At the museum

From Barcelona, veteran rock journo, adman and promoter Rick McGrath just posted his special report at Ballardian on the opening of the first-ever museum exhibit dedicated to the life and work of J.G. Ballard. "Autopsy of the New Millennium," at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). A magnificent project, it includes a the beautiful installation of an automobile drowned in the sands of time, pictured below. And who can't love a Ballardian blog in Catalan?



Very cool. A reminder of the need for Paul Virilio's unrealized project, the "Museum of Accidents."

"Contemporary civilization differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. The change has come about within a generation," noted the historian Marc Bloch, writing in the nineteen-thirties. This situation brings in its wake a second feature: the accident. The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations. Daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so to speak. In a shattered mirror, we must then learn to discern what is impending more and more often-but above all more and more quickly, those events coming upon us inopportunely, if not indeed simultaneously. Faced with an accelerated temporality which affects mores and Art as much as it does international politics, there is one particularly urgent necessity: to expose and to exhibit the Time accident.



(At least the Museum of Accidents also has a blog.)

Perhaps we should undertake a virtual curation of this museum. We could start with the tabloid newspaper photographs of Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides, who mainlines the zeitgeist better than most.



[Enrique Metinides
Untitled ( Empleado de Teléfonos de México electrocutado en el km. 13 de la carretera México-Toluca), 1971
(Jesus Bazaldua Barber, a telecommunications engineer, fatally electrocuted by more than 60,000 volts whilst installing a new phone line. Toluca, Mexico, 29 January 1971)
Black and White photograph
20 x 24 inches/ 50.8 x 61 cm]

In other news, they've got some sweet jobs posted at Blackwater USA. Deltek Costpoint Administrator? Dude, I so want that action figure. Along with a complete set of poseable Blackwater attorneys.