J.G. Ballard and empty swimming pools
Reading Ballard lately, I am always struck by his fascination with empty swimming pools. See for example in “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown” (1967):
“Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar installations on the Suffolk coast. For some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination. All these he seems to have approached as the constituents of a mental breakdown which he might choose to recruit at a later date.“
And much later in “Super Cannes”:
“Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.“
Why do I blog this? this is related to some current train of thoughts about representations of the future.
Well, maybe it’s not important at all, and spotting 2 references to empty swimming pool may seen weird. However, in the context of J.G Ballard’s work, it makes sense and I find intriguing this sort of recurring representation of the future.
Why is that so? First because it may represent the future of a distopyan future one would fear. Second because an empty swimming pool is no longer used by humans, as if that facility was left for other inhabitants. What remains is the empty infrastructure, with its shape and emptiness. I am personally more interested in this second issue and what it tells about infrastructures.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
I love how the irreverent culture of skateboarding later followed by snowboarders and to a lesser extent parkour emerged and was greatly advanced by a California drought leaving swimming pools empty in the 70s. Suddenly surfers on wheels were looking for a place to skate with their boards and these unsupervised pools during working hours and weekends were ideal. If you watch the documentary Dog Town Z Boys or the flashier Lords of Dogtown you will see this intricate system of finding empty pools in the upscale hoods of LA, the lugging of water pumps, the jumping of fences, the elaborate escape plans and the community of skaters using this distributed unsupervised infrastructure. Who would have thought the infrastructure could be used in that way and that that time, place and materiality led to the skate parks we have today and an entire cultural phenomenon. Empty of water yes, but a defined space for an unintended something else!
November 28th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Funny, I thought exactly the same thing when reading Nicolas’ post and hit on my RSS viewer to add a little comment and there, Tracey already put it before me. Iain Borden(http://www.amazon.com/Skateboarding-Space-City-Architecture-Body/dp/1859734936) calls this reapproriation (sp?) of space. I can easily speculate it has close ties with what you are defining as urban decay as well.
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
There’s another reference in Empire of the Sun of course:
“Jamie lives in the house for an undetermined length of time, awaiting his parents’ return. After what must be several months (indicated by the dropping level of water in the swimming pool) he ventures into Shanghai to find it occupied by the Japanese”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Sun_(film)
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Great thanks