Other exhibitions reflecting the Arts Labs’ hostility to commercialism included John and Yoko’s Four Thoughts, The Self x 12, Scenes from a Hunter’s Album, and (at Robert St), J G Ballard’s notorious Crashed Cars, and UNSCULPT, an event by Ian Breakwell and John Hilliard lasting several weeks, and involving successive rituals of destruction and metamorphosis.
Despite the Arts Labs’ best efforts to show art that was beyond the pale, several exhibitions subsequently transitioned to more established venues. Roelof Loew’s Soul City is now owned by Tate; John Latham’s roller blinds were subsequently shown at (and marketed by) the Lisson Gallery. As mechanically-reproduced multiples, Takis’ Signals were free of the ‘aura’ attributed by Walter Benjamin to unique works of art, but have nevertheless entered Tate’s collection”. BP
J G Ballard was a friend of Pam Zoline and his name appears on the Robert Street Lab’s letterhead as one of its Trustees. His aspirations for his celebrated exhibition are summed up in this press release, (for which there wasn’t space in the book):
“Each of these sculptures is a memorial to a unique collision between man and his technology. However tragic they are, automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Behind our horror lie an undeniable fascination and excitement, most clearly revealed by the deaths of the famous: Jayne Mansfield and James Dean, Albert Camus and John F. Kennedy. The 20th century has given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular, the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualised psychopathology. Apart from its function of redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilising rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – meditating the asexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. In 20th century terms the crucifixion would be enacted as a conceptual car crash. The car crash is the most dramatic event we are likely to experience in our entire lives apart from our own deaths”.