Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture by Linda S. Kauffman

Author:Linda S. Kauffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-02-09T04:53:00+00:00

No wonder Ballard has a cult following among technoculture freaks and heavy metal aficionados; these are the same groups (Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails, and Danzig) that feature Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose exploring sadomasochistic impulses that would make their parents shudder. When Heavy Metal interviewed Ballard in 1982., he noted:

A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true.... Everybody's going to be starring in their own porno films as extensions of the polaroid camera. Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time, like "Rite of Spring" in Disney's Fantasia ... our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we've invoked. (J(;B, 155)

Destroy and renew: neither a prophet of doom nor a naive extoller of technology's virtues, Ballard has never been a typical sci-fi writer. Science fiction was born of mid-twentieth-century optimism; it reflected an interest in technology, the future, and outer space, which quickly bored him. Modern science fiction was the first casualty of the world it helped to create. To Ballard, 2001: A Space Odyssey "signified the end of the heroic period of modern science fiction-its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, reminded me of Gone with the Wind, a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate" (JGB, 97).

In contrast to Kubrick's hermetically sealed world, in Ballard's, history is never far from mind. The past, for instance, was a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, which by definition forced us to think prospectively: "So in turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us.... We live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly" (JGB, 97). To Ballard, the cyberpunk movement is already over, because its imagery now pervades mainstream culture, in advertising, television, and fashion." It is not easy to portray the banality of everyday life while simultaneously documenting the minute process by which its materiality is bleached out, reduced to the level of abstraction, as in a Details fashion layout. (See Fig. 33 later in this chapter.)

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