INTERNAL LANDSCAPES:

IMAGES OF INNER SPACE

ILLUSTRATING THE WORK OF J.G. BALLARD
 INTERNAL LANDSCAPES:
IMAGES OF INNER SPACE
ILLUSTRATING THE WORK OF J.G. BALLARD

J.G. BALLARD (1930-2009) is a British author often associated with Science

Fiction, but was by his own admission more interested in the darker corners the “ I originally wanted a large format book,
late 20th Century imagination than the darker corners of Space. Emerging as he
did in a century torn apart by mass wars and rebuilt by mass-media, fetishistic printed by photo-offset, In which I would
consumerism and lifestyle pornography, his short stories, novellas and novels
are marked by their rich imagery, surreal spatial constructs, dystopian modern produce the artwork - a lot of collages,
symbolism, the exploration of the evolving violence of the human condition and the
internal conflicts of what Ballard termed ‘Inner Space’ material taken from medical documents and
Amongst fans of J.G. Ballard there is something of a consensus that whilst his medical photographs, crashing cars and all
that sort of iconography ”
writing is overwhelmingly rich in visual description and intricate detail, there are
very few examples of illustration, cover artwork and graphic design that do justice
to this potential. More often than not his books are let down by art direction which
at it’s best hints at the content, and at worst bears no relation to the content at all.

Notable exceptions include the blasted atomic landscapes of the mid-70’s Penguin
cover series by David Pelham, Andrea Juno’s design and Rebecca Wilson’s cover
“ I produced a series of advertisements
for the 1983 RE/Search volume 8/9, Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustrations for The
Atrocity Exhibition in 1990 by the same publisher, and JK Potter’s collages for the
which I placed in various publications
Arkham House 1988 first edition of ‘Memories of the Space Age’. (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various
Ballard sometimes described himself as a frustrated painter, often citing specific
pieces by artists such as Ernst, Dali and Bacon as visual stimuli, and surrounding
continental alternative magazines), doing
himself with prints and books of surrealist, Pop-art and other Modernist artworks
in his Shepperton home. He also owned several original pieces by his friend
the artwork myself and arranging for the
and contemporary, UK Pop-Art mixed-media artist Eduardo Paolozzi, and with
his fee from the 198X Stephen Spielberg film adaptation of ‘Empire of the Sun’,
block-making, and then delivering the
commissioned copies of paintings by the little-known Belgian surrealist Delvaux lost
during the Second World War. Surrealism was, he said, “The greatest imaginative
block to the particular journal just as would
adventure of the 20th Century”.
a commercial advertiser ”
Although lacking in confidence as a visual artist, he did make tentative forays into
visual artwork over the years, and there is a small collection of experimental pieces
which will be familiar to Ballard followers. Two of these forays were ‘Project for a
new novel’, and ‘Advertiser’s Announcements, which book ended the 1960’s and “ Of course I was advertising my own
fed directly into his written work of that period and beyond.
conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so
The first of these, 1958’s ‘Project for a New Novel’ is a series of cut-and-paste
typographic and graphic composition experiments and acts as something of a within the formal circumstances of classic
touchstone containing as it does many phrases, character names, titles and other
key elements which would resurface as themes in later short stories and novellas. commercial advertising - I wanted ads that
Conceptualised as a novel for the billboard generation, Ballard reasoned that
in a world of fast cars and diminishing attention spans the traditional novel was would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match,
dying-out and in order to communicate with the general public, the modern writer
would need to find a more easily digested format to express philosophical ideas. Newsweek, etc.
Dispensing with meaningful content altogether, instead he arranged headlines,
type and graphic elements so as to attract attention and transfer a complex idea J.G. BALLARD
without the investment of time required to read a novel.

His later ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, a collection of five full-page images with

Taking this as my starting point, the object of this project was to continue the
accompanying dislocated text captions returned the hypothesis to the printed page,
production of the Advertiser’s Announcements, using only collaged, altered and
but sought to position them between advertisements for new cars and cigarettes
photomontaged media materials, and graphic design layout and production
in the part of a publication more likely to hold the attention of a late 1960’s/early
techniques contemporary to the writing of The Atrocity Exhibition in order to
1970’s reader.
progress Ballard’s conceptual and visual intent as authentically as possible.
During this period, after the sudden death of his wife on holiday near Dali’s home of
In producing this work I owe a debt of gratitude to the 2011 Design Observer article
Cadaques, Northern Spain Ballard suffered something of a contained breakdown
What does Ballard look like? by Rick Poyner along with a recording of his Visualising
culminating in the writing of arguably his most controversial and certainly challenging
Ballard: Representation, Misrepresentation and the Graphic Image lecture delivered
shattered novella ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, which took the form of a package of
at, the ‘Shanghai to Shepperton’ conference at the University of East Anglia in
dislocated paragraphs and short stories, more like flicking quickly through the
2007, the 1984 RE/Search publication No.8/9, and the extensive online Ballard
channels of a TV set, than reading a novel.
resources of ballardian.com managed by Simon Sellars, and jgballard.ca managed
The Atrocity Exhibition was published in the UK in 1970 and after the internally- by Rick McGrath.
sanctioned pulping of the original Doubleday edition, finally made it to US
Mike Halliwell
bookshelves in 1972 under the title ‘Love and Napalm: Export USA’. Many of the
Oxford, UK - 2016
themes of Ballard’s visual experiments found their way into the book, and at one
point he explained that he had originally wanted to realise the project as a large
format collection of magazine advertisements instead of a traditional book. Jonathon
Cape, his UK publisher, perhaps understandably baulked at the experimental
idea, so after the five original Advertiser’s Announcements found their way into Mike Halliwell is an Illustrator, Graphic and Architectural Designer, and Associate
alternative magazines funded by Ballard himself, the idea was shelved and the Lecturer in Architecture and Research-Led Design at Oxford Brookes University.
images slipped into Ballardian folklore. www.mikehalliwell.net - mikehalliwell@hotmail.co.uk