.

• Nuit Blanche, a short film by Spy Films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Drowned worlds

Hollywood at Night (2006).

Alexis Rockman‘s paintings of swamped or ruined American landmarks present views which are a novelty in contemporary art galleries whilst being very familiar to science fiction readers. Many of these could well be illustrations for JG Ballard’s 1981 novel, Hello America, which imagined a depopulated United States reclaimed by flora and fauna. Others would suit The Drowned World, of course, and they bear favourable comparison with Dick French’s illustrated edition (below) which was also published in 1981.

Gateway Arch (2005).

Rockman’s hothouse atmospheres remind me of earlier paintings of Brazilian wildlife by another American artist, Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), many of whose tropical landscapes only require a distant ruin or two to match Rockman’s work. (Tip via Design Observer.)

The Drowned World by Dick French (1981).

While we’re on the subject, Ballardian has posted the first of three features about my colleagues at Savoy Books, beginning with a Michael Butterworth interview which discusses some of Ballard’s connections with Savoy. One of the subsequent posts should see yours truly discussing the visual dimension of the Savoy world. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The coming of the dust
• Ballard and the painters

The coming of the dust

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from a Red Dust Flickr gallery. The Other Andrew writes about the inundation on his blog. I’m looking forward now to the reaction of another Sydney Melbourne resident, Simon Sellars, who runs Ballardian.

Update: The Red Sydney Project—Dust Storm Days

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Apocalypse now

The art of Michael Dotson

Dream House #3 (2009).

Many of Michael Dotson‘s vivid acrylic paintings would make good illustrations for JG Ballard books or for some of his more hallucinatory short stories. Not all of these stylised urban landscapes and empty sports arenas have the requisite latent menace to be truly Ballardian but the anomalous black pyramid in Dream House #3 carries a weight of sinister implication. Pseunami (2005), meanwhile, depicts a vibrantly abstracted catastrophe.

Via Core 77.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ballard and the painters
• AVAF at Mao Mag