Paolozzi & Ballard - two giants of the UK's art/literary scene - yes, you know - so I was thinking about them today in relation to reading Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G.Ballard 1967-2008. It's a great collection which features a discussion between Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Frank Whitford from 1971. You can read it here.
Growing out of and influenced by (in the case of Ballard) the UK's 50s scene of Pop/Science hybridisation (This Is Tomorrow) they contributed to/worked for Ambit magazine and became friends. Both felt the effects of Surrealism and if Ballard's suburban brand showed obvious signs Paolozzi's was, perhaps, more subtle, yet in his hybrid sculptures and image juxtapositions, like Ballards inner space landscapes, do somehow bear the marks of Parisian dreamworld experiments of the 30s.
The flip side to all that hippy excess of the 60s Ballard, like Burroughs in America, was a rebel in straight clothing, offering his own alternate visions whilst maintaining an entirely respectable demeanour. Nice middle-class man. Well-spoken but capable of an extreme literary shock such as Crash.
I've used a few of Ballard's short story titles for my art. Here, for instance, is a print called Concentration City, landscaped here whereas the original was portrait..
The flip side to all that hippy excess of the 60s Ballard, like Burroughs in America, was a rebel in straight clothing, offering his own alternate visions whilst maintaining an entirely respectable demeanour. Nice middle-class man. Well-spoken but capable of an extreme literary shock such as Crash.
I've used a few of Ballard's short story titles for my art. Here, for instance, is a print called Concentration City, landscaped here whereas the original was portrait..
You can look at Ballard's classic text/image collage in New Worlds magazine on my other blog here
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