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JG Ballard's 'Crash! a Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA'

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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’. 1 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered Fig. 1. Sunday Mirror (19 May 1968), p. 17. 2 eBLJ 2019, Article 8 J. G. Ballard’s ‘Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA’: The Context of a Document Newly Discovered 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.). 3 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 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.
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