Artist Accused of Vandalizing Urinal Jan 06 PARIS A 76-year-old performance artist was arrested after attacking Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” _ a porcelain urinal _ with a hammer, police said. Duchamp’s 1917 piece _ an ordinary white, porcelain urinal that’s been called one of the most influential works of modern art _ was slightly chipped in the attack at the [...]

It started Monday when their first plane blew a tire on takeoff, dumped fuel over the ocean and circled back to Los Angeles International Airport to land in a spray of sparks, shedding 200 pounds of rubber and metal on the runway. 45-Hour Delay: Nonstop Plight Passengers on an Air India flight endure hours on the tarmac, [...]

An excerpt from Peter Carty’s Ballard-referencing review of an interesting-sounding novel… “An Everyman’s life history doomed to repeat itself as farce” Remainder, By Tom McCarthy Published: 12 December 2005 “Re-enactment has been a feature in recent art, most famously in Jeremy Deller’s reprise of the Orgreave battle between striking miners and police. It is a art practice that readily [...]

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Over at Yahoo’s JG Ballard newsgroup, Ballard scholar Umberto Rossi posted, in his words, “part of a poem called the Ruin, which describes the remains of a Roman city in England… probably Acquae Sulis, which the barbarians call Bath today. It came to my mind that the haunted and haunting description of ruins which were [...]

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In 1970, Ballard put together an ‘exhibition’ centred on a number of crashed cars that had been retreived from a London scrapyard. The background to the exhibition, its wider place in Ballard’s ouvre, and the effect on attendees, are all examined by Simon Ford in an article published in the online journal /seconds: “Ballard’s choice of [...]

An essay in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine suggests that the recent troubles in Paris were High-Rise meets Super-Cannes — anger and aggression inculcated by architecture. But you already knew that. Revolting High Rises (registration required) ‘The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame [...]

JG Ballard talks about Ian Sinclair’s latest book “Edge of the Orison” in the Observer, Sunday 27th November: “Iain Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psycho-geographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plain. But every book is really a blueprint for something else and this [...]