Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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6.5.06 1971, dammit

Spent Thursday afternoon with the most wonderful Cathy Ward in her Shoreditch studio, and came away with strange gain: a rare copy of a five-page interview with the sci-fi writer JG Ballard and his friend the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Ballard... manages to say, far more elegantly than I ever could, several things that have been occupying my mind about art and society recently:

"Surrealism took one of its main inspirations from psychoanalysis, accepted the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. But one, the world of the mind, is largely ruled by the laws of fictions, by one's dreams, visions, impressions and so on, and the whole idea of the unconscious as a narrative stage. Surrealism moulds the two worlds together, remakes the external world of reality in terms of the internal world of fantasy and fictions.

Now what has happened, and one reason why there are really no Surrealist painters in the true sense of the term today, is that this position has been reversed. It's the external world which is now the realm, the paramount realm of fantasy. And it's the internal world of the mind which is the one node of reality that most of us have. The fiction is all out there. You can't overlay your own fiction on top of that. [...] The environment is fulled with more diction and fantasy than any of us can singly isolate. It's no longer necessary for us individually to dream."

And on the self-infliction of violence/harm as a form of entertainment and societal or experiental one-upmanship, a subject Cathy and I have been somewhat obsessing about since hearing Rod Dickinson talk about the Waco Reenactment. Dickinson was only interested in, so to speak, what he was selling; Cathy and I were much more fascinated by why people were buying it - why a bunch middle-class, ICA-going punters would pay cash money be bussed to a disused sports ground in Essex and be subjected to FBI psychological warfare methods. Anyway, over to Jim:

"I think violence is going to play the same role in the 70s and 80s that sex played in the 50s and 60s. [...] the death of feeling, that one's more and more alienated from any kind of direct response to experience. And the car crash is probably the only act of violence most of us in Western Europe are ever going to be involved with, is probably the most dramatic event in our lives apart from our own deaths, and in many cases the two are going to coincide.

Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of finger-tip and nerve ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertiese is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch, where violence is just a style."

The interview dates from 1971. I cannot find a copy on the internet.

( 3:42 AM )

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