WHITFORD: Jim, were you aware of the Independent Group while it was going on?
BALLARD: I remember going to the This is Tomorrow exhibition in 1956, a long, long time ago. But if that show were to be mounted now I think it would be as fresh and as revolutionary in many ways. I think you have to give pop painters every credit for what they did. They liberated the external environment, perceived it at first glance. But now I think we need to look at the external environment at second glance and look beyond the worlds of consumer goods and mass iconography. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you?
PAOLOZZI: Well, you know the bombs at the Tate are my answer to the Brillo boxes.
BALLARD: To go to the Whitechapel in 1956 and to see my experience of the real world being commented upon, played back to me with all kinds of ironic gestures, that was tremendously exciting. I could really recreate the future, that was the future, not the past. And abstract expressionism struck me as being about yesterday, was profoundly retrospective, profoundly passive, and it wasn’t serious. Why I became a science fiction writer – of marginal interest – was because the future was clearly better and the past was clearly worse. Abstract expressionism didn’t share the overlapping, jostling vocabularies of science, technology, advertising the new realms of communication. This is Tomorrow came on a year before the flight of the first Sputnik, but the technologies that launched the Space Age were already underpinning the consumer-goods society in those days. How much of this did abstract expressionism represent? If an art doesn’t embrace the whole terrain, all four horizons, it’s worth nothing.
WHITFORD: The other day I inferred from something you said that, in your view, visual artists now more often produce relevant statements than writers do, that the fine arts today seem curiously more able to find metaphors for contemporary life than poets or novelists. Is this fair enough?
BALLARD: In the fine arts there was a major revolution somewhere about 1860 and in the field of literature that revolution hasn’t yet taken place. There’s a consciousness in English life that we also lack, a missing revolution here, too, which would have redefined the landscape. The fact is that the main tradition in the fine arts for the last fifty years at least has been the tradition of the new. The main pressure on the sculptor or painter is the pressure of the new. The new to the new. But in literature the main tradition is the tradition of the old. Where Eduardo and his fellow painters and sculptors are expected to find something new to say, my fellow writers and myself are expected to find something old, and to go on saying it. And nothing alerts, will strike terror into the ear of a publisher, so much as the word ‘experimental’. And the next most alarming word is ‘new’.
You see, the novel, despite what appears to be the technical advance of Joyce or William Burroughs, the novel is basically an early nineteenth-century structure. The writer still sees himself in the role of an Academy painter producing historical paintings. The sort of revolution achieved by the Impressionists, limited simply to its effect on the choice of subject matter, has not yet been achieved in literature. I mean, no one is yet writing like Corot painted, if you see the connection. Most writers see themselves in the same role as Homer. They’re telling the story of how it happened.
PAOLOZZI: I think Ballard’s subject matter and mine touch at certain points. We’re both involved with the encounter with machines, and we’re both involved with forcing people to look and with preventing them from escaping from certain facts. I don’t want to make prints that will help people to escape from the terrible world. I want to remind them.
WHITFORD: The imaginations of you both are obviously stimulated, excited to an unusual degree, by all aspects of technology, and yet, it seems to me, the vast majority of us haven’t the imagination to cope with the enormous riches which technology has conferred on us. For example, when a satellite was first used to beam TV from one continent to another for the general public someone somewhere had a brainwave. Let’s use this previously undreamed-of facility to create a truly wonderful programme. But was the imagination up to it? Not at all. In the face of all that awe-inspiring technology, the switches, batteries, angles, circuits all working like magic, all they could think up was to show the first tram leaving Sydney depot at 4.30 in the morning, a baseball match from San Francisco and the Beatles in the studio in London singing a song they’d composed specially for the occasion. It was all live, of course, but it might just as well have been on film. They could have saved themselves all the trouble. Here is a classic example of how the imagination has failed to keep pace with the possibilities afforded by technology of all kinds.
PAOLOZZI: This is quite true. I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life on that premise. A lot of people who are actually manipulating the mass media are curiously undereducated. And the media are such tremendously well-made machines, like warfare, which also has a tremendous amount of money spent on it, and the machinery protects the inefficient, the amateurish, because there are so many compensatory devices. So that the bad photographer will be rescued by the art editor, the incompetent interviewer rescued by the man on the cutting-room floor.
BALLARD: Another example: I believe the space programme, both Russian and American, has failed to excite the public imagination in real terms, and I think this may also have something to do with missed opportunities by the mass media. To have been alive, to have watched Armstrong as his foot landed on the surface of the moon … yet the effect on people’s imaginations was nil. Now why? I think you’re getting a sort of radical social classification into two groups of people: those who work within modern science and technology and modern communications, who actually appreciate what’s going on, and those who are outside it. And we are just members of the studio audience. We are watching the acrobats but have absolutely no understanding. We are like a charabanc party that’s arrived by mistake at Sadler’s Wells and are watching a ballet we don’t understand. But I think it’s the role of the artist to connect the two. His subject matter is no longer the world of manner and the world of ordinary appearances. He has to illuminate the real world for the ordinary person, the new world which technology and communications have created.
WHITFORD: But what is this reality? Our experience of the world is now so often at second hand, has been processed and reprocessed by many kinds of high- and-low definition reproduction methods, so that what we often take to be the reality is simply the distorted reflection of it. What I’m trying to say is something like this: a hi-fi enthusiast who knows his Beethoven only from records is likely to be disappointed when he finally hears Beethoven live. The pianist makes mistakes, the audience coughs, he gets all kinds of things not on recordings which turns the whole thing into a totally different kind of experience. Or when people see a Van Eyck in a high-quality reproduction and then see the original they can quite easily prefer the photograph. And I think that Eduardo is especially strong in exporting the subtle changes that occur, almost accidentally, from one translation into another medium. So that in the Olivetti etchings you get the original, which is a photograph reproduced in a newspaper, which is then blown up in a new photograph, retouched, and then etched, and there is a dialogue at the time between the image and the medium into which it’s being transferred.
PAOLOZZI: It’s got to the point where I would rather have a carpet made to look like the Mona Lisa than the real thing. It’s got to that. But a multitude of experiences, of simultaneous happenings often of very disparate kinds, is a very twentieth-century thing. You watch Apollo taking off on a TV in a bar in San Francisco then go round the corner to have your shoes shined by a topless shoeshine girl. These kinds of ironical juxtapositions happen in life all the time. But what we do know is that – and there are many good funny films about this – the mass media demolish experience, negate real experience. You know, in the crowded underground train everyone’s reading the Standard with headlines like ‘20,000 dead’. Any of these large human