Neon Parc

We can identify an associative sensibility in Blomley’s practice akin to what English author J. G. Ballard referred to as “the primitive algebra of recognition.” Here, Ballard primarily alludes to a symmetry between the car and the human form, discernible in the harsh angles of grates and dashboard instrument panels or the gentle curvature of a streamlined car body: how, for example, a headlight might resemble an areola; how the half circle of a wheel arch echoes the bloom of subcutaneous fat at the fold of a bent knee.

For Blomley, too, these sculptures activate the libidinal and extrasensual associations accrued by objects in the world, even the harsh industrial objects from which he primarily derives his work. He is more careful, however, to preserve indecipherability, allowing these forms to tease the tension between recognition and abstraction. An amorphous green sculpture demonstrates this visual ambiguity. The form resembles a capsicum, a tongue, or a mysterious organ. Close inspection of its surface reveals a mossy, poriferous texture, faintly bisected by a delicate seam line, preserving traces of the fabrication process. Its curves reveal themselves in a rhythm of shadows and muted light caught across its matte expanse.

‘Untitled [Gold]’ cuts across the room—a vertical slash of gold, dense but animated, tapered at each end. The form eschews flatness, becoming globular and fluidic: an auric mucocutaneous junction, somewhat labial in its asymmetrical, skyward, floret-like flare. Both the green organ-like sculpture and this high-gloss floret resemble ectoplasmic emanations, captured in solid form mid-bloom.

These sculptures can productively be read in relation to Minimalism. Like the postwar artists associated with the movement, Blomley shares the appreciation of solid forms or mass-produced materials with an alien quality. Yet this futuristic non-sculpture is too austere and unimaginative to offer a comfortable affinity. The tension, however, is revealing.

In 1966, Tony Smith, a key proponent of Minimalism, described an experience that would become emblematic of Minimalism’s spatial sensibility—a drive down the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike: “The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art … It did something for me that art had never done.” By comparison, art seemed impossibly small and trivial: “it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.” Blomley shares Smith’s appreciation for the encounter with the object in space whose purpose remains undisclosed, yet resists the hostility to art that Smith drew from it.

Ballard’s ‘Crash’, the pornographic sci-fi novel populated by characters turned on by car crashes, was published in 1973, the year conventionally taken to mark the end of the “golden age” of postwar prosperity. This era had also seen the emergence of Minimalist art. A portentous affinity exists between the two cultural projects, one that is apparent in their shared aesthetic fixations but is most explicit in their fascination with roads and cars. In cultural discourse, Crash is often reductively condensed to a series of endlessly circulated motifs involving stark concrete cities, terminal consumerism, and perverse sexual pathologies inspired by austere architecture and speed. What is, to my knowledge, entirely neglected is that ‘Crash’ depicts a world of men without art. Its protagonist finds his only sincere stimulation in unexpected symmetries and alluring inorganic geometries, in strange juxtapositions of bodies, technologies, and architecture. Instead of driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, thrilling at the endlessness of the road as a nameless new experience beyond art—a model for non-art that triumphantly marks the end of art as we know it—Ballard’s proposal goes something like this:

‘Imagine slamming into the uniform grey concrete, your soft body being obliterated by the hard, unyielding surface, your pelvis perforated by the steering column, your organs ruptured, your bones crushed, and the sleek metal shell that shuttled you across endless highways at high speeds crumpled like a glistening chocolate wrapper, soiled by a delicate lacework of blood, gasoline, and pearly threads of spermatic fluid.’

The dull horrors of Ballard’s world are, in part, spurred by intellectual and spiritual impoverishment. The novel can be read as the honest realisation of the Minimalist fantasy of non-art: a psychosexual parable, significantly conceived at the end of a period of joyful consumerism and economic prosperity. The novel’s obsession with a “new sexuality” born of the violent merging of bodies and technologies is made necessary by a culture in which transcendence by other means is no longer possible. The car crash becomes the vehicle by which the individual might exceed the limits of ordinary experience, something art once provided us.

Perhaps sensitive to the banality and cynicism of the Minimalist drive to non-art, Blomley is sympathetic to the promise of the undisclosed object but unwilling to dispense with art. Though the tension is tested, Pump Cover preserves imaginative distance. Like drapery sheathing the idealised bodies of classical nudes or pumped muscles, these sculptures solicit recognition without submitting to full disclosure.

Endnotes:

1. ‘Crash!’, written by J. G. Ballard, directed by Harley Cokeliss (BBC Two, 1971).
2. Tony Smith, quoted in Samuel Wagstaff, “Talking with Tony Smith,” ‘Artforum’ 5, no.4 (December 1966), 19.
3. Throughout the novel, aside from the obsession with film stars, there is no notable mention of art. Exceptions to this rule are the brief mention of a Hitchcock retrospective, and the following fleeting citation: “one almost expects to see Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch cruising the freeways in their rental company cars.” Ballard ‘Crash’, 43.

Tara Heffernan is an art historian and critic. Her work focuses on modernism and the avant-garde.