PAOLOZZI: Yes, I keep thinking about that. But I’m also thinking about the way in which reality surpasses the fictions of even the wildest imagination. Like the machine for milking a rat. Incredible, yet it actually exists.
WHITFORD: But people are curiously unable, aren’t they, to get outside the categories which have been imposed on them from the outside. They approach art with a very different kind of mental set from that with which they approach reality. And somehow the two worlds don’t touch. Would you therefore think your role to be to take something of significance from out there and to put it in a context in which it can be appreciated with that kind of mental set?
PAOLOZZI: Well, that may be too simple. If you look at the series of etchings, the Olivetti project, the basic image remains to all intents and purposes unchanged. But the very fact of presenting it as an etching means that you have to look at this image in a much more serious way than you would if you just found it in the pages of Time or Newsweek. But it has to be a particular image; one chooses one from three thousand which one has collected over twenty years. That’s what I call normal. I try to reject the ordinary ways of making the art image. But just as, possibly, for want of a better parallel, a classical artist might have done 500 drawings based on a friend, one’s looking at 500 images involved with a kind of global situation and one’s choosing an image which acts as a metaphor for one’s particular feeling. But unless one emphasises and arranges the images into patterns of irony the point will be lost.
WHITFORD: Both of you often choose images which have to do with crashes, violence of all kinds, but particularly with car crashes. For which particular ideas or feelings does the car crash act as a metaphor?
BALLARD: Well, I don’t altogether know, and I’m glad I don’t know. I follow my hunches and obsessions and I agree with something Eduardo said the other day. That violence is probably going to play the same role in the seventies and eighties that sex played in the fifties and sixties. There’s what I call in my book The Atrocity Exhibition the death of feeling, that one’s more and more alienated form any kind of direct response to experience.
Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of fingertip and nerve ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertise is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch where violence is just a style.
Just over a year ago I put on an exhibition of crashed cars, what I called new sculpture, at the New Arts Lab. And I had three cars brought to the gallery. It was very easy to mount the show because the technology of moving cars around is highly developed. A crashed Mini, an A40 and a Pontiac which had been in a massive front-end collision, a Pontiac from that last grand period of American automobile styling, around the mid-fifties. Huge flared tail-fins and a maximum of iconographic display. And I had an opening party at the gallery. I’d never seen 100 people get drunk so quickly. Now this has something to do with the cars on display. I also had a topless girl interviewing people on closed-circuit TV so that people could see themselves being interviewed around the crashed cars by this topless girl. This was clearly too much. I was the only sober person there. Wine was poured over the crashed cars, glasses were broken, the topless girl was nearly raped in the back seat of the Pontiac by some self-aggrandising character. The show went on for a month. In that time they came up against massive hostility of every kind. The cars were attacked, widows ripped off. Those windows that weren’t broken already were smashed. One of the cars was upended, another splashed with white paint.
Now the whole thing was a speculative illustration of a scene in The Atrocity Exhibition. I had speculated in my book about how the people might behave. And in the real show the guests at the party and the visitors later behaved in pretty much the way I had anticipated. It was not so much an exhibition of sculpture as almost of experimental psychology, using the medium of the fine art show. People were unnerved, you see. There was enormous hostility.
PAOLOZZI: But you didn’t predict the acts of aggression against the crashed cars.
BALLARD: That’s true. I didn’t predict the acts of aggression against the crashed cars. That’s the one thing I didn’t imagine.
WHITFORD: Eduardo’s exhibition is going to be organised, we hope, around four or five pieces of most recent sculpture, you know, the hopper, the bombs and so on. I think this is going to be tough, to make it heavy going for a lot of people. And it’s right too that artists should make it difficult for us.
BALLARD: The man in the street might not know the difference between Duchamp and anyone else but his sophistication, his appreciation of colour, forms and so on, is enormously subtle and one can almost visualise a time when the sort of separate role of the painter or sculptor is no longer necessary, when the engineer of a Boeing designs a new airliner and the shape he chooses for an engine may itself contain all the ironic and imaginative comments on itself that the specialised imagination of people like Eduardo now provides. Eduardo can now look at some technological object and in his sculpture give it that ironic and imaginative replay in which other people recognise their first perception of that object, that first blunted perception heightened and illuminated. But the day may come when his role is no longer necessary. But at present he is necessary and his graphics are concerned with the nature of the environment on a compacted and subtle level. How new techniques in microscopy or a whole range of scientific techniques are providing access for the imagination to reach into the world of modern technology and illuminate it for the imagination of other people. I mean, he is looking at very complex worlds where you need a lot of training before the doors can even be opened.
PAOLOZZI: The public’s dilemma comes from the fact that they’re still looking for objects, you see, objects in the fine-art tradition, and it’s this kind of object the public usually gets. Most of the American pop painters fit absolutely into the tradition of, say, post-Corot painting. A Liechtenstein is no more radical really than, say, a Manet. I mean, Manet completely revolutionised painting. If I can cast myself back to 1850, or whenever it was, I can see that Manet delivered a body blow to the safe and comfortable posture of the intelligent eye. How can any pop painter be said to have had that kind of impact, to have advanced beyond that?
As far as I’m concerned there’s a slight note of disillusionment with America now; the American Dream is over. I like to think that the Olivetti things take a cool look at a special kind of pornography, the pornography of human values. And in a way forcing people to look at a state they accept, like having monkeys working with computers, and also perhaps suggesting the kind of corporate image, the faceless man. That whole world of Fortune magazine, the whole business language of the American stock exchange, the faceless white-collar worker turning into a mechanical man. It’s not just technology, it’s looking with as fresh an eye as possible at the whole realm of human experience.
WHITFORD: Jim, you were suggesting earlier that the average person now is highly sophisticated when it comes to fine art, and to grasping points made visually, and I don’t think it’s true in many cases. For example, there is still very little acceptance of the ideas to which Eduardo gave general currency during Independent Group meetings all those years ago, when was it, in 1952. He still puts on slide shows of images culled from all kinds of sources similar to the ones which took up the first part of the first meeting of the IG and there’s still incomprehension, isn’t there? Things like the source material for the Olivetti project and BUNK!, which is, in fact, a series of graphics reproducing many of the images first shown at that IG meeting. There is hostility even in art schools when Eduardo gives such slide shows.
PAOLOZZI: