Page 45 - Studio International - October 1970

concept art and sub-Christo, can one say 8 `... for the imagination to reach into the world of
sub-Barry Flanagan ? Is such a thing possible ? modern technology ... '
Line study for screenprint 1971
And they see 11 all the time in the pages of 9 ' ... objects in the fine-art tradition
Studio International. I think that kind of thing Three American Heroes 1971
needs to be said. They're all hooked on ironic Rubber
statements now. You know, someone fills a Coll: Krazy Kat Arkive
Photo: Artur Laskus
room with mud, so now we've got to fill a room
to 'Things like... Bunk which is, in fact, a series...
with mud that's been chromium-plated. the images first shown at the Independent Group
WHITFORD: Jim, were you aware of the meeting'.
Three Collages from Bunk (first shown at the
Independent Group while 11 was going on ? Independent Group in 1952, but made earlier).
BALLARD: I remember going to the 'This is Bunk will be published privately by the artist later
Tomorrow' exhibition in 1956, a long, long time this year.
ago. But if that show were to be mounted now I Photos: Cuming Wright-Watson
think 11 would be as fresh and as revolutionary 11 'They're all hooked on ironic statements now'.
in many ways. I think you have to give Pop Avant-Garde ? ! 1971
Silk-screen
painters every credit for what they did. They Published by Bernard Jacobson
liberated the external environment, perceived
11 at first glance. But now I think we need to
look at the external environment at second
glance and look beyond the worlds of consumer
goods and mass iconography. You'd agree with
that, wouldn't you ?
PAOLOZZI : Well, you know the bombs at the
Tate are my answer to the Brillo boxes.
BALLARD: To go to the Whitechapel in 1956 and
to see my experience of the real world being
commented upon, played back to me with all
kinds of ironic gestures, that was tremendously
exciting. I could really recreate the future, that
was the future, not the past. And Abstract
Expressionism struck me as being about
yesterday, was profoundly retrospective,
profoundly passive, and 11 wasn't serious. Why
I became a science-fiction writer—of marginal
interest—was because the future was clearly
better and the past was clearly worse. Abstract 11
Expressionism didn't share the overlapping,
jostling vocabularies of science, technology,
advertising, the new realms of communication.
`This is Tomorrow' came on a year before the
flight of the first Sputnik, but the technologies
that launched the space age were already
underpinning the consumer-goods society in
those days. How much of this did Abstract
Expressionism represent ? If an art doesn't
embrace the whole terrain, all four horizons, it's
worth nothing.
WHITFORD: The other day I inferred-from
something you said that, in your view, visual
artists now more often produce relevant
statements than writers do, that the fine arts
today seem curiously more able to find
metaphors for contemporary life than poets
or novelists. Is this fair enough ?
BALLARD: In the fine arts there was a major
revolution somewhere about 1860 and in the
field of literature that revolution hasn't yet
taken place. There's a consciousness in English
life that we also lack, a missing revolution here,
too, which would have redefined the landscape.
The fact is that the main tradition in the fine
arts for the last 5o years at least has been the
tradition of the new. The main pressure on the
sculptor or painter is the pressure of the new.
The new to the new. But in literature the main
tradition is the tradition of the old. Where
Eduardo and his fellow painters and sculptors
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