JG Ballard's 'Crash! a Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA'
J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered
Chris Beckett
Introduction
On 19 May 1968, the Sunday Mirror featured news of a forthcoming event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), under the provocative headline: ‘A Star Role for the Beloved Monster that Lives on Sex and Sacrifice’ (fig. 1). An asterisk after the headline pointed to a quotation highlighted in a box at the foot of the page, taken from an influential government report by Colin Buchanan for the Ministry of Transport, Traffic in Towns (1963). The quotation glossed the key word ‘monster’ and warned of a dangerous fascination with the motor car: ‘We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness. And yet we love him dearly.’1 At the top of the page was an unattributed quotation: ‘If Christ came again he would be killed in a car crash’. This is the ‘startling thought’, we are told, ‘behind this year’s most disturbing drama’.
A star is born. She comes from America and you won’t have read or heard about her. She’s factory-built and before her stage debut, her image will undergo some violent changes. This star is a car. In all her pristine glory, she will be provided with dummy passengers and crashed at high speed. Looking on as their ‘protégé’ is wrecked at a car research centre will be a science fiction writer and a psychologist. The head-on collision will be recorded on film. Then the wreckage will be gathered up to become the centre-piece of an unusual stage production at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts later this year.2
The article was illustrated by two photographs of Jayne Mansfield, one a grainy image of the scene of her fatal road-accident in the summer of the previous year (29 June 1967). A third photograph presented the science fiction writer and psychologist in question, James
This paper was made possible by the award of a British Library Coleridge Research Fellowship in the summer of 2018. I am very grateful for the generosity of Professor Heather Jackson and her late husband Professor J.R. de J. Jackson in funding the Fellowship, named after Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whose works first brought the donors to the British Library as readers. I am also grateful to the Estate of J. G. Ballard for permission to reproduce ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (hitherto unpublished) and all other material by the author. The Estate of J. G. Ballard retains full copyright. 1 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns: A Study of the Long Term Problems of Traffic in Urban Areas (London, 1963). In fact, the quotation came not from Buchanan but from the introductory Report of the Steering Group by its Chairman Sir Geoffrey Crowther (paragraph 55). Such was public interest in the subject that a lightly abridged edition was immediately published by Penguin Books, Traffic in Towns (Harmondsworth, 1963), in which the quotation from Crowther (p. 15) was given prominence on the back cover. Crowther’s phrase caught the popular imagination and would have been recognized by many Sunday Mirror readers. 2 June Rose, Sunday Mirror (19 May 1968), p. 17. In contrast to the four-wheeled ‘star’ from America, Crowther assigned a masculine identity to his ‘monster’.
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Fig. 1. Sunday Mirror (19 May 1968), p. 17.
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Ballard and Christopher Evans, photographed together with a crash-damaged vehicle in the foreground. The article included sound-bites from both Ballard and Evans about the projected event (including the reference to Christ returning). An ambitious multi-media production was promised, involving actors, collaged film footage, crash-test dummies (to be prepared by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi), and a crashed car ‘brought on stage to a soundtrack of screeching brakes and metallic bangs’. Despite the prominent advance publicity, the performance at the ICA did not take place. The Sunday Mirror feature, primed with shock and tease, has, until now, remained its only recorded trace. In the summer of 2017, however, Nancy Evans, widow of Christopher Evans, donated to the British Library Ballard’s typed outline for the event (Add. MS. 89275).3 With the title ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’, this fascinating eight-page document – stamped ‘Dr Chris Evans’ at the head of every page – is believed to be the only physical copy of the outline that has survived (figs 8-15 below). The typescript is a carbon copy; there is no top copy in Ballard’s archive at the British Library. Before examining the outline for the ‘science theatre presentation’ in further detail, and before considering it in relation to the composition of the novel Crash (1973), I want to first take a generous step back to review setting and context. Doing so will defer the pleasure of the text but should make us better readers. There are strong connections between the activities of the ICA and the development of Ballard’s work at a time when its scope extended beyond the written word, venturing into conceptual advertisements, exhibition curation and film. In 1968, the year in which ‘Crash!’ was to have been performed, the ICA reached a significant juncture in its history: after eighteen years at Dover Street, Mayfair, it had raised sufficient funds through the public auction of donated art works and from agreed Arts Council funding to move to much larger and more prominent premises at Nash House in The Mall, where it remains today.4 When it relocated, the ICA dramatically increased the scale and range of its offering and boldly engaged with the vibrant counterculture then bursting across London. But the years the ICA spent at Dover Street, during which a post-war generation of British artists and architects associated with pop art and brutalism emerged, have much to tell us about the visual arts culture that underpins the imaginative world of Crash.
3 In 2015, e-mail contact between Fay Ballard (daughter) and Nancy Evans raised the possibility of Nancy Evans being interviewed for the publication Deep Ends, the annual anthology of writing about Ballard’s work published by Rick McGrath. Mike Holliday was proposed as the interviewer. In the end, the interview was not pursued, but Holliday’s preparation for the interview evolved into a profile of Chris Evans published inDeep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology 2016 (Toronto, 2016), pp. 212-19. Holliday informs me that after Nancy Evans read the profile in advance of publication, she ‘then looked into the two large trunks in which she’d put her husband’s books and papers after he’d died in 1979 – and not opened since […] and discovered the ICA presentation’ (private communication, Holliday to Beckett, 25 Sept. 2018). Following further e-mail contact with the British Library, Nancy Evans, who resides in the United States, personally delivered her donation on 13 July 2017. 4 Roland Penrose, ‘ICA Auction’, ICA Bulletin, no. 161 (Aug.-Sept. 1966), pp. 6-7, reported on an auction (23 June) at Sotheby’s ‘to raise funds for the Carlton House Terrace centre’. A target of £100,000 was exceeded ‘by about £15,000’. A list of the many notable artists who contributed works for sale was given in ICA Bulletin, no. 159 (June 1966), p. 7. A second auction was planned for the spring of 1967: ‘We have already promises of between 40 and 50 works, including a painting from Picasso’. A previous statement by Penrose, ‘The Future of the ICA’, ICA Bulletin, no. 158 (May 1966), p. 6, stressed that the new premises were to be shared: ‘It is clear that in its present state the ICA has insufficient membership for it to be able to expand and step up activities within a year or two to a degree that could justify moving from a gallery in Dover Street that measures only 800 sq. ft. to premises in Carlton House Terrace that offer in all 30,000 sq. ft. of accommodation. Following up the suggestion that we should form an association with other kindred societies we have accepted the very promising suggestion of creating a centre for the Arts and Design. Four other societies, among whom we find many old friends, have decided to join us. All are concerned in varying degrees with design in industry, advertising and town planning. Their activities are complementary to ours and in no way competitive.’ The ICA was to be responsible for the Gallery (7, 500 sq. ft.).
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The ICA at Dover Street in the 1950s: the emergence of ‘the long front’
The prime movers in the founding of the ICA in 1947 were the poet and critic Herbert Read and the surrealist artist Roland Penrose.5 They had worked together before the war as members of the committee that organized the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London in 1936. By background and orientation, both were European modernists. Penrose lived in Paris between 1922 and 1935, where he met and worked alongside many leading artists, including Max Ernst (whose paintings Ballard greatly admired). Read died on 12 June 1968, two months after the ICA entered Nash House. He had championed the generation of English modernist artists who emerged in the 1930s, particularly Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. The inscription on his gravestone – ‘Knight, Poet, Anarchist’ – captures the tension between establishment and experiment, conformity and rebellion that characterized his influential contribution to English arts and letters. Read and Penrose had sought to establish a convivial environment that would bring artists, scientists and technologists closer together. Initially without a permanent base, in 1950 the ICA secured premises at 17-18 Dover Street in Mayfair, where it ran a wide-ranging programme of exhibitions, talks, concerts and social events. In the words of Anne Massey, the ICA ‘operated in a space between the public museum and private gallery; the art school and the private club; the adult education centre and the jazz club.’6 In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard recalls that he ‘regularly visited the ICA in Dover Street,’7 although unfortunately he provides no details of his visits. He mentions Francis Bacon’s ‘modest retrospective’ at the ICA in 1955,8 but he can only have learned of this subsequently. At the time the exhibition was held, from 20 January to 19 February 1955, Ballard was stationed at a NATO base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, training to be an RAF pilot. To pass the time in this remote location – ‘a wilderness of ice and snow’ – he read contemporary science fiction for the first time from the plentiful supply of popular American magazines ‘in the Moose Jaw magazine racks’.9 As he read, he began to entertain the idea of trying his hand at writing science fiction stories himself:
After weekend trips across the border, I could see that both Canada and the USA were changing rapidly, and that change would in time reach even Britain. I would interiorise science fiction, looking for the pathology that underlay consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional possibility. Or so I thought, staring at the silent airfield, with its empty runways that stretched into a snow-blanched infinity.10
This portrayal of youthful writing ambition is, of course, a retrospective framing. For ‘interiorise science fiction’ read Ballard’s more familiar term ‘inner space’; the signature images ofa ‘silent airfield’ and ‘empty runways’ are characteristic examples of the objective correlatives of disaffection, dislocation and abandonment with which his prose is identified. Ballard resigned
5 For a detailed account of the founding of the ICA, including the involvement of a number of other figures in the Organizing Committee, see Anne Massey, ‘From Museum of Modern Art to Institute of Contemporary Arts’, the introduction to Institute of Contemporary Arts 1946-1968, published by the ICA (London, 2014). 6 Ibid., p. 11. 7 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (London, 2008), p. 216. 8 Ibid., p. 156. The ICA show comprised fourteen paintings, including ‘Fragment of Crucifixion’, ‘Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ and ‘Study of Figures’, the last a painting of two naked wrestlers that provoked some controversy, based upon photographs by Eadweard Muybridge from The Human Figure in Motion (1901). Ballard does, however, report going to see ‘a far larger retrospective at the Tate Gallery’ in 1962: it ‘was a revelation to me. I still think of Bacon as the greatest painter of the post-war world.’ In 2015, the ICA held an exhibition, ‘FB55’, to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Bacon’s show. See Anna McNay’s review of ‘FB55’ for Studio International
4 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered his commission before he completed training. He returned in the cold spring of 1955 to RAF High Wycombe where, waiting for his discharge papers to follow him from Canada – he was not discharged until 31 May11 – he wrote his first science fiction story, ‘Passport to Eternity’.12 That story, somewhat revised, would not be published until 1962,13 but in December 1956 two other stories appeared simultaneously, in the magazines Science Fantasy and New Worlds: ‘Prima Belladonna’ (later collected in Vermilion Sands) and ‘Escapement’.14 In an interview conducted by David Pringle in 1981, Ballard recalled:
I was interested in the old ICA. I wasn’t a member, but I used to go to exhibitions there. That was a hothouse of ideas, and Pop Art was born there. Some people whom I subsequently got to know – Paolozzi, Reyner Banham, Hamilton and so on – formed the Independent Group there. They were interested in a fresh look at consumer goods and media landscape of the day, regarded it as a proper subject matter for the painter. I felt that their approach had a certain kinship with that of science fiction (in which they were all extremely interested) and I went along to the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in ’56.15
What is striking in reviewing the programme that the ICA ran in the 1950s – which incorporated the cuckoo-like incubation and hatching of the beginnings of the pop art movement – is how many of the deeper roots of Crash appear to lie in the Independent Group’s orientation to post-war modernity, following its gaze towards America, and sharing its fascination with the iconography of popular culture and the rapidly developing interface between people and technology. Pop art’s interrogation of the representation of identity, particularly celebrity identity as refracted through film, television and advertisements, is pursued throughout the stories of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970); in Crash, the body of Elizabeth Taylor is captured and fragmented by Vaughan’s long and furtive camera lens and exhibited like a target on the walls of his apartment.
11 David Pringle, ‘Chronology: Ballard / Moorcock 1955-1962’, in Rick McGrath (ed.), Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology 2015 (Toronto, 2015), p. 14. 12 Interview conducted by David Pringle (1981): ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, J. G. Ballard, RE/Search, no. 8/9 (1984), p. 117. 13 Revised in 1961, the story was eventually published in Amazing (June 1962). 14 ‘Prima Belladonna’, subsequently collected in Vermilion Sands (1971), appeared in Science Fantasy, and ‘Escapement’ in New Worlds, both published in December 1956. Neither story was stereotypical of the science fiction genre: ‘Luckily, there were other magazines likeGalaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the short stories were set in the present or very near future, extrapolating social and political trends already evident in the years after the war’ (Miracles of Life, p. 166). Ballard’s first publication was the story ‘Violent Noon’, a winning competition entry published in Cambridge University’s student newspaper The Varsity (26 May 1951), a cutting of which can be found in Ballard’s archive at the British Library: Add. MS. 88938/3/1. The story is at
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Although it is unlikely that Ballard went to either, two exhibitions at the ICA organized by members of the Independent Group were important forerunners to ‘This Is Tomorrow’.16 In 1953, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Smithson and Nigel Henderson curated ‘Parallel of Life and Art’; in 1955, Richard Hamilton curated ‘Man, Machine and Motion: An Iconography of Speed and Space’.17 Both exhibitions were photographic, inviting contrast and comparison between the wide ranges of images selected for display. Lawrence Alloway described the former exhibition as: ‘A hundred blown-up photographs of motion studies, ethnographical material, child art, micro-photographs, blended technology, and fantasy in wild profusion.’18 The constraints of space at Dover Street were turned to advantage: presented in close proximity, suspended from the ceiling as well as hung on the walls, the unframed exhibits made a form of walk-through collage. A review of ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ in the Sunday Times observed: ‘The subjects range from Leonardo drawings of a Deluge to a cross-section of a tumour, and from Diderot’s idea of a sea-urchin to a radiograph of a cat batting a ball.’ It was ‘a repository of symbols, and alphabet of contemporary daydreams or an estimate of the part played by photography in the history of human curiosity.’19 The front cover of the exhibition catalogue was a striking example of man and technology fused: an x-ray image of a man (wearing spectacles) using an electric shaver trailing a power cable.20 In ‘Man, Machine and Motion’, Hamilton displayed some 200 photographs of people and transportation divided into four sections – Aquatic, Terrestrial, Aerial and Interplanetary – once again juxtaposing images of technology and fantasy in close proximity in an immersive and collagist exhibition environment.21 The introduction to the catalogue emphasized the ‘union’ of man and machine – a key theme in Crash – citing the mythological centaur as imaginative precursor, ‘always
16 Born in 1930, Ballard was only in his early twenties during the first half of the 1950s. It was an unsettled period in his life. After studying anatomy and physiology at Cambridge for two years in preparation for a career in psychiatry, he switched in 1951 to read English Literature at Queen Mary College, London, although he left after a year. In 1954, he volunteered to train with the RAF as a pilot; he was stationed in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan from autumn 1954 to the spring of 1955. Abandoned pathways and aspirations, but in retrospect it is apparent that each false start fed the imagination of the writer in waiting, from the cold anatomy table to the troubled flyers who haunt his fiction. On return from Canada, he married Mary Matthews, on 26 September 1955. Any exhibitions or events that Ballard may have attended at Dover Street are therefore more likely to have been in the later 1950s and early 1960s; that is, in the years following the exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ (1956). For speculation that Ballard may have seen ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (1953), see the ‘Introduction’ by Rick Poynor to David Brittain, Eduardo Paolozzi at ‘New Worlds’: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties (Manchester, 2013), pp. 12-13. 17 ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ ran from 11 September to 18 October 1953. ‘Man, Machine and Motion: An Iconography of Speed and Space’ ran from 6 to 30 July 1955. 18 Lawrence Alloway, ‘“Pop Art” Since 1949’, The Listener (27 December 1962). Reprinted in Richard Kalina (ed.), Imagining the Present: Essays by Lawrence Alloway, (Abingdon and New York, 2006), p. 82. According to the catalogue introduction: ‘The exhibition will provide a key – a kind of Rosetta stone – by which the discoveries of the sciences and the arts can be seen as aspects of the same whole. Related phenomenon, parts of that New Landscape which experimental science has revealed and artists and theorists created.’ 19 Quoted by Anne Massey, Institute of Contemporary Arts 1946-1968 (2014), p. 91. 20 Ibid., p. 90, for a reproduction of the front panel of the catalogue in the form of a concertina fold-out sheet. The x-ray photograph appears in László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, 1947), p. 252 (fig. 349) and was taken (in 1941) at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories, Bloomfield, New Jersey. Vision in Motion ‘concentrates on the work of the Institute of Design, Chicago and presents a […] general view of the interrelatedness of art and life’ (p. 5), a phrase that the title of the ICA exhibition more or less replicated. 21 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words 1953-1982 (London, 1982), p. 20. See also Massey, Institute of Contemporary Arts 1946-48, pp. 108-13.
6 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered potentially anarchic and fearsome […] evoking much that is heroic and much that is terrible’.22 In Crash, narrator James Ballard also evokes the liminal centaur when he describes the orderly movement of distant traffic: ‘Along the elegant motion sculpture of the concrete highway the coloured carapaces of the thousands of cars moved like the welcoming centaurs of some Arcadian land.’23 Reyner Banham wrote the distinctive catalogue entries for the exhibition. His description of items 62-65 (four Chrysler cars from 1909, 1924, 1949 and 1955) is a conspicuous example, in which the evolution of the mechanical operation of changing gear is offered as ‘a miniature history’ of automobile design, the car interior now realized as a ‘boudoir’:
This capsule chronicle of improving gear-change, from gloved grasp of massive lever to naked finger-touch on chromium plant-stem, is also a miniature history of the progress of the automobile design from an approximate truce with mechanical forces to a pure creation of the human will – the driver no longer dresses for battle, but for the boudoir.24
In the contemporaneous essay ‘Vehicles of Desire’ (1955), Banham argued that the body styling of cars of the 1950s was ‘drawn from Science Fiction, movies, earth-moving equipment, supersonic aircraft, racing cars, heraldry and certain deep-seated mental dispositions about the great outdoors and the kinship between technology and sex.’25 Deep-seated mental dispositions were in the air. The design of American cars of the 1950s may have provoked desire, but the travelling ‘boudoir’ that the car had become – a private and modish domestic space on wheels – was severely injuring and killing people with shocking frequency, as US car accident statistics progressively showed.26 Car interiors had become increasingly hazardous: protuberant dashboard knobs and switches, sharp chromium trim, and, especially, the spear-like steering column, caused severe injury in the so-called ‘second collision’, the crash impact between people and the car interior.27 As Ralph Nader sharply observed in Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), an important source book for The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash alike: ‘The stylist who has been given great leeway to determine panel shape has devised a great variety of designs that have managed to provide spectacular dangers.’ Whilst Nader’s choice of the adjective ‘spectacular’ seems here to be but a matter of (unfortunate) stylistic emphasis, Crash is Fig. 2. Christianity and the Natural Sciences.
22 Hamilton, Collected Words, p. 19. The introduction to the catalogue was co-authored by Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway. 23 J. G. Ballard, Crash (London, 1973), p. 166. 24 ‘Man, Machine and Motion’ (ICA, London, 1955), unpaginated. Banham’s text for items 62-5 has prompted Hal Foster to discuss the description in conjunction with a painting by Richard Hamilton, AAH! (1962), one of a series exploring the planes and contours of the automobile and the female body. See Foster, The First Pop Age (Princeton, 2012), pp. 46-8. Hamilton’s painting, based upon a photographic colour advertisement for a Plymouth automobile, is also reproduced at
7 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered indeed about those interior ‘spectacular dangers’, 28 as it is also about the public spectacle of the road accident as a form of macabre theatre. Ballard’s initial impetus to write a performance piece for the ICA is therefore not surprising: the car crash seemed a phenomenon that was already staged. Crash continually draws upon theatrical metaphor: the description of the motorway arch as a proscenium; the arc lights of the emergency recovery services shining like stage lights; Vaughan’s perpetual rehearsal of his longed-for fatal crash with Elizabeth Taylor; the cosy home-cinema showing of road-crash film footage; and the public re-enactment by Seagrave, under Vaughan’s direction, of the deadly road collisions of celebrity victims, from James Dean to Jayne Mansfield. Crash is as much about the staging, witnessing and celebration of collision as it is about collision itself, and it has more to say about the scars of wounds – injury’s lingering afterlife – than the moment of injury. ‘Where did I get the idea of the car crash? How did I become obsessed with it? I think it was just ordinary observation of people at the site of car crashes in real life, and also the sort of fascination people have looking at films of car crashes, whether they’re newsreel film or feature films.’29
Fig. 2. Front cover of exhibition catalogue (facsimile edition, 2010): ‘This Is Tomorrow’, Whitechapel Gallery (1956).
‘This Is Tomorrow’ opened for a month at the Whitechapel Gallery on 9 August 1956 (fig. 2). The show was a collaborative and innovative production in which the Independent Group was strongly represented: twelve multi-disciplinary teams of artists, architects, sculptors, and graphic designers created twelve immersive environments. There was no signposting, no description or identification of exhibits, only a series of constructed spaces to walk through and installations to freely interpret.30 The area developed by Group 2 was the most popular:
28 Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York, 1965), p. 100. Nader’s campaigning book included a number of detailed examples of crash injuries. A table showing ‘leading causes of injury’ (1956-61) is given on p. 91. The ‘instrument panel’ is the leading cause, closely followed by the ‘steering assembly’. On the final page ofCrash (1973), p. 224, we read of ‘the sharp barb of the steering column, a bloodied lance rising from the deformed instrument panel’. 29 Ballard interviewed by Maura Devereux (7 Oct. 1990), V. Vale (ed.), J. G. Ballard: Conversations (San Francisco, 2005), p. 200. 30 For a brief British Pathé news report (1956), see
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Just inside the entrance […] visitors encountered a most unexpected structure. Shaped like a house of mirrors or a distorted duck blind, this odd piece of architecture incorporated familiar images from the repertoire of popular culture: billboard-size robots [Robby the Robot from the newly-released filmForbidden Planet], optical illusions, Marilyn Monroe [a still from Seven Year Itch (1955), her dress caught by an updraft], advertisements, a rock ‘n’ roll jukebox [continuously playing], a giant beer bottle, and a cinematic wall of posters. This cacophonous installation, designed by Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John Voelcker, must have seemed to many visitors like a noisy intruder in the sanctimonious realm of the art exhibition. Instead of embodying the cerebral and contemplative aspects of geometric abstraction as did many of the other eleven installations […] the Hamilton- McHale-Voelcker funhouse impudently asserted the impermanent, the pleasurable and the sensorily jarring. As a result, the installation was immensely popular.31
Lawrence Alloway wrote an introduction for the catalogue, in which he argued that the exhibition offered a gallery experience that was different in kind. ‘This Is Tomorrow’ signalled a paradigm shift away from the binary opposition of élite and mass culture to a non-hierarchical and inclusive aesthetic – a continuum – that linearly joined art, technology and consumerism. It was a shift that he would later characterize as ‘the long front of culture’:
Purity of media, golden proportions, unambiguous iconologies, have been so powerful that we have contracted art and architecture down to very narrow fields. An exhibition like this is, on the contrary, a lesson in spectatorship, which cuts across the learned responses of conventional perception. In ‘This Is Tomorrow’ the visitor is exposed to space effects, play with signs, a wide range of materials and structures, which, taken together, make of art and architecture a many-channelled activity, as factual and far from ideal standards as the street outside.32
The ‘street outside’ was Whitechapel High Street. Passing pedestrians, among them curious teenagers with an ear for the contemporary, would have heard the sound of the jukebox escaping from the entrance, and if they had ventured inside they would have found the cacophonous funhouse. The exhibition, wrote Ballard, ‘opened all the doors and windows onto the street.’33 A popular success, it attracted 1,000 visitors a day. The catalogue immediately sold out and
31 Brian Wallis, ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: The Independent Group and Popular Culture’, Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Pop (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 10. As well as appearing in a film poster on display, Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet (1956) appeared ‘in person’ at the opening of the exhibition; for photographs, see Ben Highmore, The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (London, 2017), pp. 23-4. 32 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Design as Human Activity’, the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for ‘This Is Tomorrow’, Whitechapel Gallery (1956), unpaginated. Reprinted by Whitechapel Gallery in a facsimile edition (2010). The spiral-bound catalogue, considered as innovative as the exhibition, was designed by Edward Wright. Alloway’s ‘The Long Front of Culture’ (1959) is reprinted in Richard Kalina (ed.), Imagining the Present: Essays by Lawrence Alloway (London, 2006), pp. 61-4. The essay begins: ‘The abundance of twentieth-century communications is an embarrassment to the traditionally educated custodian of culture. The aesthetics of plenty oppose a very strong tradition which dramatizes the arts as the possession of an élite.’ On 17 December 1957, Banham gave a talk at the ICA entitled ‘The Trapeze and the Human Pyramid’: ‘Now that anti-academic critics have kicked away the traditional “ladder of taste” what image will serve to symbolize the social stratification of aesthetic preferences in literature, the arts, entertainment and design?’ ICA Bulletin, no. 82 (Dec. 1957). 33 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, p. 188.
9 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered had to be quickly reprinted.34 Ballard described the exhibition as ‘a revelation’. He found its embrace of popular culture and technology refreshing, ‘a vote of confidence’ in his choice of science fiction as the genre within which to pursue his writing ambitions.35 When he recalled the impact the exhibition made upon him, Ballard cited two contributions by Independent Group members. The collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? by Hamilton, and ‘Patio and Pavilion’ (Group 6) by Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Nigel Henderson. It is noticeable that these two strong memories align with two very different visions of the future, both of which, variously elaborated, appear with regularity throughout Ballard’s fiction: one, a dystopic vision of suburbia, the other a post-apocalyptic and paradoxical scene of timeless ruin and promise. Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) is a collage work associated with the beginnings of pop art (fig. 3). Perhaps surprisingly, in 1956 it was only seen reproduced in black and white as one of twelve posters for the exhibition and as a black and white image in the exhibition catalogue.36 The collage was not exhibited in its original form until 1964 when it was shown in an exhibition in The Hague.37 The work shows a living room interior populated with individual advertisement images cut from American magazine sources. In the foreground, a semi-naked couple from the worlds of body- building and burlesque who seem pleased with themselves strike exaggerated poses. They perform for us, challenge our gaze and court attention. A third person – a woman seemingly far distant by virtue of the size of the cut-out image – looks away, vacuuming the staircase. Her relative size pulls the eye and stretches the perception of depth. Controlled perspective in the collage contributes coherence to what amounts to a parodic vision of consumerist plenty – an ornamental tin of ham, like a strange fruit of tomorrow, rests on the small table – and dissolves the sense of a collection of disparate visual elements. On the other hand, both Fig. 3. Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s the ceiling (a segment of the Earth’s homes so different, so appealing? (collage, 1956). surface in dark space) and the window
34 The Preface to the facsimile catalogue (Whitechapel Gallery, 2010) records: ‘The catalogue was priced at 5 shillings and the 1300 copies printed by Lund Humphries sold out immediately with a subsequent run of 1000 copies following suit.’ 35 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, p. 188. 36 For a comprehensive study of the poster collage, including the context of its creation and the identification of individual components, see John-Paul Stonard, ‘Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”ʼ, The Burlington Magazine, cxlix (September 2007), pp. 607-20. Ballard’s archive at the British Library includes Hamilton’s subsequent digital re-working (1992) of the collage, personally inscribed: Add. MS. 88938/9/1. The re-worked ‘collage’ is at 10 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered (a cinema showing The Jazz Singer, the first ‘talkie’) surprise us; theyopen the room in different ways and contribute a floating sense of displacement. Arguably, an uncanny mood of emptiness and dislocation persists. Ballard described the collage as ‘a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead.’38 His second strong memory of the exhibition was the collaborative installation ‘Patio and Pavilion’, a simple shed-like structure with a surrounding patio area marked out with sand. The structure was designed and built by Alison and Peter Smithson, and subsequently ‘dressed’ by Paolozzi and Henderson with an eclectic collection of objects suspended from the walls, placed on the sand, on the roof and on a low table inside.39 The wooden structure was three-sided, open at the front, with a sloping plastic corrugated roof. On the back wall of the shed was a large and somewhat forbidding head of a man, a brooding collage by Henderson (and another Henderson collage lay on the patio space). Ballard remembers seeing the installation as ‘a basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.’40 The installation seemed to look back to the deprivations of war, then still a recent memory, but also to symbolically gesture a re-beginning. Its double aspect, at once retrospective and prospective, was constructed under the shadow – or mushroom-cloud – of a continuing programme of nuclear testing. Ballard’s reference to a ‘terminal hut’ echoes the title of his seminal story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964): set on the Eniwetok Atoll, that story paved the way formally – and emotionally – for the fragmentary apocalyptic stories of The Atrocity Exhibition. The ‘hothouse of ideas’ at the ICA which Ballard highlighted in his autobiography was warmly conveyed by Banham in his essay on the Italian Futurists, ‘Primitives of a Mechanized Art’, written as the 1950s drew to a close. Banham quoted a passage from Umberto Boccioni’s Pittura, scultura futurista (1914) in which Boccioni listed ‘all the anti-artistic manifestations of our epoch – the café-chantant, gramophone, cinema, electric advertising, mechanistic architecture, skyscrapers […] night-life […] speed, automobiles, aeroplanes and so forth’. Forty years later, Banham reflected that not much had changed: ‘these images describe the London scene into 38 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, pp. 188-9. Ballard’s last novel, Kingdom Come (London, 2006), addresses consumerism in these terms (p. 64): ‘I opened the local newspaper […]. Its pages were crammed with advertisements for a huge range of consumer goods. Every citizen of Brooklands, every resident within site of the M25, was constantly trading the contents of house and home, replacing the same cars and cameras, the same ceramic hobs and fitted bedrooms. Nothing was being swapped for nothing. Behind this frantic turnover, a gigantic boredom prevailed.’ The sense of ‘disquiet’ and ‘emptiness’ in Hamilton’s collage to which I allude is discussed (without reference to Ballard) in Ben Highmore, The Art of Brutalism, pp. 240-1, where he takes up remarks by Stonard (2007) and Greil Marcus (2010). It should be pointed out that although the work is attributed to Hamilton, it was, as Stonard establishes, a team effort; Hamilton was assisted by his wife Terry Hamilton and Magda Cordell who made the selection of advertisement elements according to a list supplied by Hamilton. That list (which included no suggestion of a dystopic vision) was entirely generic: ‘Man, Woman, Humanity, History, Food, Newspaper, Cinema, TV, Telephone, Comics (picture information), Words (textual information), Tape recording (aural information), Cars, Domestic appliances, Space’. For the list, see Hamilton, Collected Words (1982), p. 24. 39 For photographs of the installation, see Highmore, The Art of Brutalism, pp. 137-9, and see also Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London, 2001), pp. 114-22. Having built their structure, the Smithsons departed for Dubrovnik, leaving Paolozzi and Henderson to add their contributions, which were not discussed before they left: see the interview conducted by Beatriz Colomina, ‘Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson’, October, xciv (Autumn 2000), pp. 3-30. 40 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, pp. 187-8. According to Smithson, interviewed by Colomina, p. 26, ‘everything was metaphorical’. 11 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered which we stepped as we left the Institute of Contemporary Arts those evenings in 1953 and 1954.’41 The remarks were a warm (and nostalgic) affirmation of perceived continuity with the first age of the machine. Banham characterized the post-war world of mass consumerism as the second age of the machine, ‘the age of domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry.’42 Thus the reel-to-reel tape-recorder, a commodity at the cutting-edge of domestic technology in 1956, was proudly displayed in the foreground of Hamilton’s collage. Industrial design and the dark art of commercial persuasion were subjects of particular interest to the Independent Group, most of whom collected advertisements from glossy magazines as valuable source material.43 Like commonplace anthologies of old, their cuttings and tear-sheets captured the everyday secrets of the consumerist present. The elegant alignment of form and function, a design principle fundamental to pre-war modernism, uncoupled in the ‘fabulous fifties’ releasing baroque flights of design fancy that gave cars improbable fins and streamlined phallic thrust. Discussion followed at Independent Group meetings on the implications of economic growth based upon planned obsolescence.44 Hamilton gave a talk at the ICA (7 July 1959) entitled ‘The Design Image of the 50s’. The description of the talk in the ICA Bulletin refers to the ‘image value’ of consumer goods exceeding their ‘functional fitness’ and to ‘techniques which probe the consumer’s unspoken desires’ (fig.4). At the time, the terms of the debate were engagingly presented in Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), a best-selling and influential exposition of the new role of motivational research in the development of advertising campaigns that were deeply pitched to appeal to the subconscious. The obscurity into which the science of psychology now shone a light – the profound seat of self-doubt, anxiety, jealousy and guilt – was identified as the emotive site where impulsive decisions to purchase were actually made, far from the balanced reckonings of the rational mind. ‘The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope […] We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, 41 Reyner Banham, ‘Primitives of a Mechanized Art’, first published inThe Listener (3 Dec. 1959). Reprinted in Mary Banham et al. (eds.), A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 39-45. There is a similar passage in the essay ‘Futurism for Keeps’ (1960), cited in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge MA, 2002), p. 146: ‘As Richard [Hamilton] and I and the rest of us came down the stairs from the Institute of Contemporary Arts those combative evenings in the early fifties, we stepped into a London that Boccioni had described, clairvoyantly. We were at home in the promised land that the Futurists had been denied, condemned instead to wander in the wilderness for the statutory forty years […] No wonder we found in the Futurists long lost ancestors, even if we were soon conscious of having overpassed them. Overpassed or not, they seemed to speak to us on occasions in precisely the detail that the ghost spoke to Hamlet.’ 42 Rayner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London, 1960), p. 10. 43 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘But Today We Collect Ads’, ARK, no. 18 (Autumn 1956), pp. 49-50: ‘Mass production advertising is establishing our whole pattern of life – principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard of living. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own.’ The earliest collector from the Independent Group seems to have been Eduardo Paolozzi. In April 1952, at the Group’s first meeting, he presented in quick-fire fashion on an epidiascope a set of collaged images and tear sheets taken from American magazines, which eventually formed the printed collages published as Bunk (1972). As Anne Massey notes, The Independent Group (Manchester, 1995), p. 46: ‘These images have subsequently acquired a mythical aura, often cited as the first examples of British Pop Art or even Pop Art.’ For a detailed account, see John-Paul Stonard, ‘The “Bunk” Collages of Eduardo Paolozzi’, The Burlington Magazine, cl (April 2008), pp. 238-49. 44 See, for example, Richard Hamilton, ‘The Persuading Image’ (1959), reprinted in Collected Words, pp. 135-43. Hamilton’s essay, which caused some contention when first delivered as a lecture at the ICA (see Hamilton’s subsequent remarks, p. 144) discussed the relationship between designer and consumer, the role of obsolescence (‘a useful tool for raising living standards’), and the role of motivational research. See also Reyner Banham, ‘Junk Culture’ (1961), reprinted in Mary Banham et al. (eds.), A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, pp. 77-80. 12 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 4. Richard Hamilton, ‘The Design Image of the 50s’ (7 July 1959). ICA Bulletin, no. 100 (July/August 1959). 13 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered we buy prestige.’45 The 1950s in America also saw motivational research applied for the first time to political persuasion. In both The Atrocity Exhibition (see, for example, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’), and Crash, Ballard parodies the ubiquitous psychological testing and ‘depth interviews’ of consumer – and voter – volunteers that Packard describes. Glamorous and sophisticated colour advertisements traded on the psychology of consumer desire in the promotion of everything from Presidents to cars to modern kitchens. In January 1956, the ICA held the first of two ‘architecture’ discussions on house interiors, beginning with ‘The Kitchen’. In tacit acknowledgement of the automobile as the acme of contemporary design, the description in the ICA Bulletin promoting the event to Members referred to the ‘car-like finish’ of modern kitchen equipment and emphasized – rather like the gentle gear change mechanism in the Chrysler cars that Banham described – ‘its mystique of expensive and mysterious operation’ (fig. 5). The ICA at Dover Street in the 1960s: the ‘long front’ lengthens As the 1960s gathered momentum, the ICA’s eclectic mix of events reflected the trend of the decade towards experimentation and increasing cultural liberalization. Looking through the ICA’s varied schedule, some events stand out in the context of the present essay because they can be matched to aspects of Ballard’s fiction, although there appears to be no evidence to suggest that Ballard went to any of them. Marshall McLuhan, for example, speaking about ‘Changing Modes of Perception Since TV’ (27 June 1963), or R. D. Laing speaking on ‘Violence and Love’ (21 January 1964) and on ‘The Experience of LSD’ (2 June 1966).46 In October and November 1963, the ICA held the first UK show of American pop art, ‘The Popular Image USA’. It included two American flag paintings by Jasper Johns, three comic-strip paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, and three screen-prints of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol.47 Ominously, the penultimate day of the exhibition, 22 November 1963, coincided with the assassination of President John Kennedy. Other events at the ICA stand out because they are indicative of the Institute’s direction of cultural travel, its radical passage to Nash House in the Mall, and are therefore indicative of the public context in which Ballard envisaged his piece of theatre being presented. The ICA certainly continued to offer a catholic programme, but the spirit of Dada, of anti-art, which was fundamental to countercultural practice, operated as a strong influence, and it tended to lead the Institute in the direction of a more performance-oriented programme. On 6 December 1960, the ICA presented a mixed-media show by Brion Gysin, William Burroughs’s collaborator (fig. 6). According to Barry Miles’s (unflattering) description, the performance featured ‘Burroughs’s flat Midwestern voice, radio static and distorted Arab drumming, while Gysin pranced about the stage, painting a vigorous sloppy abstract on a huge sheet of paper.’48 Gysin may have ‘pranced’ and his painting may have been ‘sloppy’ but his conception of the art work as a performative 45 Quoted in Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1957; reissued 2007), p. 35. 46 The fullest discussion of Ballard’s fictional exploration of Laing’s ideas is in Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard (London, 2011). As Francis points out (p. 62), the date of Ballard’s story ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962) demonstrates that he was aware of anti-psychiatry from its outset (Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness was published in 1960; R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, in 1962). Ballard took LSD for the first and only time in June 1967. He described the experience as ‘a negative trip, a real paranoid journey of despair’, quoted in David Pringle, ‘A Ballard / Moorcock Chronology January 1966 to December 1970’, in Rick McGrath (ed.), Deep Ends: A Ballardian Anthology (Powell River, British Columbia, 2018), p. 164. The experience was fictionally rendered in Crash (Chapters 21-2) and The Kindness of Women (Chapter 10). 47 A list of exhibits is given in Anne Massey, Institute of Contemporary Arts 1946-1968, p. 138. For a complete chronology of events 1948-1968, see pp. 165-200. 48 Barry Miles, London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 (London, 2010), p. 130. 14 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 5. ‘The Kitchen’ (10 January 1956). ICA Bulletin, no. 61 (Jan. 1956). 15 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 6. Brion Gysin (6 December 1960). ICA Bulletin, no. 108 (Nov./Dec. 1960). 16 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered occasion, as process rather than product, was an early signal of things to come, a current in the arts that was beginning to transform the way that museums and galleries understood their purpose and the manner in which they organized the public spaces at their disposal. A fundamental part of that transformation was a shift in artists’ expectations of audiences who were increasingly being prompted to interact with exhibition spaces and to co-operate in the production of meaning. It was a shift from passive reception to active completion through aesthetic engagement.49 On 24 October 1962, the ICA hosted the neo-Dada co-operative Fluxus: The Festival of Misfits event ended dramatically with artist Robin Page kicking his electric guitar off the stage, down the stairs and along Dover Street, followed like a Pied Piper by his bewildered audience as the instrument was kicked along the pavement until it was destroyed.50 On 11 May 1965, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills presented the ‘happening’ O What a Lovely Whore, in which the only performers were the audience. The stage curtain opened to reveal a variety of props which included, according to reports, wooden poles, a trampoline, trolley, piano, projector, reels of pre-recorded film, a tape recorder, cine camera, and three spotlights on wheels. The audience was told by Boyle that if there was to be an event they would have to create it themselves. Enthusiastic destructive behaviour ensued; the piano was not spared.51 On 14 September 1966, the ICA hosted an ‘Action Lecture’ by Wolf Vostell, in association with the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ (DIAS), an international gathering of the ‘destructive’ avant-garde at Africa House, Covent Garden, 9-11 September.52 Organized by Gustav Metzger, the symposium was supplemented by a series of planned and spontaneous ‘destructive art’ events held across London, attracting considerable attention from the press. One event called ‘KROW-1’ (i.e. ‘work’ spelled backwards) involved Robin Page again: dressed in a shiny silver suit and helmet, he dug a substantial hole with a pick and shovel in the basement of Better Books in Charing Cross Road, eventually striking a mains water pipe which brought the excavation to an abrupt halt.53 49 See Sandy Nairne, ‘The Institutionalization of Dissent’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking About Exhibitions (London, 1996), pp. 387-410. 50 Dick Higgins, ‘Michael Morris and the Canadian Fluxfriends’, Under the Influence of Fluxus (Winnipeg, 1991), p. 12. The event is also referred to by Charles Darwent, ‘Robin Page Obituary’, The Guardian (3 June 2015). The on-stage guitar destruction finale favoured by Pete Townshend of The Who – first performed in 1964 – was inspired, Townshend later recalled, by an illustrated lecture on ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ that Gustav Metzger had given two years earlier, in December 1962, at Ealing School of Art, where Townshend was then a student. See Gustav Metzger, Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art (London, 1996), p. 88. See also Mark Wilkerson, The Life of Pete Townshend (London, 2008), p. 28. 51 The ‘instructions’ for the event are given as Appendix 19 in Journey to the Surface of the Earth: Mark Boyle’s Atlas and Manual (Cologne, 1970), which includes, as a footnote to the Appendix, a first-hand description of the event. Boyle also describes the event in Jonathon Green (ed.), Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971 (London, 1988), pp. 43-4. See also Andrew Wilson, ‘Towards an Index for Everything: The Events of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills 1963-71’, in The Boyle Family (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 45-59, which includes a photograph of the piano ‘being smashed and remade’ (p. 48). See also Hilary Floe, ‘“Everything was Getting Smashed”: Three Case Studies of Play and Participation, 1965-71’, in Tate Papers, no. 22 (Autumn 2014) 17 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered The ICA’s programme in the first half of the 1960s for the twin arts of poetry and music tells a similar story.54 In 1960, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Alan Brownjohn gave readings; by 1965, the ICA’s poetry offering was the American poet Allen Ginsberg and Michael Horovitz’s Live New Departures rolling programme of readings by a new generation of ‘underground’ poets. The new generation looked to popular culture and to the American Beat poets, and looked back – overstepping the Movement poets of the 1950s – to the anarchic spirit of the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, to European poetry in translation, and to the poetry of American modernists Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.55 In October 1965, Jasia Reichardt curated an exhibition of concrete poetry, ‘Between Poetry and Painting’; the English sound and concrete poet Bob Cobbing gave a reading at Dover Street.56 Cobbing, who was a key figure in London’s vibrant poetry scene and ran the small press Writers Forum, worked at the cultural and social hub that was Better Books. Invited by Metzger to join the DIAS organizing committee, it was Cobbing who was conveniently on hand to judiciously halt Robin Page’s basement excavation. In the field of music, the ICA’s customary and somewhat comfortable two-ply weave of jazz (George Melly, Mike Westbrook) and British post-war modernism (Thea Musgrave, Elisabeth Lutyens, Alan Rawsthorne) began to be supplemented by a third strand. In December 1965, the ICA held a four-day festival of contemporary music ‘centred around’ the textural ‘process’ music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who introduced a concert of his music (hosted by the Commonwealth Institute) which included Zeitmasse and Zyklus.57 On 1 November 1966, the American composer Morton Feldman also spoke about ‘process’ and contemporary composition: The fact that men like Boulez and Cage represent extremes of modern methodology is not what is interesting. What is interesting is their similarity. In the music of both men, things are exactly what they are – no more, no less. In the music of both men, what is heard is indistinguishable from its process. In fact, process itself might be called the Zeitgeist of our age.58 New technology was enabling new sounds and new approaches to composition: the electronic experiments of the avant-garde and ‘underground’ rock music were beginning to collide, from Terry Riley to Steve Reich. Emerging group Pink Floyd played at Dover Street on 16 January 1967. At the time, they were the regular house band at the UFO Club in Tottenham Court Road where they played extensive sets to immersive light shows, providing the sonic accompaniment to a thousand LSD trips. 54 Not that Ballard had much time for either poetry or music. In an interview for Paris Review (1984), Ballard said of Ambit magazine: ‘when people ask me what my policy is as the so-called prose editor I reply that it is to get rid of the poetry that infests the magazine’. Reprinted in Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (eds.), Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J. G. Ballard 1967-2008 (London, 2012), p. 195. As for music, Ballard’s remark when interviewed by Jon Savage (1978) seems conclusive: ‘To be honest, I don’t listen to music. It’s just a blank spot.’ Reprinted in Sellars and O’Hara (eds.), p. 120. See also Simon Sellars, ‘“No-One Dances in Ballard”: An Interview with Mike Ryan’,< http://www.ballardian.com/ballardian-music-mike-ryan-interview> [accessed 11 Jan. 2019]. And yet, despite Ballard’s self-confessed ‘tin ear’ (New Musical Express, 1996: quoted by Sellars), his prose is highly metaphorical and rhythmical, as compressed as poetry, and exhibits, to my ear, a mastery of timing, tone and pitch. 55 The front cover of ICA Bulletin, no. 150 (Aug.-Sept. 1965) featured a photograph of a ‘Press conference on the steps of the Albert Memorial before the Poetry Internationale at the Albert Hall’ (11 June 1965). Among the assembled on the steps are Alex Trocchi and Allen Ginsberg. There is a brief account and photograph of the event on pp. 12- 13: ‘With the assistance of New Departures and Alex Trocchi’s Stigma [sic], an independent Poets Co-operative was formed, which set up a bush-telegraph and filled the Hall to overflowing at less than a week’s notice.’ Michael Horovitz subsequently edited the Penguin anthology Children of Albion: The Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1969). 56 25 October 1965. 57 ICA Bulletin, no. 153 (Dec. 1965), p. 7. Zeitmasse (1955-56) for five woodwinds.Zylus (1959) for percussion. 58 Morton Feldman, ‘A Compositional Problem’, ICA Bulletin, no. 165 (Jan. 1967), p. 16. 18 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered A new Director (or two) In the same month that Pink Floyd played at the ICA, the Institute appointed a new Director to take the organization forwards to Nash House: the zoologist and surrealist painter Desmond Morris. The time was ripe for succession: Herbert Read was now terminally ill, and Roland Penrose was keen to step back from further frontline duties. In appointing Desmond Morris, the ICA was appointing from ‘within’: Morris had been a member of the ICA since its first exhibition, ‘Forty Years of Modern Art’ (1947), and had contributed strongly to its programme over the years. In 1956, he was appointed Head of Granada’s TV Zoological Film Unit at the Zoological Society of London, based at Whipsnade Zoo. In 1957, he surprised artists, scientists and the press alike by curating an exhibition of paintings by two young chimpanzees.59 A natural communicator who was broadly informed, Morris chaired many evenings of discussion at Dover Street. However, the overnight commercial success of his book The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (1967) – immediately serialized with popular impact in the Sunday Mirror – suddenly presented Morris with the financial security to devote his time to further writing projects (from a new base in Malta). He resigned after less than a year in post.60 In November 1967, only four months from opening at its new premises, the ICA acted boldly (and propitiously for Ballard) in appointing as its Director Michael Kustow. Some ten years younger than Morris, Kustow came from a background not in fine art, nor from science, but in radical theatre. After leaving Oxford, and after a spell at a kibbutz, Kustow travelled to France, working for a time in Lyon at Roger Planchon’s Theâtre de la Cité, before enrolling as a postgraduate in the Department of Drama at Bristol University (where, in 1957, Harold Pinter’s first playThe Room had been produced by Henry Woolf). In 1962, Kustow assisted Arnold Wesker at the Roundhouse on the ‘Centre 42’ project, before joining Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). There, he worked alongside poet Adrian Mitchell and playwright Denis Cannan (and others) on a script for Peter Brook’s controversial and experimental play of protest against the Vietnam War, US (1966).61 One of Kustow’s strengths as a candidate for the new role at the ICA was undoubtedly his experience in arts outreach. At the RSC, in 1964, he had edited their new magazine Flourish, and in the following year, he initiated and managed the RSC project ‘Theatregoround’. Radiating from the RSC’s two bases in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, ‘Theatregoround’ was an agile unit of six actors and a fold-up stage which took theatre out on the road to engage with new audiences in schools, colleges 59 Congo from London Zoo, and Betsy from Baltimore Zoo. The exhibition was held at the ICA, 17 September to 12 October 1957. ‘Roland Penrose gave a painting to Picasso since he had given the ICA a painting. When he looked at the picture he could see that it was serious and thought it was splendid. He later famously bit a journalist who asked why he had a painting by an animal in his collection.’ Morris interviewed by Melanie Coles (2016) 19 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered and factories.62 In TANK (1975), Kustow’s novelistic memoir of his two years in post at the ICA, he describes his interview for the job – by what felt like a self-effacing committee – as a ‘scene of incongruous disorder’, a wryly comical clash between old and new, between the familiar clutter of yesterday’s avant-garde – ‘a Miró painting hung nonchalantly between piles of dusty brown files’ – and the urgent organizational change he judged would be required to make a success of the move to Nash House. The ‘long front’ of popular culture that Alloway had described was lengthening: ‘young people were going elsewhere in the city to see and hear new things.’63 After interview, Kustow was despatched to visit Herbert Read – ‘the old man living among Moores in the Yorkshire moors’64 – to receive his seal of approval: ‘although the idiom of generations was different, [Read] sensed a sympathetic spirit in the young man, and recommended he be appointed Director of the Institute.’65 Kustow estimated that the opening party at Nash House, on 22 March 1968, drew ‘a crowd of some three thousand people’, a ‘multicoloured flock’ who ‘claimed’ possession, as he saw it, of the empty white gallery. Read had sent a message to be read out to the guests: ‘I promise you that we shall never relapse into formalism or academicism, but remain what we have been from the beginning, an experimental workshop inspired by the revolutionary ideals that in the past fifty years have transformed the world of art.’66 In 1968, year of contagious political protest and social upheaval across the cities and campuses of Europe and America, year of barricades and occupations, the youthful audience would certainly have been receptive to a plea for ‘revolutionary ideals’, and the desire that the Institute should remain an ‘experimental workshop’ would have also struck a contemporary note. But the idiom of expression, as Read and Kustow both knew, was necessarily different. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, who had presented the ‘happening’ O What a Lovely Whore in 1965, and who had just returned from touring America with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Soft Machine, created the striking ‘light environment’ for the occasion.67 ‘As night fell, the wine took hold, and at 2 a.m. everyone – young, old, straight, freaky, stiff-suited or near-naked – joined in a Bacchanalian dance to the electronic voodoo of an impassive rock group’. Kustow reflected that ‘the birds outside in the trees in St James’s Park had surely never heard such a clamour in their lives’.68 Obsessive images ‘The Obsessive Image: 1960-1968’, the ICA’s opening exhibition curated by Mario Amaya, was a contemporary slice of figurative art. Roland Penrose saw it as ‘an antidote to the current 62 Colin Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution (London, 2004), pp. 41- 2. See also Stephen R. Lawson, ‘The Old Vic to Vincennes: Interviews with Michael Kustow and Peter Brook’, yale/theatre, vol. vii, no. 1 (1975), pp. 78-91. Kustow (p. 81): ‘The first thing we did was a misguided, lunatic and yet rather worthwhile attempt to tell the history of the theatre in an hour and a half [….] Then, suddenly, and this was quite a jump, from melodrama we leaped into Pinter and The Birthday Party. The audience, all turned on by the melodrama, could see, all of a sudden, the very wholesome base of melodrama in Pinter himself. They took The Birthday Party without thinking what a hifaluting, philosophical, complex statement it was, and instead saw these two guys working over this poor guy with his spectacles. So that was the original show.’ 63 For an account of the interview, see Michael Kustow, TANK: An Autobiographical Fiction (London, 1975), pp. 27-30: ‘They conducted the interview gently, almost self-effacingly’ (p. 28). TANK is a novelistic memoir in which the fictional element seems to extend not much further than changes of name: ‘Henry’, for example, for the poet and artist Adrian Henri, and, less obviously, ‘Rosalie’ for the performance artist Carolee Schneemann. 64 Ibid., p. 36. 65 Ibid., p. 37. 66 Ibid., p. 42. 67 Boyle family chronology 20 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered trend towards “minimal” and “conceptual” art’.69 The front cover of the catalogue, derived from René Magritte, displayed the enigmatic silhouette of a bowler-hatted bourgeois (fig. 7). Amaya suggested in his introduction that ‘the landscape of the mind is still where the obsessive image most comfortably resides.’70 The exhibition mixed contemporary work from Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and René Magritte alongside the work of younger artists, including Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and David Hockney, Allen Jones, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. There was a strong surrealistic thread joining the exhibits, ‘the thread of Surrealistic risk’, as Robert Melville put it.71 There are good reasons to think that Ballard might have gone to see ‘The Obsessive Image’. To begin with, on display was the work of some of the artists he most admired. Would he really have not got along to see Ernst, Tanning and Magritte?72 Ballard would subsequently remark that ‘Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition’,73 and in the late 1960s a poster of Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride hung above his writing desk (as a photograph in Ballard’s archive at the British Library clearly shows).74 The themes of the exhibition resonated strongly with many of the preoccupations of The Atrocity Exhibition, preoccupations that were soon to spill over into the still darker waters of Crash. In other words, ‘The Obsessive Image’ threw into aesthetic relief Ballard’s prevailing obsessions. When Amaya referred to the exhibition as ‘a new celebration of anatomy’ in which ‘Organs are investigated with the mock-detachment of an autopsy and body-parts long hidden take on an over life-size importance’,75 he might have been describing the field of enquiry on which Ballard had already embarked. But Amaya had in mind the surrealist eroticist Hans Bellmer who was exhibiting three works, including a new realization of ‘La Poupée’ cast in aluminium.76 In his 69 Roland Penrose, Scrap Book: 1900-1981 (London, 1981), p. 262. 70 Mario Amaya, introduction to the catalogue ‘The Obsessive Image: 1960-68’ (ICA, London, 1968), p. 6. 71 Robert Melville, ibid., p. 4. As Melville records in his prefatory remarks to the catalogue, he was to have curated the exhibition himself but fell ill during preparations and the task fell to Amaya. 72 Dorothea Tanning ‘with her hieratic eyes’. Ballard, ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ (New Worlds, July 1966) < http://www.jgballard.ca/non_fiction/jgb_reviews_surrealism.html> [accessed 27 Jan. 2019]. 73 Ballard, note to ‘The University of Death’, The Atrocity Exhibition, expanded and annotated edition (San Francisco, 1990), p. 21: ‘Max Ernst’s paintings run through The Atrocity Exhibition, in particular “The Eye of Silence” and “Europe After the Rain”. Their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leached, all sense of time.’ 74 British Library, Add. MS. 88938/1/12/4 (photograph ‘A’). See Chris Beckett (ed.), Crash: The Collector’s Edition (London, 2017), pp. 267-8. 75 Mario Amaya, ‘The Obsessive Image: 1960-1968’ (ICA, London, 1968), p. 7. Consider also Amaya’s remarks on p. 8: ‘These obsessive images, with their horror, their humour, their borrowings and their parodied detachment, present themselves in several distinct categories: as vehicles for irrational, imaginative departure, as a means of communicating our cultural environment undiluted, for sexual comment or erotic contemplation, and quite often as a way towards exploring pure abstract form which lurks within every human shape. Sometimes it is all of these combined.’ 76 21 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 7. Catalogue front cover (British Library copy): ‘The Obsessive Image: 1960-1968’. Institute of Contemporary Arts (11 April – 29 May 1968). 22 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered exploration of surrealism, Ballard would certainly have come across Bellmer’s arresting photographs (c. 1935)77 of his fantastic ball-jointed doll in different seductive articulations, artfully posed by door and stair, but the exhibition at the ICA would have been a unique opportunity to see ‘La Poupée’ for himself in a gallery. References to Bellmer’s dolls immediately begin to appear in Ballard’s writing, in ‘The Great American Nude’ (1968) and in ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969), both of which were written following the exhibition: Catherine Talbot stared at the objects of Talbert’s desk. These flaccid globes, like the obscene sculptures of Bellmer, reminded her of elements of her own body transformed into a series of imaginary sexual organs. She touched the pallid neoprene, marking the vents and folds with a broken nail. In some weird way they would coalesce, giving birth to deformed sections of her lips and armpit, the junction of thigh and perineum.78 Humped against his right shoulder, her breasts formed a pair of deformed globes like the elements of a Bellmer sculpture.79 Ballard kept no diary or other record of having visited the exhibition, but these instances in his fiction appear to register, like vivid notebook entries, something memorably seen. The implicit referencing of Bellmer in Crash – in which the erotic doll is redoubled as mannequin and as crash- dummy – provides further testimony of the lingering impact the artist’s work made upon him.80 Over and above these motives of attraction and affinity, there is another compelling reason to believe that Ballard attended the opening exhibition: there were new friendships in his life at the time, people who drew him more closely into the orbit of the new ICA. The person largely responsible was author Michael Moorcock. Ballard and Moorcock became friends in the early 1960s, before, that 77 23 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered is, the sudden death of Ballard’s wife in 1964.81 Moorcock’s friendship was an important personal and professional thread of continuity through these difficult years (in many respects, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash are both books of mourning: ‘Now that Vaughan has died […]’82). In 1964, Moorcock took over as editor of New Worlds, publishing and promoting the ‘new wave’ science fiction of younger writers who were then emerging, with Ballard as their de facto vanguard figure. Moorcock’s appointment presented Ballard with the opportunity to publish challenging work in New Worlds, including fiction for The Atrocity Exhibition, and spurred him to develop in essay form his thoughts about surrealism and ‘inner space’.83 It was in the spring and summer of 1967, during a period of only some six weeks or so, that Moorcock introduced Ballard to three people who would prove to be fundamental to the writing of Crash: in early May, he met the psychologist and computer scientist Christopher Evans; at the end of the same month, he met his future life partner, Claire Walsh; and, in June, having followed the artist’s work avidly from a distance since ‘This Is Tomorrow’, he met Eduardo Paolozzi.84 By his own account, Ballard struck an immediate rapport with each: Ballard and Paolozzi ‘got on famously from the start’; Evans became his ‘closest friend’; and Walsh was ‘the most important person [he] met in the late 1960s’.85 81 ‘I think it was in E. J. Carnell’s office in Grape Street. Jimmy was working for one of the other MacLaren magazines (publisher of New Worlds, which Carnell then edited) – Chemistry and Industry, I think. We had a nodding acquaintance for a while. Then John Brunner and I (this would have been about 1960) decided to call a conference of SF writers, with a view to starting some kind of association. The meeting was very disappointing to me, Barry Bayley and Jimmy. We’d hoped to hear some stimulating stuff about, as it were, a new literature for the space age. Instead all these guys were interested in was ‘how to break into new markets — how to sell to TV’ and so on. United in our disappointment, we started meeting regularly once or twice a week, mostly at the White Swan in Knightsbridge, near where Jimmy was working. After I was married, we became even closer, seeing Jimmy, Mary and their kids pretty regularly. We all got on very well.’ Interview conducted by Mike Holliday (2007): ‘Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard’, 24 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered The impresario for the avant-garde Two weeks before June Rose’s feature about Ballard’s ‘science theatre presentation’ appeared in the Sunday Mirror, science fiction’s ‘new wave’ forward-guard was out in force at the Brighton Festival (4-5 May 1968). Still flourishing today, the Festival was then only in its second year: ‘Science fiction was the major theme – discussed at a weekend conference and reflected in poetry readings, music and film’.86 The conference fell into two broad camps, the traditionalists and a largely younger ‘new wave’ contingency (which included the American authors Thomas Disch and John Sladek). A lively report in The Times characterized the event as an occasion invaded by aliens.87 Michael Kustow, who was also present (the alien from the ICA), concluded that the traditionalists were suffering from ‘anxious ownership syndrome’. Chris Evans (another alien presence) suggested that 2001: A Space Odyssey was so dated that it would be better titled ‘2001 BC’. Ballard’s laconic take was that the film was ‘a Pan-Am instructional film for stewardesses’.88 He was less interested, he said, in imagining an already abandoned future than he was in opening up the fictional present, and he thought that surrealism and pop art offered new ways of ‘expanding a narrative space’. His promotion of ‘non-linear’ narrative did not, however, impress those present who preferred stories with a beginning, a middle and an end (and this group of traditionalists included, perhaps surprisingly, Richard Hamilton).89 ‘Ballard’s intervention’, reported The Times, ‘resembled that of an official receiver at a bankruptcy.’ Kustow’s writings do not suggest any particular interest in science fiction, but in Brighton he was among alien friends.90 Later in May, he travelled to Prague at the invitation of the British Council ‘to see the work of Czechoslovak artists and try to arrange an exhibition of their paintings and sculpture at the Institute, in return for a British art show in Prague’. It is the time of the Prague Spring. On Charles Bridge, he notices the graffiti (a chalked street headline 86 25 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered that reads like a genealogy of the counter-culture): ‘HIERONYMUS BOSCH / EL GRECO / PAUL ELUARD / FRANK ZAPPA’.91 Returning to London, he finds that ‘the Underground press is filled with French wall posters, exultant descriptions of barricades and conflicts with the C.R.S., depicted as the steel-helmeted Anti-Christ’. He is struck by the theatrical character of political events and the speed by which news travels, ‘generating a fall-out of imitation, rituals performed by style-conscious young people in cities across the world’.92 One local example of ‘fall-out’ was the six-week student occupation of Hornsey College of Art (28 May – 12 July 1968). Hearing about the occupation on his return, Kustow ‘rushed out to the art-school and sat late into the night with the occupiers’. By the end of the evening he had invited them to present their case – imitative ritual or not – to the public at the ICA. ‘Within a fortnight, they assembled a didactic exhibition, propounding a different syllabus and new forms of assessment, ran forums involving artists and members of the public, and served good cheap food from a mobile canteen.’93 When considering why Ballard’s event did not take place, it is important to bear in mind not only the ambition of the proposed performance – the considerable distance still to be travelled from outline to production – but also that the rolling programme the ICA offered at the time, over and above its primary exhibitions, was frequently modified, and events – it was an eventful year – were sometimes mounted, and cancelled, at short notice. In a ‘Comment’ article for Studio International (February 1968) which set the scene for the April opening, Kustow described his new job as travelling ‘very fast, and in too many directions at once’.94 He pictured his role as a journey with a constantly revised itinerary as new features suddenly appeared on the cultural landscape. In a later memoir, he described his time at the ICA as being ‘an impresario for the avant-garde’.95 The Brighton conference at the start of May would have provided impresario Kustow with an ideal opportunity to catch up with Ballard and Evans about the show they were planning for him. June Rose’s article in the Sunday Mirror would appear in a fortnight’s time, and the interviews that Ballard and Evans gave her had either just happened or were on the immediate horizon. The matinee idol To say that Ballard was introduced to Chris Evans is to underplay the moment. In his autobiography, Ballard tells it more dramatically: Evans drove into his life. Ballard’s metaphor of the road for the friend who quickly became, as Miracles of Life discloses, the ‘model’ for the protagonist Vaughan in Crash incorporates an apposite sense of sudden collision, of lives colliding. Thinking about Evans, Ballard immediately sees him behind the wheel of a car – ‘a huge American convertible’ – and he sees speed: 91 Michael Kustow, TANK (1975), p. 62. See Linda Maštalíř, ‘Frank Zappa’s Connections to Prague’, 26 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Chris Evans drove into my life at the wheel of a Ford Galaxy, a huge American convertible that he soon swapped for a Mini-Cooper, a high-performance car not much bigger than a bullet that travelled at about the same speed. Chris was the first ‘hoodlum scientist’ I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life. In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.96 Ballard frequently visited Evans at the National Physical Laboratory (at Teddington, not far from his house in Shepperton) where the young scientist is said to have ‘raced around his laboratory in American sneakers, jeans and a denim shirt open to reveal an Iron Cross on a gold chain, his long black hair giving him a handsomely Byronic air’.97 In his mind’s eye, he cannot help but see Evans figuratively. Evans was ‘at his best on the lecture platform, and played to his audience’s emotions like a matinee idol, a young Olivier with a degree in computer science’. Ballard ‘never met a woman who wasn’t immediately under his spell’.98 The description of Evans as ‘Byronic’ is a signal that Evans is here being remembered in part through the prism of the fiction that followed, since Vaughan is also accorded that distinctive adjective in Crash: ‘staring down at the car in a Byronic pose, his heavy penis visible in the tight crotch of his jeans’.99 It is, of course, ‘TV scientist’ Vaughan rather than Evans who is the ‘hoodlum scientist’: Ballard casually deploys his compound neologism as if it were common linguistic currency. Borrowed from film noir and ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction – genres that influenced the melodramatic inflections ofCrash – the American slang ‘hoodlum’ introduces violence and aggression into the portrait: I realized that I had seen his pock-marked face many times before, projected from a dozen forgotten television programmes and news-magazine profiles – this was Vaughan, Dr Robert Vaughan, a one-time computer specialist. As one of the new-style TV scientists, Vaughan had combined a high degree of personal glamour – heavy black hair over a scarred face, an American combat jacket – with an aggressive lecture- theatre manner and complete conviction in his subject matter, the application of computerized techniques to the control of all international traffic systems.100 When did Ballard see Evans lecture? Was it, perhaps, at the ICA in Dover Street, 13 June 1967, only a couple of weeks after their first meeting, that Ballard saw a ‘matinee idol’ speaking about ‘The Contribution of Psychology to the Understanding of Human Vision’? Or was it at the end of that summer, again at Dover Street, on 19 September 1967, when Evans’s subject was ‘The Dreaming Brain’? Ballard stresses that Vaughan is not Evans (just as Catherine Ballard in Crash is not Claire Walsh),101 but the language of imagination and memory are porously joined in his valedictory tribute. If we add the violent connotations of ‘hoodlum’ to the image of Evans driving at the speed of a bullet (more gangland verbal texture), we arrive at a central construct in Crash, a quasi-scientific intersection that echoes the terms of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto: ‘Within the car-crash death was directed by the vectors of speed, violence 96 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, pp. 211-12. 97 Ibid., p. 212 (italics added). 98 Ibid. 99 J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 98. 100 Ibid., p. 63. 101 In the first draft ofCrash (British Library Add. MS. 88938/3/8/1), ‘Catherine Ballard’ is named ‘Claire’. 27 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered and aggression’.102 Evans’s glamour is re-seen as Vaughan’s seediness; the matinee idol is recast as a deranged Anti-Christ; and the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, around which Evans raced, is re-imagined as the Road Research Laboratory of Crash, a hoodlum’s workshop where crash-dummies – dolls by another name – endure their ‘death-ordeals’.103 That imaginative transformation, however, was some twelve months away: Vaughan first appears in the story ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (published in Encounter, September 1969).104 In 1968, the narrator of the event planned for the ICA was still an Olivier with a degree in computer science and, according to Ballard’s outline, a comprehensive understanding – that is, Ballard’s understanding – of ‘the latent nature of the automobile’.105 Dating Ballard’s undated outline for the ICA In the notes that Ballard wrote for the annotated edition (1990) of The Atrocity Exhibition, he identified the story ‘Crash!’ (1969) as ‘the gene from which my novel Crash was to spring’. It is not a claim that Ballard could have easily made for a lost and unpublished draft outline for an event that did not take place, but it is evident that the eight-page document (figs 8-15) stamped ‘Dr Chris Evans’ throughout is, in fact, a prior ‘genetic’ source for the novel. Not a story in the conventional sense, the ‘Crash!’ that Ballard identified as theCrash ‘gene’ takes the form of a parody of a scientific report. The research topic being explored through the responses of groups of research volunteers is ‘the latent sexual content of the automobile crash’ (the very subject of the prior ICA outline). The volunteers resemble the focus groups used by the motivational researchers of Madison Avenue – the so-called ‘depth men’ – whose psychology-driven strategies Packard described in The Hidden Persuaders.106 Here they are put to work upon more unusual material. Two examples will suffice: 102 J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 45. F. T. Marinetti’s The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, first published in Le Figaro (Paris, 20 Feb. 1909), included the declaration: ‘We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’ Other pertinent statements in the Manifesto included: ‘We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap […] We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of his orbit […] No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.’ As translated in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London, 2009), p. 21. In the context of car design, Ballard’s notes (1990) to ‘Crash!’ in the annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition refer to Marinetti’s comparison of the beauty of a fast car to the Greek sculpture of Nike. The winged statue was discovered on the island of Samothrace in 1863, and has been displayed in the Louvre since 1884. 103 J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 129. 104 The second pre-Crash appearance of Vaughan is in ‘Coitus 80’, New Worlds, no. 199 (March 1970). Uncollected by Ballard, but reprinted in Beckett (ed.), Crash: The Collector’s Edition, pp. 330-1. 105 Nancy Evans remembers: ‘as part of the research Chris decided to get a part-time job as a salesman, in Twickenham I think it was. It didn’t last very long but I seem to recall at the end of it he published a feature about it in a newspaper.’ Private communication to Mike Holliday, quoted in Holliday, ‘His Closest Friend: A Profile of Christopher Evans’, in Rick McGrath (ed.), Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology 2016 (Toronto, 2016), p. 216. It is possible that Nancy Evans is remembering Chris Evans’s remarks quoted in June Rose’s article for the Sunday Mirror (19 May 1968). 106 Chapter 3 of Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) is entitled ‘So Ad Men Become Depth Men’. 28 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 8. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 1). 29 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 9. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 2). 30 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 10. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 3). 31 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 11. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 4). 32 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 12. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 5). 33 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 13. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 6). 34 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 14. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 7). 35 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 15. J. G. Ballard, ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’ (p. 8). 36 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Simulated newsreels of politicians, film stars and TV celebrities were shown to panels of (a) suburban housewives, (b) terminal paretics, (c) filling station personnel. Sequences showing auto-crash victims brought about a marked acceleration of pulse and respiratory rates. Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were living, and later used one or other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner. […] Using assembly-kits constructed from photographs of (a) unidentified bodies of accident victims, (b) Cadillac exhaust assemblies, (c) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, volunteers were asked to devise the optimum auto-crash victim. The notional pudenda of crash victims exercised a particular fascination. Choice of subjects was as follows: 75 percent J. F. Kennedy, 15 percent James Dean, 9 percent Jayne Mansfield, 1 percent Albert Camus.107 In the novel Crash, we find that Vaughan has conducted similar exercises. James Ballard looks through Vaughan’s research files, pages of questionnaires completed by a group of subjects who have all experienced a minor or major car-crash.108 They have matched lists of celebrities with a choice of ‘wounds and death-modes’: I turned the pages of Vaughan’s questionnaires. The photographs of Jayne Mansfield and John Kennedy, Camus and James Dean had been marked in coloured crayons, pencil lines circled around their necks and pubic areas, breasts and cheekbones shaded in, section lines across their mouths and abdomens.109 Although the story ‘Crash!’ points thematically to the novel Crash, it does so indirectly and without the momentum that narrative provides. Another story, ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’, the final story from The Atrocity Exhibition to be written, has a more directly narrative relationship to the novel; not only does it introduce the figure Vaughan, it presents him in a characteristic context. Vaughan (‘a young man ina shabby flying jacket’) abruptly approaches Travers in his car and sits down ‘heavily’ beside him, ‘beckoning at the steering wheel with a gesture of sudden authority’. An interlude of some days follows, a road-trip, a ‘grotesque itinerary’ under Vaughan’s tutelage. Along the way, they pick up ‘two teenage girls’ whom Vaughan ‘almost rape[s]’ on the back seat, ‘grappling with them in a series of stylized holds’.110 The episode will be re-inscribed in the car-wash chapter of Crash when Vaughan subjects Catherine Ballard to a violent and ‘stylized’ sexual encounter on the back seat of James Ballard’s car.111 James and Vaughan – and Travers and Vaughan alike – maintain voyeuristic eye-contact through the cars’ rear-view mirrors. ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ was completed before the end of March 1969.112 Ballard had, by then, found his central character and 107 Ballard, ‘Crash!’, The Atrocity Exhibition (London, 2006), pp. 153, 154. 108 J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 132: ‘The subjects who had completed the forms represented a cross-section of Vaughan’s world: two computer programmers from his former laboratory, a young dietitian, several airport stewardesses, a medical technician at Helen Remington’s clinic, as well as Seagrave and his wife Vera, the television producer and Gabrielle.’ 109 Ibid., p. 135. 110 Ballard, ‘Crash!’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2006), pp. 105, 106. 111 Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 161. James Ballard narrates: ‘I felt that this act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision.’ 112 Letter (11 June 1969), Ballard to his Danish translator Jannick Storm. Quoted by David Pringle, ‘A Ballard / Moorcock Chronology: January 1966 to December 1970’, in Rick McGrath (ed.), Deep Ends: A Ballardian Anthology 2018 (Powell River, British Columbia, 2018), p. 186. 37 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered was beginning to reach for the shape of Vaughan’s ‘deranged’ narrative. He would start to draft Crash in December 1969.113 When was the undated outline for the ICA written? Internal evidence suggests an answer. On p. 5 of the outline (fig. 12) Ballard writes: ‘The safety engineer hypothesises various disasters, from simple head-on collisions to the elaborate disasters that involved Kennedy, Jayne Mansfield, Dean and Dorleac.’ By the time that Ballard came to draft his ‘science theatre presentation’, the deaths of James Dean (1955) and John Kennedy (1963) had receded into the past, but Mansfield and Dorléac were more recent fatalities. The French film actress Françoise Dorléac (sister of Catherine Deneuve) died on 26 June 1967 when she lost control of her car some ten kilometres from Nice at the Villeneuve-Loubet exit of the A8 autoroute La Provençale. Just three days later, 29 June 1967, Jayne Mansfield was killed on US Highway 90 when the car in which she was travelling crashed into the back of a tractor-trailer. However, there is a later date indicated on p. 6 of the outline (fig. 13) when Ballard refers to ‘the deaths of Dean and Kennedy, Mansfield and Jim Clarke sic[ ]’. Scottish racing driver Jim Clark, who died in an accident at Hockenheimring, Germany, was also mentioned when Ballard was interviewed by June Rose for the Sunday Mirror. The date of Clark’s death, 7 April 1968, when the racing driver veered from the track and fatally crashed into nearby trees, is the latest date-marker in Ballard’s text. Clark’s inclusion in the outline, and in Ballard’s remarks to Rose, served to attach the proposed ICA performance piece to the recent news agenda. The outline was therefore probably typed during April 1968, shortly before, that is, the science fiction conference in Brighton at the start of May. The ICA outline as a foundation text for Crash The extent to which the ICA outline seeded the story ‘Crash!’ is apparent from the many instances of text taken directly from the outline that reappear in ‘Crash!’ The table below gives a number of examples: Crash!’ (‘science theatre presentation’) ‘Crash!’ (The Atrocity Exhibition) ‘Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish ‘From this and similar work it is clear that between the manifest content of the inner Freud’s classic distinction between the world of the mind and its latent or real content. manifest and latent content of the inner world This distinction now has to be applied to the of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality.’ (fig. 8, p. 1) outer world of reality’ (Expanded edition, 2006, p. 156). latent identity of the machine can be seen in ‘An understanding of this identity can be the automobile, which dominates the vectors found in a study of the automobile, which of speed, aggression, violence and desire’ dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, (fig. 9, p. 2) violence and desire’ (p. 156). ‘Far from being the unqualified tragedy we ‘It is clear that the car crash is seen as all assume it to be, the car crash may in fact a fertilizing rather than a destructive be perceived as a fertilizing, rather than a experience, mediating the sexuality of destructive, element, a liberation of sexual those who have died with an erotic intensity and machine libido, mediating the sexuality impossible in any other form’ of those who have died with an intensity (p. 157) impossible in any other form’ (fig. 9, p. 2) 113 Ibid., p. 194. ‘As for my next novel, have been working hard since December, and must have 20,000 words done. Coming along strongly but uncertainly.’ Letter (28 January 1970), Ballard to Jannick Storm, quoted by Pringle. 38 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered ‘a dramatic examination of the real identity ‘The latent sexual content of the automobile of the car crash’ (fig. 9, p. 2) crash’ (p. 153). ‘laboratory volunteers, panels of suburban ‘Panels consisting of drive-in theatre housewives, mental defectives and car-crash personnel, students and middle-income victims’ (fig. 12, p. 5) housewives’ (p. 155) ‘The safety engineer obliges, describing a ‘The optimum wound profile’ (p. 155) hypothetical optimum wound profile which they have yet to discover’ (fig. 13, p. 6) ‘the notion of the conceptual auto-disaster’ ‘The conceptual auto disaster’ (p. 155) (fig. 13, p. 6) ‘this optimum car death’ (fig. 13, p. 6) ‘The optimum auto-disaster’ (p. 155) ‘He tells the audience of the increased sexual ‘Relatives of auto-crash victims showed a potency that will result from their attending similar upsurge in both sexual activity and this performance at the ICA’ (fig. 14, p. 7) overall levels of general health’ (p. 153) talks in a rambling way about the sexual ‘Behaviour of spectators at automobile behaviour of spectators at car accidents’ (fig. accidents’ (p. 154) 14, p. 7) Ballard’s writing during this period typically exhibits an idiosyncratic lexicon drawn from a variety of linguistic registers, from scientific reports to car brochures and surgical manuals. Words and phrases are re-combined and shared between texts that overlap and repeat, as if message and meaning were being hypnotically encoded. The reference to ‘manifest and latent content’ in the opening sentence of the outline – in which Ballard re-applies terms familiar from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to ‘the outer world of reality’ – can also be found in ‘The University of Death’ (1968). The enduring significance to Ballard of this adapted Freudian terminology can be inferred from the fact that the same phrasing re-appeared not only in the author’s introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), but also in his revised introduction (1995) to the novel. The distinctive phrase ‘transliterated pudenda’ (fig. 9, p. 2) also appears in ‘The University of Death’ as well as in ‘The Death Module’ (1967, re-named ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’), and it is also to be found in the text of Ballard’s first conceptual advertisement, ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (1967).114 However, the extent of the textual transfer from the outline for the ICA to the story ‘Crash!’ summarized in the table above goes beyond the terms of an aesthetic of repetition and reiteration: it confirms the ‘genetic’ priority of the outline for the projected performance at the ICA. Having sketched theme and subject at the beginning of the outline (‘the real identity of the car crash’), and having suggested how the performance will be ‘expressed’ (‘continuous film projection’, ‘plaster dummies’, ‘a narrative space for five actors’), Ballard proceeds to 114 ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ [i.e. Claire Walsh] was first published on the back cover ofAmbit , no. 32 (Summer 1967), shortly after Ballard and Walsh first met. It comprises a full-face portrait with the following text: ‘HOMAGE TO CLAIRE CHURCHILL, Abraham Zapruder and Ralph Nader. At what point does the plane of intersection of these eyes generate a valid image of the simulated auto-disaster, the alternate deaths of Dealey Plaza and the Mekong Delta. The first of a series advertising (1) Claire Churchill; (2) The angle between two walls; (3) A neural interval; (4) The left axillary fossa of Princess Margaret; (5) The transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader. A J. G. BALLARD PRODUCTION.’ Reprinted (with four further conceptual advertisements) in Beckett (ed.), Crash: The Collector’s Edition, pp. 272-3. The advertisements are available online at: 39 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered describe the ‘Drama’ (figs 10-15, pp. 3-8). The film projection and the enacted drama proposed will show ‘automobiles in all their roles’. In fact, the settings listed (under ‘Technique’, fig. 9, p. 2) foreshadow many of the key settings of the novel to come. The ‘star’, as Rose’s article described the car on stage, will be presented in the showroom (Crash, Chapter 19, the motor show at Earls Court), in the carwash (Chapter 17), on the motorway, on the speedway track (Chapter 9, stock-car races at Northolt), in the ‘road safety laboratory’ (Chapter 13, the ‘Road Research Laboratory’), and from car-crash to ‘car-crusher’ (car breaker’s yard and police car pound, Chapters 7, 21, 24). In the fluid performance described, the ‘science lecturer’ (Evans) is first a car salesman, then a ‘road safety engineer’, and finally ‘an ambulance attendant’. Evans’s sequence of roles reflects the shape of the performance, a compressed and darkly surreal journey from new car to car-crash, from wounds to fatality. The sales context that Ballard initially presents has the anachronistic feel of an early post- war American car advertisement, a perception that seems to be confirmed by the choice of film footage to be shown as the sale is completed: ‘the screen shows a hosanna advertising commercial of a happy middle-income family taking possession of a new delivery, dream colonial mansion in the background’ (fig. 11, p. 4). Consider for comparison the advertisement for a Buick Roadmaster (‘a ride that’s like a dream’) reproduced in Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, in which the comfortable Buick convertible is shown parked on the driveway of a substantial residence (fig. 16). The tagline reads: ‘Only one thing is needed to complete this picture […]. That’s you.’115 In Ballard’s drama, a family group of four – mother, father, son and fiancée – are looking for a car, a ‘special car’. However, the sales scenario quickly departs from convention: the ‘special car’ that the son is looking for (he is ‘about to get married, has his way to make in the world, a family to raise’) is identified as the crashed vehicle on stage. The dummies sat inside are asked by the family what they like about the vehicle. A ‘mysterious voiceover’ gives their response: ‘fragments of data about wound-areas, impact deformations, the most popular makes etc.’ (fig. 10, p. 3). What is being bought, and what is being sold in this transaction? The projected performance at the ICA is a form of sacrificial narrative on the altar of the automobile: it bears the imprint of Sir Geoffrey Crowther’s ‘monster’. When the scene shifts to a road safety laboratory, the son climbs in beside the crash dummies; at the ‘speed track’, he dons a silver suit ‘like a kamikaze pilot’. Metering coils are attached to ‘various possible and hoped-for would areas’ (fig. 14, p. 7). Inevitably, it seems, the young man is destined to die in a head-on collision. Evans the lecturer, after discoursing upon ‘the more experimental research done on auto-disasters’, will conclude that ‘even the audience watching this play, is waiting for this optimum car death, a second coming that will embrace all these unconscious desires’ (fig. 13, p. 6). The audience is to be advised that they may experience an increase in sexual potency as a result of witnessing the crash drama.116 The performance ends with the fiancée climbing into the crashed car beside her husband-never-to-be ‘to make love to his dead body’. The closing film footage projected is of an audience looking up, ‘facing the audience at the ICA, while the sounds of car horns, collisions, traffic jams, fade out’. At the close, spectators are left looking at spectators. I have referred to the car-collision as spectacle in Crash. The perverse assertion that the experience of a car-crash, or its aftermath, might have some positive outcome – that is, the notion proposed in the ICA outline that such an event is ‘fertilizing’ – is fictionally rendered in Crash at several points, not least the pivotal scene of Vaughan’s death where ‘at least five hundred people had gathered on every verge and parapet, drawn there by the news that [Elizabeth Taylor] had narrowly missed her death’.117 Elsewhere in the novel, in Chapter 17, the collision of three cars ‘at the junction of the eastern descent ramp of the flyover and Western 115 Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951), p. 83. 116 June Rose’s article in the Sunday Mirror (19 May 1968) ends with the suggestion that Evans’s advice should not be taken too seriously: ‘Only members of the Institute of Contemporary Arts will see the production. For them, lecturer Evans, tongue in cheek, promises “increased sexual potency”.’ 117 J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973), p. 221. 40 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 16. Advertisement for Buick Roadmaster, from Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (1951). 41 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Avenue’ brings traffic to a halt. Vaughan, James and Catherine Ballard are caught up in the traffic jam. A crowd quickly gathers, spectators ‘three deep’, including children ‘lifted on their parents’ shoulders to give them a better view’. Eventually, the crowd disperses, invigorated and psychologically nourished: The last of the ambulances drove away, its siren wailing. The spectators returned to their cars, or climbed the embankment to the break in the wire fence. An adolescent girl in a denim suit walked past us, her young man with an arm around her waist. He held her right breast with the back of his hand, stroking her nipple with his knuckles. They stepped into a beach buggy slashed with pennants and yellow paint and drove off, horn hooting eccentrically. A burly man in a truck-driver’s jacket helped his wife up the embankment, a hand on her buttocks. This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners.118 In the drama for the ICA, Ballard proposes that Chris Evans then ‘talks in a rambling way about the sexual behaviour of spectators at car accidents’ (fig. 14, p. 7). ‘Rambling’ is a manner of excited address associated more with Vaughan – as if Ballard had had a precognition about his yet unrealised protagonist – than with the measured and cogent articulation of scientist Evans. In the episode from Crash, the crowd disperses in a celebratory mood: the burly truck-driver’s hand on his wife’s buttocks as he helps her up the embankment enacts the lift and fillip of the occasion. Vaughan, James and Catherine Ballard drive to the carwash where, stirred by what they have just witnessed, Vaughan engages Catherine in a violent sexual encounter on the back seat as James watches, a front-seat spectator. Ballard’s sense of how he might manage the car-crash related material he had been obsessively working over since the mid-1960s eventually evolved to the point where, as he began to draft Crash in December 1969, he saw the possibility of a longer narrative emerging, a surprising prospect, perhaps, for a writer who had, since the mid-1960s – and at the Brighton science fiction conference – practised and advocated ‘non-linear’ fiction as the only adequate formal response to a fragmented world.119 With hindsight, we might conclude that the outline for the proposed performance had served its larger purpose insofar as it had usefully drawn together settings and themes that would soon be transformed and recast as the novel Crash. Ballard’s new narrative would not revolve around a stereotypical family unit. The central character would not be an innocent looking to purchase a ‘special car’. Instead, he is an outsider, a Dionysian and would-be redemptive Anti-Christ who gathers about him a family of sorts, a cohort of crash-damaged survivors, including the narrator. But that transformative process of the imagination was still up ahead, waiting in the middle distance. More immediately, the outline for the performance at the ICA provided much source material for the story ‘Crash!’. That story was ephemerally published by the ICA in the following year, on the back of its folding monthly ‘eventsheet’ for February 1969 (fig. 17). The story’s publication under the same title as the proposed ‘science theatre presentation’, re-purposing much of its language, marked the closing-of-the-door on an outline in draft for a performance that never was. Ballard kept no copy. 118 Ibid, p. 157. 119 ‘W e live in quantified non-linear terms – we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did.’ Ballard in conversation with George MacBeth (1967), reprinted in Sellars and O’Hara (eds.), Extreme Metaphors, p. 7. 42 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 17. ‘Crash!’ by J. G. Ballard, first published on the verso of the Institute of Contemporary Arts ‘eventsheet’ for February 1969. 43 eBLJ 2019, Article 8