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The Atrocity Exhibition

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The Atrocity Exhibition The Atrocity Exhibition WITH AUTHOR'S ANNOTATIONS PUBLISHERS/EDITORS V. Vale and Andrea Juno BOOK DESIGN Andrea Juno PRODUCTION & PROOFREADING Elizabeth Amon, Laura Anders, Elizabeth Borowski, Curt Gardner, Mason Jones, Christine Sulewski CONSULTANT: Ken Werner Revised, expanded, annotated, illustrated edition. Copyright © 1990 by J. G. Ballard. Design and introduction copyright © 1990 by Re/Search Publications. Paperback: ISBN 0-940642-18-2 Limited edition of 300 autographed hardbacks: ISBN 0-940642-19-0 BOOKSTORE DISTRIBUTION: Consortium, 1045 Westgate Drive, Suite 90, Saint Paul, MN 55114-1065. TOLL FREE: 1-800-283-3572. TEL: 612-221-9035. FAX: 612-221-0124 NON-BOOKSTORE DISTRIBUTION: Last Gasp, 777 Florida Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. TEL: 415-824-6636. FAX: 415-824-1836 U.K. DISTRIBUTION: Airlift, 26 Eden Grove, London N7 8EL TEL: 071-607-5792. FAX: 071-607-6714 LETTERS, ORDERS & CATALOG REQUESTS TO: RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS SEND SASE 20ROMOLOST#B FOR SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94133 CATALOG PH (415) 362-1465 FAX (415) 362-0742 REQUESTS Printed in Hong Kong by Colorcraft Ltd. 10987654 Front Cover and all illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner Back Cover and all photographs by Ana Barrado Endpapers: "Mucous and serous acini, sublingual gland" by Phoebe Gloeckner Phoebe Gloeckner (M.A. Biomedical Communication, Univ. Texas) is an award-winning medical illustrator whose work has been published internationally. She has also won awards for her independent films and comic art, and edited the most recent issue of Wimmin's Comix published by Last Gasp. Currently she resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ana Barrado is a photographer whose work has been exhibited in Italy, Mexico City, Japan the United States. A monograph of her work was recently published by Atelier PeyotI in Tokyo. Ms. Barrado lives in New York City. CONTENTS Introduction by V. Vale and A. Juno Preface by William S. Burroughs CHAPTER 1 The Atrocity Exhibition CHAPTER 2 The University of Death CHAPTER 3 The Assassination Weapon CHAPTER 4 You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe CHAPTER 5 Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown CHAPTER 6 The Great American Nude CHAPTER 7 The Summer Cannibals CHAPTER 8 Tolerances of the Human Face CHAPTER 9 You and Me and the Continuum CHAPTER 10 Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy CHAPTER 11 Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. CHAPTER 12 Crash! CHAPTER 13 The Generations of America CHAPTER 14 Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan CHAPTER 15 The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race APPENDIX: Princess Margaret's Facelift Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty Queen Elizabeth's Rhinoplasty The Secret History of World War 3 Introduction by Andrea Juno & V. Vale The 20th Century is characterized by both vision­ name changes (Travis, Travers, Traven, Talbot) ary dreams of amazing scientific advancement (the mirror the increasing fragmentation of his exter­ Space Race; Astrophysics; the Computer Revolu­ nal environment—a backdrop of splintered mass- tion; organ transplant surgery) and nightmares of cultural icons. As Ballard commented, "Its barbarism (death camp experiments; Hiroshima; landscape is compounded of an enormous number Vietnam; serial killings). Clearly, our astounding of fictions, the fragments of the dream machine technological innovation has not been accom­ that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fic­ panied by "utopian" social progress or a sweeping tions like TV, radio, politics, the press, and adver­ elevation of individual clarity. The basic underpin­ tising. Life is an enormous novel. Today, when the nings of society seem flawed: the structural myths, fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, the goals, icons, and values; as well as the information main task of the arts seems to be more and more processing/analytic capabilities of its citizens. Just to isolate the real elements in this goulash of as their myth about the coming of a white messiah fictions from the unreal ones." prepared the Aztecs for easy takeover and In this edition, the deconstruction of the narra­ slaughter by a handful of Spanish conquistadores, tive form is taken one step further by the inclusion so our fundamental mythology may be preparing of recently-written annotations. This amplifica­ us for what now seems inevitable: the suicide of tion of text by the author himself, twenty years planet Earth. later, provides valuable (and poignant) clarifica­ "The best way to keep something bad from tion of important figures, events, places and other happening is to see it ahead of time...and you can't references which may have faded into undeserved see it if you refuse to face the possibility." (William oblivion. The interplay between the "real" S. Burroughs) author's first-person annotations and the text pro­ For nearly 35 years J.G. Ballard has been sys­ vides a curious displacement of subject/object, tematically identifying and updating the myths reality and fiction. and iconography proffered by our media, ex­ Yet another level of "reality" is challenged by trapolating ecological and psychological disaster Phoebe Gloeckner's precisely-drawn illustrations. scenarios whose inevitability derives from patho­ Their realism dismantles "pornography" like Bal­ logical defects in our belief and value systems. lard's text: as a series of fragmentary, alienated, Ballard's work constitutes a body of prophecy passionless responses to a set of stimuli. A penis unequaled in accuracy and relevance. Always set inside a mouth takes on the detached distancing in the near future, the Ballardian landscapes de­ of a medical lecture, its eroticism excised—just as scribe empty swimming pools, concrete freeways, an atrocity on the news is neutralized by the deserted resorts, decaying cities and abandoned commercial that follows, resulting in deadened Space launching pads, peopled by media stars such emotional response. Implied here is a critique of as Charles Manson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn science as ultimate pornography, capable of reduc­ Monroe and Ronald Reagan. Against a backdrop ing the ineffable—unique personal relationships, of television, the Vietnam war, advertising and the source of our greatest delight—to objectified, TV/movie icons, ambiguous characters relent­ purely functional commodifications. lessly pursue their obsessions, whether it be to As Ballard observes, "I think we're all perhaps assassinate JFK again "in a way that makes sense," innately perverse, capable of enormous cruelty, yet or to die in a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor as an paradoxically our talent for the perverse, the violent, act of ultimate sexual fulfillment. and the obscene may be a good thing. We may have Written from 1967-1969, The Atrocity Exhibi­ to go through this phase to reach something on the tion is Ballard's most concentrated book—a other side. It's a mistake to hold back and refuse to prophetic masterpiece. Not since James Joyce and accept one's nature." In The Atrocity Exhibition, the William S. Burroughs has the novel's form—a fantasies of our epoch and of its technology lie radical departure from traditional linear narra­ ruthlessly exposed to light, evoking all the lyrical tive—been so illuminative of the shifting inner disenchantment of their failed promise. landscapes of its characters; it resembles a flicker­ ing video-collage in written form. We enter the schizophrenic psyche of the main character whose -V. Vale & Andrea Juno Preface by William S. Burroughs The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound fatalities were still living and later used one and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots or the other of the crash victims as a private of sexuality are explored with a surgeon's focus of arousal during intercourse with the precision. An auto crash can be more sexu­ domestic partner." ally stimulating than a pornographic pic­ James Dean kept a hangman's noose dan­ ture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in gling in his living room and put it around many cases have no overt sexual content, his neck to pose for news pictures. A painter whereas dreams with an overt sexual con­ named Milton, who painted a sexy picture tent in many cases do not result in orgasm.) entitled "The Death of James Dean," sub­ The book opens: "A disquieting feature of sequently committed suicide. This book this annual exhibition was preoccupation stirs sexual depths untouched by the hard­ with the theme of world cataclysm, as if est-core illustrated porn. "What will follow these long incarcerated patients had sensed is the psychopathology of sex relationships some seismic upheaval in the minds of the so lunar and abstract that people will be­ nurses and doctors." come mere extensions of the geometries of The line between inner and outer land­ situations. This will allow the exploration scapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can without any trace of guilt of every aspect of result from seismic upheavals within the sexual psychopathology." human mind. The whole random universe Immensely magnified portion of James of the industrial age is breaking down into Dean subsequently committed suicide. cryptic fragments: "In a waste lot of Conception content relates to sexual depths wrecked cars he found the burnt body of of the hardest minds. Eichmann in drag in the white Pontiac, the nasal prepuce of LBJ, a waste lot of wrecked porous rock. crashed helicopters, Eichmann in drag, a dead child . ." The human body becomes landscape: "A hundred-foot-long panel that seemed to represent a section of sand dune . Looking at it more closely Doctor Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. ."This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a key note of The Atrocity Exhibition. This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art— literally blowing up the image. Since people are made of image, this is literally an explo­ sive book. The human image explodes into rocks and stones and trees: "The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape .
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