The V&A is running an exhibition called Modernism: designing a new world 1914 -1939, which features some stunning bakelite and aluminium objects, including this fire new Tatra T87, made in Czechokslovakia in 1938.

The exhibition provoked a lovely meditation by J.G. Ballard, who still manages to stay completely in tune with our times, and to produce paragraphs like this:

“Years later, in that Utah beach blockhouse, I was looking at similar stains on the concrete walls, but the scattered rubbish and tang of urine made me think of structures closer to home in England – run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them, and who were careful never to stray too far from their Georgian squares in the heart of heritage London.

photo by Sergio Gaudenti

From the rooftop barbette I looked along Utah Beach towards an identical blockhouse 800 yards away, and beyond that to the faint silhouette of a third. The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

Pure, vintage, contemporary.

Oh, and Ballard himself is a cult, and I am one of many acolytes. After all, he wrote The Atrocity Exhibition thirty five years ago:

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition – to which the patients themselves were not invited – was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and caculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin… What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell’.

In his modernism article, he praises the Heathrow Hilton, and lives nearby in the landscape he has described again and again, most notably in Crash and Concrete Island. He has a particular way of infusing reality and vision into each other; this is his real life:

For the past 35 years I have lived in the Thames Valley town of Shepperton, a suburb not of London but of London Airport. The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least 10 miles to its south and west, a zone of motorway intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras, a landscape which most people affect to loathe but which I regard as the most advanced and admirable in the British Isles, and paradigm of the best that the future offers us.

I welcome its transience, alienation and discontinuities, and its unashamed response to the pressures of speed, disposibility and the instant impulse. Here, under the flight paths of Heathrow, everything is designed for the next five minutes. Its centrepiece, and for me the most inspiring in England today, is Michael Manser’s superb Heathrow Hilton, near Terminal Four. Its vast atrium resembles a planetarium in the way that it salutes the skies above its roof.

After all, he is the writer who erected and inhabited a particular dream world for twenty years, and then revealed how much of his dissonant, metallic expressionism reconfigured his own experience as a child in occupied Shanghai. But somehow Empire of the Sun was never quite as luminous as his visions.

In honour of that particular fusion, here is an image of the Heathrow Hilton:

And here is the reality of a Tatra, in Alaska, long after Czechoslovakia had been invaded and remade and liberated and invaded and remade and freed itself and split up:

Dreams and realities.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 11:49 pm and is filed under visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.