J.G. Ballard, David Pelham, and the Glory Days of Collaborative Art in Book Publishing

This is a bit old of a posting, but I'm reposting a link to it nevertheless. I found it at one of my favorite sites, Ballardian.com. This site is great to dig around in if you're a fan of Ballard's work. Not just because there are tons of great essays on his work itself, but because it features a lot of great pictorials of art that's been inspired by his writing. (Too many to post links to even all my favorites, dig around and you'll see.)

I'm reposting a link to this story about his collaboration with early publisher David Pelham for Penguin because it's a kind of testament to this. Pelham only plays somewhat into the the essay itself, which delves somewhat deeper into the visual aspects of Ballard's work and its influences. But the part about Pelham alone is interesting. I'll quote, since it's near the bottom:

"For Ballard the images of surrealism[...]informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre[...]to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself."

The essay describes that Pelham's friendship with Ballard was one reason he chose to design them, but the fact that he came up with these designs, which have become icons in their own right, says something about worthy about the spirit of collaboration in earlier book packaging. Ballard's style is, as the writer points out, intensely visual; this is one of the reasons why Ballard-inspired visual art is nearly ubiquitous and almost an art subculture in its own right. (And so often so, so good.) But it's rare now, even with bestselling books, that you see that kind of iconic cover art.

(You will, though, read stories like Alec Soth's recent blog about a book publisher who, when turned down by Soth to use a much-redesigned version of one of his photos for a cover, went ahead and used the redesigned version anyway. Is that forced collaboration?)

The more important message is how Ballard's writing style has influenced so many other forms of visual work. Book covers may become irrelevant with the advent of Kindle, much like how Peter Saville declared, a few years ago, that album covers are dead. But I don't think that the actual "spirit of collaboration" is going anywhere, and if anything is just getting more interesting, since there are more mediums to work with it in.

So if a bit sad that we don't get as iconic packaging with contemporary writers we like (not that there are not good book covers--Joseph Sullivan had a cool blog on the NYTimes site about this which is now sadly defunct), the digital plus is that now sites like Ballardian.com are able to post scans of the originals online, for those of us who don't have actual copies. So we can print out hi-res posters instead, and stick them on our wall, along with our old Factory records.

Experiments with the Dreamachine

In my last post I wrote about the experience of seeing "Inception" and how the theater experience of it seemed to have a persistent lucid-dream ripple effect. More recently (Thursday) I went to see the Brion Gysin exhibit at the New Museum, and I have been thinking about that more.

Gysin might be known most for his close friendship with William S. Burroughs, and his development of the cut-up technique in literature and art that Burroughs later utilized in his own writing. (He was a mentor also to Keith Haring and Patti Smith, and also friend to Genesis P-Orridge.) But Gysin's body of work spanned decades, starting with his involvement with the Surrealists in Paris (though he was expelled from the group early on), throughout the '40s and '50s when he began developing the use of Japanese calligraphy techniques, and then finally with the Beat movement, and he was prolific in virtually every medium. The New Museum has curated a comprehensive exhibit of his interdisciplinary work, and walking around it gives you at least a nebulous idea of how interesting it must have been to be inside Gysin's head.

It includes: his painting, his photographs, his painting-photograph cut-up collages (several of the Centre Pompidou being erected), his notebooks, his poetry, collaborations with jazz artists, drawings, films, slide projections. What made Gysin so constantly relevant as an artist is that he didn't stick to one medium so much as he mastered it enough to draw upon it while he was working on an idea. Contemplating the erection of Pompidou outside his window in Paris, mentally working out the time-sequence of a building in construction, he would fill in a painted blueprint of the scaffolding with small cut-outs of photographs of the scaffolding in visual context.

He was an experimenter, and he was also a mental cartographer. So many of the ideas behind his work are not about communicating one concept but communicating the different levels, stages, that a concept goes through before it's applied in material form. The psychology of creation. With his camera, pencil, paper, easel: testing, testing, and charting the territory. One pointing on display, as my friend pointed out, looked a lot like the graphics in Pro Tools when you're arranging a song; and we wondered whether the developers of Pro Tools had seen this work when they were creating the visuals of the software, or if it's just another example of Gysin being ahead of his time.

But the most interesting work on display is something that he invented in the early '60s called the "Dreamachine." (You can read more about it here. There was also a documentary about it made in 2008.) It sits within a small dark chamber. Inside, a tall cylinder with a lightbulb mounted at its base, with concentric slits on all sides, spins at 78 rpm on a turntable. Kneeling on cushions around the "machine," you are encouraged to hold your nose about 6 to 8 inches from the spinning cylinder, and close your eyes.

Gysin developed his machine after reading (along with Burroughs and mutual friend Ian Sommerville) the book "The Living Brain," by neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter, on brain waves and their corresponding functions. Sommerville developed a prototype: Gysin turned it into a machine and eventually patented it. In experiments rather than museum visits, the experience is described as: flashing lights first behind closed eyelids turn to patterns and mosaics; after more extended time, the patterns turn into vivid landscapes and shapes.

It's difficult to have this experience at the New Museum. There's no closed door to the exhibit, and the background noise can be distracting. It's physically a bit uncomfortable; you have this sensation that your eyes are pulsing behind the lids, like you're blinking constantly even though your eyes are closed, and once or twice I had my fingertips at the sides of my eyes like I needed to shut the lids closed. Nevertheless the visual experience does have a trajectory. Mine began with: blinking lights; bright lines of color, wavering, like lines on bad satellite TV connection. I didn't see shapes, exactly, until in the last of five minutes, when something like a ferris wheel started revolving around the center of my eyelid-canvas.

At the entrance to the exhibit you learn that software developers in more recent years have created computer applications that mimic the experience of the Dreamachine. (An interesting parallel to the recent news explosion about i-Dosing. Parents are concerned that their kids are having a drug-like experience using just internet--you'd think they'd be grateful, when it's way less toxic than sniffing glue.) There are a few that are free on the web, and I've been experimenting with this one. [Note: again, not for epileptics.]

I find it works better if you close your eyes as soon as you press start. It's a lot less powerful than Gysin's dreamachine at the exhibit, though optically it's more comfortable. Sitting still, nose near the screen, and closing your eyes, you have the sense that you're about to do something like meditate, but the experience isn't actually like that at all. With the speed of the lights and the reflexive moment of your eyes, you're too engaged optically in what's happening in your eyelid-tapestry.

LCD as light source, there's less colors to have "kaleidoscope," and I haven't gotten into the sense of light turning into shapes. But it is a lot like lucid dreams. Optically, your eyes are reacting too fast to allow your mind to lull, but after a few minutes, for me, anyways, my eyes will tune out and other images will slip in for split-seconds; like someone's profile or the exterior of a building. Until my eyes twitch and the still-illuminated menu bar at the bottom of the screen will slip in instead, a static white line of noise in the lower-quarter of the tapestry.

And it is like lucid dreaming. The speed of the lights tricks you also into having the sense that more time is passing than is. When your cell-phone alarm goes off and you open your eyes--you wake up.