In 1989, "RE/Search" magazine released a new edition of this J.G. Ballard classic that many consider to be his finest work. It consists of a series of 15 "compressed novels" that loosely follow a doctor who is having a mental breakdown. Includes "You and Me and the Continuum," "Tolerances of the Human Face," "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," and "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy." Five additional fiction pieces have been added to this edition along with disturbing photos by Ana Barrado and intense medical illustrations by Phoebe Gloecker.
The "RE/Search" crew has done an incredible job of not only re-presenting the original material but in actually amplifying its impact by their design and illustrations. This is a complex, intense, and very disturbing piece of work.
(G. Branwyn)
Links:
Glossary:
ACCESS:
The Atrocity Exhibition
J.G. Ballard
RE/Search Publications
20 Romolo St., #B
San Francisco, CA 94133
1989, 120 pgs., pb, Large Format, $14.
Here is the TEXT POPUP for The Atrocity Exhibition:
In his dream of Zapruder frame 235 Tallis was increasingly preoccupied by the figure of the President's wife. The planes of her face, like the cars of the abandoned motorcade mediated to him the complete silence of the plaza, the geometry of a murder
- from "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy"
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.
