ON THE BEACH – Dali, Ballard, Neil Young and Cadillac Ranch
James Reich, First Published by The End Of Being, August 21, 2011.
The warped pataphysical pocket watches of Salvador Dali’s small canvas The Persistence of Memory continued to mark molecular time from 1931 until the spring of 1974, when their position on the beach was usurped in a series of almost simultaneous works of popular culture. Dali had anticipated this in his repainting of The Persistence of Memory as The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory in the early 1950s, a treatment that acknowledges post-atomic mass production, and implicitly, the naïve apocalypse of the original canvas viewed through the lens of mid-century holocausts, and holocausts yet to come: the encroaching post-nuclear beach of Nevil Shute’s 1958 novel On The Beach, filmed by Stanley Kramer in 1959.
But the instability that Dali brought to his end of chronology painting in The Disintegration was abruptly consummated in 1974, beginning with an image by David Pelham. Pelham was commissioned to produce art and design for Penguin’s editions of three of the 1960s catastrophe novels of J. G. Ballard and two short fiction collections: The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World also known in the UK and in Penguin’s edition as The Drought (1964), and The Terminal Beach (1964); the fifth paperback, the collection published as The Four Dimensional Nightmare was released later in 1975. Ballard’s seminal catastrophe or apocalypse novels of the early sixties, their rational extension/mutation in his avant-garde period in the early seventies before his return to the suburban apocalypse genre in the mid-seventies emerge from the ambience of the Cold War, and are book-ended by the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the resignation of Richard Nixon and end of the Vietnam War. Pelham’s images for the Penguin reprints present arguably the most authentic and sympathetic realizations of Ballard’s fiction in book jacket design, and his beautiful image for The Drought of the tail end of a yellow Cadillac part-submerged (submersion is Pelham’s motif for the series as it is for Ballard in general) into the desert of the real is, in my view, the finest of the series. Ballard’s relationship to surrealism, and to Dali’s Persistence of Memory is well-documented: it appears, for example, in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and is frequently referenced during Ballard’s interviews and non-fiction directly and indirectly. Speaking of the European scene in an interview with V. Vale and Andrea Juno for Re/Search in October 1982, Ballard said: “Here, surrealist painters have an enormous influence on, say, record sleeves, paperback jackets – you get pseudo-Dali landscapes, Yves Tanguy semi-marine drained beaches, Magritte-ish displacements of things. Here the impact is colossal on advertising.” Pelham’s submerged yellow Cadillac, its futurist/nostalgic tail fins and sunlit chrome appeared in April of 1974. The greatness of Pelham’s image lies precisely in its post-surrealist grasp of ‘the end of chronology’ as a trope in Ballard’s catastrophe fiction. It is a pop art Disintegration…
The following month, in late May of 1974, the Ant Farm avant-garde collective began construction of Cadillac Ranch, a series of ten Cadillacs part submerged in the dirt of the Texas Panhandle west of Amarillo. Ant Farm co-founder Chip Lord in his 1976 book Automerica: A Trip Down U.S. Highways from World War II to the Future, refers to the symbolism of the “latent tailfin.” The teleology of the Cadillac expressed high-concept attributes through mass-production. They represented, according to advertising, The Standard of the World. We should also regard the latent tailfin, the submerged Cadillac as an icon of obsolescence, the exposure (through submersion in the desert of the real) of myths of bourgeois futurism, and further as an image of holocaust. The activities of the Ant Farm group continued on a distinctly Ballardian trajectory during 1975 with the performances of Media Burn in which a Cadillac was crashed through a barricade of burning television sets, and The Eternal Frame; the latter being a re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination, understood via relation to the Zapruder film of the incident, which Ballard had defined as a conceptual car crash in both The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash (1973). The simulated repeat of iconic crashes, including the Kennedy ‘crash’ had been established as a style in those works.
Uncannily, Pelham’s yellow Cadillac in the sand (the latent tailfin) resurfaces in July 1974 in psychedelic poster artist Rick Griffin’s cover art for Neil Young’s album On The Beach. Psychedelic art, even in a generalized sense, is indebted to surrealism, and this image makes specific use of its currency. The image and angle of the Cadillac tail in Griffin’s surreal photograph are strikingly close to Pelham’s illustration, and this is also the work that further binds Pelham’s work to Ballard’s fascination with The Persistence of Memory. The melting watches and the dead tree of Dali’s 1931 painting are represented by the forlorn angle of a fringed beach umbrella over the disarray of a cocktail table that Young has abandoned to contemplate oblivion at the limit of the beach. The gatefold album features a potted reworking of Dali’s tree on the back cover. The orange flowers printed on the fabric of the beach furniture, their particular shade and shape allude to Dali’s closed watch, swarmed with ants. The windblown newspaper wrapped about the base of the umbrella (headline calling for the resignation of Richard Nixon which would occur the following month) again marks the end of chronology. Dali’s Catalonian cliffs (absent from Pelham’s image for The Drought) are referenced in the indistinct coastline visible on the right of the record sleeve photograph. Neil Young’s ragged hair replaces the pubic eyelashes of Dali’s abortive creature on the beach. Alienation and holocaust pervade the album from Young’s solitary abandonment during a radio interview in the title track, to the Manson Family allusions and autogeddon of “Revolution Blues”: “I got the revolution blues, I see bloody fountains, and ten million dune buggies comin’ down the mountains. Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.”
The history of surrealism is also the history of its exploitation by and assimilation/submersion within pop culture; as the visual vocabulary of the unconscious, it is also the vocabulary of advertising. The latent tailfin is one of the neologisms of the pop culture unconscious of 1974. The tailfins of the Cadillac are post-atomic surrealist desiring-production. Mass-production and its expression across media surfaces exists ad-absurdum and ad-surrealism, with emphasis on ads and the poly-ironic hate speech of the Corporate. At the close of the Vietnam War and the Nixon era, the sudden emergence of the yellow Cadillac in the sand is the high tide of the melting pocket watch that Dali had anticipated after the atomic holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Consumer time, even in the form of the Cadillac, iconic standard of the world was ended by the pataphysics of the bomb.