Making The Drowned World Manifest : Re-reading Ballard’s novel through art

In 1970, J.G. Ballard used a London gallery as a laboratory in which to test ideas he was toying with, ideas that eventually found their way into his 1973 novel, Crash. Ballard found that art and literature were a fecund combination. Considering the richness of his imagery and the complexity of his ideas, it is not surprising that Ballard’s works have gone on to inspire artistic responses. Perhaps the most well known of these is Robert Smithson’s masterpiece, Spiral Jetty, 1970. However, most works inspired by Ballard’s writing respond to vague notions of things Ballardian rather than to a particular novel or short story. In this essay I will focus specifically on recent contemporary Australian artworks which were made in direct response to Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World, for a 2015 exhibition I initiated and coordinated titled Mapping The Drowned World. Using my own artworks as examples, as well as work made by fellow Australian artists Roy Ananda, Jon Cattapan and Janet Tavener, I will demonstrate that art and Ballard’s literature continue to make a great synergistic team: together they produce more than the sum of their parts.