In fact, Ballard admits that at one stage he thought he’d like to be a painter, but he found that he was better at conjuring images with words than with brushes. “I think I always was a frustrated painter,” he said in a 1975 interview. “They are all paintings, really, my novels and stories.” The author even went so far as to declare, “When I start painting I shall stop writing!” 6 Yet Ballard did produce some works of visual art. In addition to collages, an unrealised billboard project, pseudo advertisements and his typographically arresting micro-stories, Ballard occasionally used the gallery as a laboratory in which to experiment with literary ideas. This strategy can be seen in the early 1970s performance piece he organised in which a stripper named Euphoria Bliss performed a striptease to the reading of a scientific paper. As Ballard says it was “an example of the fusion of science and pornography that The Atrocity Exhibition expected to take place in the near future.” 7 In 1970 Ballard decided to stage an exhibition of crashed cars in order to test a hypothesis he was formulating about the unconscious erotic potential of the car crash. Three mutilated vehicles were displayed like sculptures at the New Arts Laboratory in London and Ballard hired a topless woman to interview visitors. According to Ballard, the response was overwhelmingly negative and the already damaged cars were vandalised. “There was a huge tension in the air,” he says, “as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring.” Encouraged by the outrage caused by this exhibition, which Ballard described as “a psychological test disguised as an art show,” the writer began work on his novel, Crash.8 Ballard’s Crash started as an exhibition, then became a novel in 1973. In 2010 it went full circle and became an exhibition again. Crash: Homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian Gallery in London focused on Ballard as both artist and muse.9 In Crash (the exhibition), Richard Prince’s sculpture Elvis, 2008, a car stripped of all utility and reduced to pure fetish, captured the kinky ethos of the novel perfectly. It may or may not have been made as a direct response to the novel, but Charissa Terranova argues convincingly in her 2014 book, Automotive Prosthetic, that Ballard and Prince share a “technophilic” sensibility. She also provides compelling evidence of the artist’s obsession with the writer, citing the fact that Prince fabricated a 1989 interview between Ballard and himself and then used this fictional exchange as a foundational myth in his own autobiographical story.10 Elsewhere in the show Prince used actual copies of Crash (the novel). Other international artists who have engaged directly with Ballard’s material include Turner prize winner Roger Hiorns, whose copper sulphate encrusted car engines seem to be the product of an unholy union between Ballard’s novels Crash and The Crystal World;11 Ann Lislegaard who has made several videos which respond to sci-fi novels including Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard), 2006; Ed Ruscha who lifted text directly from Crash in his painting Fountain of Crystal, 2009; and Tacita Dean who made a film JG, 2013, inspired by her personal correspondence with Ballard. And many more artists have made works that can be loosely classified as Ballardian, perhaps most notably the American land artist Robert Smithson’s masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, 1970.12
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