Book jacket illustration of crash collapsing bulkheads, designing pornotopia: travels in visual culture
What is crash?
James Ballard wrote the book and it starts off he's in a car crash and meets a character called dr Robert Vaughan and he wants to die in a head on collision with Elizabeth Taylor, a small cult/ subculture of crash victims is forming around Vaughan that is focuses upon the re enactment of celebrity car crashes from which they derive erotic pleasure. Crash tests limit of readers tastes and sympathies so it provokes strong reactions as it is a dark imagination and almost psychotic.
In terms of method he attempts to produce book covers and he compares the analysis of existing covers and the ideas of what the author Ballard actual thought about these visuals of text.
Personal dimension material culture allows poyner to start collecting the book and it's covers, he liked the 'toxic beauty' of the prose, the core problem is the image makers have been defeated by crash and visual treatments are marked by incomprehension and evasion, so he doesn't see them as being the truth of the text and he thinks in some cases people don't understand what the novel is about, you get the themes but not really getting to what crash is trying to portray. Crash is openly pornographic and it's a deliberate strategy and it's to complicate somebody's response. Looking at all of these treatments what do they get wrong and right, he talks about first adaptation by Jonathan Kay in 1973 shows a jutting gear stick infront of a 3D dimensional type, Ballard describes it as 'monstrously bad' . It's important to get the context. Ballard wants an element of fantasy to it but some realistic approach as well. Ballard as well as being an author also engaged in design/ illustration and poyner suggests there's always been a technological surrealism which ties in with what Ballard wants for his novel o be realistic but have a fiction in there too.
Ballard produced his own graphic work for ambit magazine, and he shows material surrealist concerns in his own work which he tries to portray through his work to engage interpretation.
Four novels and book covers published by Ballard the terminal beach, the wind from nowhere, the drowned world, all published by penguin and poyner says there the most ballardian images to be found. They are a style of one significant thing to the novel centred and illustrated in a hard clean way quite dark but colourful covers. David Pelham designed these airbrushed illustrations, the terminal beach in poyners position terminal beach is best. The centered type is flawlessly placed and weighted in relation to the image below and the stencil typeface carries a military association that fits the subject matter of the title story. Graphic design is a form of rhetoric and one reason this image works so well is that it has been realised so perfectly, it is grounded like Ballard prose in meticulously precise observation but he has given the scene of becalmed destructive power an intensified, hyper real quality most obviously in the use of colour.
There are lots of different versions of illustrations for crash. All using different styles and methods to try and get the best design to portray the fantasy and the realism in a visual that is acceptable.
