Sunday, December 25, 2005

A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard's 'Crashed Cars' Exhibition of 1970

Ballard:

Each of these sculptures is a memorial to a unique collision between man and his technology. However tragic they are, automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Behind our horror lie an undeniable fascination and excitement, most clearly revealed by the deaths of the famous: Jayne Mansfield and James Dean, Albert Camus and John F. Kennedy. The 20th century has given birth to a vast range of machines -- computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons -- where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire.

(Via Beyond the Beyond.)

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