When people travel, have more experiences and meet more people, they tend to have more sexual experience – as they would have more meals. I feel that so-called normal sexuality (if there ever was such a thing), i.e. heterosexual relationships oriented around genital sex of a reproductive character, which sustained people through most of their adult lives in the past, will probably in future be exhausted within a few years. People may well go through a phase of their young lives, say their late teens and early twenties, when their sex lives take place in genital terms and they have children, but that will be the adolescent stage. One’s real puberty will be reached when one moves into the area of, let’s say, conceptualised sex, when sex is between you and a machine, or between you and an idea.
BARBER: When sex becomes so totally detached from any genital procedure, it surely ceases to be sex and just means pleasure. In those terms, food is sex.
BALLARD: Exactly. The analogy is with food. Apart from economic and minor religious obstacles, there’s been unlimited freedom to explore every avenue and byway imaginable, and some of the greatest delicacies world cuisine can offer couldn’t be farther removed from the basic nutritional requirements of the human body. I’m talking about frogs’ legs, bird’s nest soup, etc. Eventually, conventional sex is the first of the new perversions. Just as you would think it odd to meet an intelligent adult who ate tapioca three times a day, though nutritionally it’s perfectly sound (and it’s the staple diet of the Polynesians), so I think in future we’ll regard people who only have conventional sex as odd. People will begin to explore all the side streets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually – there won’t be any kind of compulsion to become, let’s say, a high-heel fetishist – which is a monomaniac impulse. Just as recipes are now given on TV for making a veal escalope, so in twenty years’ time TV will offer nightly new sexual experiments and deviations, and we’ll put them into practice. Sex won’t take place in the bed, necessarily – it’ll take place in the head. And in a sense the head is a much richer place than the bed. Well, it is!
1971: Frank Whitford. Speculative Illustrations: Eduardo Paolozzi in Conversation with J.G. Ballard
Originally published in Studio International, 182: 937, October 1971
Ballard enjoyed a lifelong friendship with artist Eduardo Paolozzi, stimulating some of his most memorable writing. Like many foundation stones in his career, the connection stemmed from New Worlds. Just after Moorcock had taken charge of the magazine, positioning Ballard as his star writer, he wanted to broaden the scope by including articles about visual arts. Ballard knew that Paolozzi was interested in science fiction, got in touch and visited his studio with Moorcock. Paolozzi then became a contributor to New Worlds. Later, when Ballard became prose editor of Martin Bax’s Ambit magazine, he and Bax recruited Paolozzi into the fold.
Ballard had long admired Paolozzi’s work. In 1956, the year he published his first professional short story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, he attended the ground-breaking This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, an event widely seen as the birth of pop art. The show featured teams of architects, painters and sculptors building ‘environments’ around their ideas of what the future might hold, and Paolozzi was in a team with artist Nigel Henderson and architects Peter and Alison Smithson. Ballard was struck by the exhibition’s focus on the consumer landscape and the surface texture of supermarkets and advertising, which he saw as the kind of everyday material that science fiction should be concerned with. Paolozzi’s work left a lasting impression on him, and he rhapsodised about ‘Paolozzi’s great early sculptures … and his brilliantly original screen-prints’. Ballard sensed a kindred spirit in the artist, who would wander around scrapyards looking for industrial detritus to use in his work, reassembling it into what Ballard called ‘these Easter Island totems made of machine parts … somewhere between circuitry and organics, a hybrid’.
Ballard and Paolozzi share certain obsessions: the mystery and symbolism of technology, and its almost sentient nature; surrealism and the nature of reality; violence as catharsis. In this fascinating conversation, chaired by art critic Frank Whitford, they touch upon these subjects, and express respect for each other’s work. The original interview started with Whitford explaining that he ‘began by putting it to Ballard that both he and Paolozzi are working within a surrealist tradition, a tradition which, especially in [England], has never been taken very seriously’. [SS]
BALLARD: There’s something about surrealism which touched the whole Puritan conscience. It’s a variety of symbolism, I suppose, a twentieth-century variety using psychoanalysis as its main language. And if you accept as a definition of a symbol that it represents something which the mind tries to shield itself from you can understand why people in puritanical northern Europe and North America have always been uneasy in the face, not just of surrealism, but of symbolism as a whole. What sort of incursion into the imaginative life of all the arts in England and North America have the symbolist poets made – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jarry and so on. Almost none. And the surrealists get the same treatment. But I don’t see myself working in a surrealist tradition at all because surrealism was like Hollywood in a sense, was a one-generation movement. You can refer to the surrealists in connection with my own fiction, but I certainly don’t use the basic techniques of surrealism, automatic writing, for instance.
PAOLOZZI: I wouldn’t quarrel with the use of the word surrealism in my case because, after all, it’s the reason I went to Paris, to see the surrealists. Any book on surrealism excites me still. I don’t mind trying to extend the tradition. It’s easier for me to identify with that tradition than to allow myself to be described by some term, invented by others, called ‘pop’, which immediately means that you dive into a barrel of Coca-Cola bottles. What I like to think I’m doing is an extension of radical surrealism.
BALLARD: Surrealism took one of its main inspirations from psychoanalysis, accepted the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. But one, the world of the mind, is largely ruled by the laws of fictions, by one’s dreams, visions, impressions and so on, and the whole idea of the unconscious as a narrative stage. Surrealism moulds the two worlds together, remakes the external world of reality in terms of the internal world of fantasy and fictions. Now what has happened, and one reason why there are really no surrealist painters in the true sense of the term today, is that this position has been reversed. It’s the external world which is now the realm, the paramount realm, of fantasy. And it’s the internal world of the mind which is the one node of reality that most of us have. The fiction is all out there. You can’t overlay your own fiction on top of that. You’ve got to use, I think, a much more analytic technique than the synthetic technique of the surrealists. Eduardo does this in his graphics. He’s approaching the subject matter of the present day exactly like the scientist on safari, looking at the landscape, testing, putting sensors out, charting various parameters.
The environment is filled with more fiction and fantasy than any of us can singly isolate. It’s no longer necessary for us individually to dream. This completely cuts the ground from under all the tenets of classical surrealism. Why I admire Eduardo is because he’s making within the span of his own lifetime as an adult sculpture and graphic art which is a complete turnabout. I mean that he’s accommodated himself to this change. From his early sculpture, where he was using the technique appropriate at the time of overlaying an external reality, the world of nuts-and-bolts technology, with his own fantasies, he’s gone round now to the opposite position. He is now analysing external fictions.
WHITFORD: And yet, Eduardo, you think that although it’s all out there in the external world it takes a creative leap in order to recognise what’s out there, and that the majority of people don’t recognise, or are incapable of recognising, precisely what is there to be seen unless it’s