Crash Book Jacket Design
Spencer Roberts:
Book jacket illustration of CRASH,
Collapsing Bulkheads,
Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture.
Context:
Crash – tests limits of reader’s tastes/sympathises – provokes a strong reaction.
Plot: James Ballard after being involved in a car crash meets Dr. Robert Vaughan. He then one day hopes to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. They get aroused by car crashes, and it has become a sort of fetish to them. A lot of the film is mostly on the fetish of becoming attached to this combination. It’s one of those cult novels, even though it sounds bizarre, it gives a fictional narrative world. It shows a social problem, a condition of contemporary culture.
You tend to find that in this period, up until the last decade more people were frightened of technology than what we are now. We now embrace technology, and we use computers for everything. With the onset of technology, within the social world initially brought difficulties and feelings with angst.
The skill of a novel like Crash is that it doesn’t do it in a cliché way. What someone like Ballard does, is that he gives it some kind of structure, in a response to technology. It’s a bizarre mesh of the unpalatable and the manipulation of a person.
If you were working on a dissertation on adaptation, has an illustrative focus is part of a research strategy is what Poyner is addressing in this essay. In terms of his method is partly using comparative analysis of existing covers, and he also tries to find what Ballard has to say on various attempts to adapt covers. He’s doing a critical reading of Crash itself, whilst designing the actual covers. He gives us his own personal dimension (material culture) Poyner, is a collector. He became interested in Ballard as an author. He’s one of the thinkers of postmodernity in graphic design. Poyner starts collecting the book and its covers – like ‘toxic beauty’, of the prose.
He says that the core problem of the adaptation is that image makers have been defeated by Crash. As they’re not true to what he says being the truth of the text. One of the things that mark these particular treatments if that they are marked by incomprehension and evasion. As something to do with sex, and something to do with women. Taking these elements, but not what Crash is trying to express. It misses the point of the novel itself.
This idea that Crash is pornographic is complicating someone’s response. Exotic, and intimate quality. It’s this that charges the novel.
The first adaptation, book jacket is by Johnathan Cape, in 1973, shows a jutting gearstick presumably intended to be phallic. Ballard describes it to be monstrously bad. Crude and impossible to beat.
Looking at the second illustration is more in tune with Ballard, as he likes this one as they get it a bit better. There’s nothing like this scene in the book (Ballard says) that there’s life to the car like some kind of creature. Ballard the author himself really likes this, he likes that it is realistic. Kind of a realistic style, but he doesn’t want it to be photorealistic, a fantasy-like image too. Semi-realistic fantasy image, that isn’t even in the novel. Like a movie poster of the 1950’s – brought into focus by that line - “A brutal, erotic novel”.
/ The Crash trailer is a genre in itself because it has to make a film palatable for a general audience. A trailer normalises everything, this film wins a 1996 Cannes Winner, for originality daring, and audacity.
What does Ballard, himself look like?
/ There’s always been a technological surrealism, is a genre of Ballard starts to build for himself. A lot of his novels, fall into this category. He did graphic work for Ambit magazine. It tended to be provocative images, between political elements within a scene. It makes the claim that ‘Fiction is a brand of neurology’. He also tries to express in his illustrations is that he tries to set up tensions between the elements. Quite a literally and art oriented style.
Ballard has a link with surrealist forms of illustration.
The different novels of Ballard, are technological in orientation. Nothing organic no trees, etc, all hard technologic reference points. Purely Ballardian images to be found on any of his books – by Poyner. If you just talk about images and no context about the essay or text, it won’t be interesting to anyone. You can use Ballard’s novel in an interesting way as it foregrounds all of these problems, as you can talk about Ballard’s fiction and writing style, and to how it translates to his style.
If you’re going to do a series of covers, you have to get the to author. The Terminal Beach is the strongest of the quartet (by Poyner again). Graphic Design is a form of Rhetoric we talk about persuasive forms of steering someone into a way of thinking about something. You can think about Graphic Design in rhetorical terms. Ballard’s work is strangely problematic.