Body work - interview with author J.G. Ballard and director David Cronenberg - Interview

ArtForum, March, 1997 by Andrew Hultkrans

AH: Many of Cronenberg's films deal with biological mutation, often mediated by technology. Some of your stories and novels deal with that as well. But there's a difference in the characters' response to these mutations - in Cronenberg there's usually some kind of visceral revulsion, a sense of horror in the face of extreme change. But in some of your works - High Rise, Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Concrete Island (1974) - there's an almost calm, tacit acceptance of the new context, as if it were relatively natural. How are your heroes able to adapt to these disturbing transformations?

JB: Well, most of Cronenberg's heroes are rebelling against whatever mutational process is underway. Only towards the end do they yield. Whereas my characters, right from my early natural-disaster novels, accept the transformation taking place, because it's an externalization of some deep, unconscious - or semiconscious - need of their own. They embrace the catastrophe because they're keen to remythologize themselves, and rediscover the different world that lies beyond the transformation. So I think a rather different psychology is at work in my own fiction. On the other hand, of course, there are an awful lot of similarities. And Cronenberg's Crash is, in many ways, a departure from his previous films, in the sense that it's wholly naturalistic. There are no exploding heads, no organic mutations taking place, no unfolding visceral changes. It's very cool and chromed. The violent change is all played down. The crashes are like those in real life - they're over in a second. And the sex is very stylized. In some ways, I think it's his best film.

AH: You've talked about pornography in the past. Today, it seems, even "deviant" pornography aesthetics have become mainstream - they're used in advertising and fashion layouts, etc. Do you think there is any new form of pornography emerging?

JB: The sort of stylization that you see in, say, Mapplethorpe's photography, in S/M photography, doesn't seem that far removed from the stuff you pick up in the Sunday supplement magazines these days. Human beings have an almost limitless capacity to absorb the psychologically perverse, because it's all so buffered by the electronic media that stand between us and the images. Plus there's a process at work - of which Crash is a part, I think - that I call the "normalizing of the psychopathic." More and more of what used to be regarded as aberrant or perverse activity is now accepted as more or less conventional behavior. We're almost infinitely tolerant of human behavior of any kind, as long as it's consensual.

This normalizing of the psychopathic has defused huge areas of the sexually perverse - of the human imagination, generally. Surprisingly, I'm told people are still shocked by Helmut Newton's photography.

AH: Which is hard to believe. It's hardly appalling.

JB: I think it's genius, actually. I adore Newton. If you print this, the Artforum readership will think Ballard is a complete idiot, but I think, since the death of Francis Bacon, the most consistently imaginative - and, in many ways the greatest - visual artist working today is Helmut Newton. I can't think of anyone better. Certainly not all these installation artists who are pouring out of British art schools. You know, all those sharks in formaldehyde and so on. People are shocked by Newton, but not by the sexually explicit material, that would have shocked them, say, thirty years ago. They're shocked by his voyeuristic, masculinist eye. They're shocked by their sense that this is a man who is degrading women - which is a different matter altogether. You can degrade women just as fiercely when they're fully clothed. I see his photographs as stills in some very elegant movie that might be playing in your local cineplex. In fact, he loved the film of Crash. I met him about a month ago, and he said, "You know, that's the sort of film I like."