When in Doubt, Quote Ballard
SAJ2 contributor Tim Chapman has onlined a great interview he conducted with Iain Sinclair. They mostly discuss JG Ballard, and there’s plenty of other interesting material if you’re not part of the car crash set.
Ballard has said in the past that if he had his time again he’d be a painter. It seems now that he almost wants to be a sociologist.
Maybe not so much a painter as a very good art critic — not in an academic sense, but as someone with the language and the eye to break an image down. That takes in being a form of social critic or geographer, an essayist in the sense that someone like Paul Virilio is. There is an interface between the world of the catalogue and copywriting for Mercedes cars and the film script for a porn movie — all of these things intersect in something that he’s not embarrassed to cut together.
Talking about geography, you’re very much associated with the psychogeography movement…
Have you seen this book that’s just come out on psychogeography that tries to incorporate Ballard into that group? You make of him what you will, but I don’t think he’s in any way a psychogeographer, and I don’t think he’d use those terms himself at all. I think the aspect of him they’ve drawn on is the notion of a spatial geography, of particular lines and movements that you make in describing a city’s geometry, which he does with the multistorey carparks and bridges and motorways and all of that.
