The cosmic clock with Ballard at its core
I first wrote to JG Ballard about Donald Crowhurst, the lone yachtsman who disappeared at sea in 1969 after his failed attempt to be first to sail non-stop around the world. I had just returned from photographing Crowhurst's abandoned trimaran on the Caribbean island of Cayman Brac, so I sent him a picture of it and asked what he thought. The name, Crowhurst, at the very least, sounded like one of his characters. I received a letter back in what became his familiar handsome handwriting on his Shepperton-headed notepaper. No, he had no particular interest in Crowhurst and considered him to have been a foolish man, but his boat looked like one of those second world war crashed aircraft still being found in the jungles of the Pacific islands, which he supposed, in a way, it was.
Now, some time down the line, I can understand why Ballard would have had no truck with Crowhurst. As someone who had had to bring up his children alone, he would not have approved of Crowhurst's abandonment of his family, nor his level of self-delusion and human failing. Ballard's psychological experiments took place elsewhere; he was not interested in pity. He never showed compassion for any of his characters.
My relationship to Ballard had begun a little earlier, with our mutual interest in the work of the US artist Robert Smithson. In 1997, I tried to find Smithson's famous 1970 earthwork, Spiral Jetty, in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. I had directions faxed to me from the Utah Arts Council, which I supposed had been written by Smithson himself. I only knew what I was looking for from what I could remember of art school lectures: the iconic aerial photograph of the basalt spiral formation unfurling into a lake. In the end, I never found it; it was either submerged at the time, or I wasn't looking in the right place. But the journey had a marked impact on me, and I made a sound work about my attempt to find it. Ballard must have read about it, because he sent me a short text he had written on Smithson, for an exhibition catalogue.
It was the writer, curator and artist Jeremy Millar who became convinced Smithson knew of Ballard's short story, The Voices of Time, before building his jetty. All Smithson's books had been listed after his death in a plane crash in 1973 - and The Voices of Time was among them. The story ends with the scientist Powers building a cement mandala or "gigantic cipher" in the dried-up bed of a salt lake in a place that feels, by description, to be on the very borders of civilisation: a cosmic clock counting down our human time. It is no surprise that it is a copy of The Voices of Time that lies beneath the hand of the sleeping man on the picnic rug in the opening scenes of Powers of Ten, Charles and Ray Eames' classic 1977 film about the relative size of things in the universe.
Smithson understood the prehistory of his site. Beneath the Great Salt Lake was, for some, the centre of an ancient universe, and his jetty could have been an elaborate means to bore down to get to it. As if understanding this, Ballard wrote in the catalogue text: "What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty?" He elaborated later to me in a letter: "My guess is that the cargo was a clock, of a very special kind. In their way, all clocks are labyrinths, and can be risky to enter." The two men had a lot in common, and Ballard believed him to be the most important and most mysterious of postwar US artists. My interest in time, cosmic and human, future and past, as well as the analogue spooling of the now, has Ballard at its core.
Ballard said that he would have liked to be a painter, and his proximity to art was a close one. He had artist friends, including Eduardo Paolozzi, but what he particularly loved was surrealism, once stating, in an interview with the art critic William Feaver, that one of the things he most admired in Salvador Dalí was that he would never be "recuperated by good taste". He was a man of his time, but also stood apart from it. He remarked in an interview around the publication of Miracles of Life that, in the late 1940s, the British behaved more like they'd lost the war than won it; this pessimism made for a dysfunctional British modernism, if one at all, with little buoyancy and no clear trajectory within British art, until the advent of pop as a movement spawning something new.
I think Ballard's dystopian vision appealed to generations later than his own, those who had spent their childhoods in newly built cityscapes already in decline, in the underpasses and overpasses of 1960s construction. Pop art might have given us the freedom to use the detritus of the everyday, but Ballard gave us the aesthetic language of entropy, one particular to the civic space, motorway or industrial complex. Although Ballard was clear that his descriptions were of the present rather than the future, their prescience is uncanny: that London might one day be underwater no longer feels unlikely, and that catastrophe is close at hand is, as we now know, true.
Ballard liked the idea of the exhibition. He devised a number himself, including his show of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab, London, in 1970; he wrote about them and was a frequent visitor to them. As he explained in an interview with the curator and art critic, Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition for him was not a display of artworks, but a radical statement about the human imagination on a par with neuroscience and nuclear physics. For Jimmy, as I called him latterly, the human brain was an exhibition he delighted in visiting.
• Life, work and tributes A comprehensive guide to JG Ballard, including interviews and his own writing guardian.co.uk/books/jgballard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/27/tacita-dean-jg-ballard-art
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