Venus Smiles

Tabita Cargnel: Venus Smiles (2020) [a]

Photo © Dario Des Ciancolini from Vibes Art

 

 

'Venus Smiles' is another amusing short story by J. G. Ballard [b], at the centre of which is a sonic sculpture, commissioned by the tale's narrator - Hamilton - who sits on the Vermilion Sands Fine Arts Committee.

 

The artist responsible for the work, Lorraine Drexel, sounds like an interesting woman, going by Hamilton's description:

 

"This elegant and autocratic creature in a cartwheel hat, with her eyes like black orchids, was a sometime model and intimate of Giacometti and John Cage. Wearing a blue crêpe de Chine dress ornamented with lace serpents and other art nouveau emblems, she sat before us like some fugitive Salome from the world of Aubrey Beardsley. [...]

      She had lived in Vermilion Sands for only three months, arriving via Berlin, Calcutta and the Chicago New Arts Centre. Most of her sculpture to date had been scored for various Tantric and Hindu hymns, and I remembered her brief affair with a world-famous pop-singer, later killed in a car crash, who had been an enthusiastic devotee of the sitar. [...] She had shown us an album of her sculptures, interesting chromium constructions that compared favourably with the run of illustrations in the latest art magazines." [52]   

 

Unfortunately, the piece Miss Drexel produces for the central square of Vermilion Sands isn't quite what Hamilton and other committee members had hoped for; and it certainly isn't to the liking of the specially invited assembly of VIPs and members of the general public who witness its unveiling with a mixture of shock and anger. 

 

Even Hamilton's secretary, describes 'Sound and Quantum: Generative Synthesis 3' as "'nothing but a piece of old scrap iron'" [51] - one that makes an infernal racket as well as an ugly sight:

 

"With its pedestal the statue was twelve feet high. Three spindly metal legs, ornamented with spikes and crosspieces, reached up from the plinth to a triangular apex. Clamped on to this was a jagged structure that at first sight seemed to be an old Buick radiator grille. It had been bent into a rough U five feet across, and the two arms jutted out horizontally, a single row of sonic cores, each about a foot long, poking up like the teeth of an enormous comb. Welded on apparently at random all over the statue were twenty or thirty filigree vanes.

      That was all. The whole structure of scratched chromium had a blighted look like a derelict antenna." [53]   

 

Worse, once the acoustic drape is removed, the sculpture gave out an "intermittent high-pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling" [53]. After the furious crowd disperse and an insulted, but amused, Lorraine Drexel has skipped town, (keeping her $5000 fee), it's immediately agreed that the work should be removed. As no one else wants anything further to do with it, it is also decided that Hamilton should keep it:

 

"There was nowhere else to put the statue so I planted it out in the garden. Without the stone pedestal it was only six feet high. Shielded by the shrubbery, it had quietened down and now emitted a pleasant melodic harmony, its soft rondos warbling across the afternoon heat." [54]

 

Unfortunately, Hamilton's problems with the sculpture have only just begun ... A week or so later, Carol, Hamilton's secretary, notices that the thing is not only moving but changing shape. Further, it's rapidly expanding in size and beneath the surface rust Hamilton detects "a bright sappy glint" [56], as if the sculpture were alive, like some kind of strange tree coming into bud:

 

"Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. [...]

      Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction." [56] [c] 

Of course, Hamilton has the option to just chop this musical monster down. But he is curious to see how big it will grow. The answer is very big: and even after it eventually collapses under its own weight and "lay on its side in a huge angular spiral [...] like the skeleton of a futuristic whale" [58], its growth rate continued to accelerate. 

 

Thus, Hamilton is obliged to seek a solution in his tool shed: "Using the hacksaw, I cut off a two-foot limb and handed it to Dr. Blackett, an eccentric but amiable neighbour who sometimes dabbled in sculpture himself." [59]

 

The latter speculates (in a pseudo-scientific manner) about how the sculpture is managing to grow: "I imagine it's rapidly synthesizing an allotropic form of ferrous oxide. In other words, a purely physical rearrangement of the constituents of rust." [59] This might not be very plausible, but Hamilton's only other idea is that, before she left, Lorraine Drexel "had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork" [58]. 

 

The good doctor is convinced that the process will soon reach a natural conclusion. However, the next morning Hamilton wakes up to find the thing breaking through his bedroom window and spreading across his garden: "It sounded as if a complete orchestra were performing some Mad Hatter's symphony out in the centre of the lawn." [60] 

 

At this point, Carol insists that Hamilton take up his hacksaw once more:

"The metal was soft and the blade sank through it quickly. I left the pieces I cut off in a heap to one side [...] Separated from the main body of the statue, the fragments were almost inactive [...] By two o'clock that afternoon I had cut back about half the statue and got it down to manageable proportions.

      'That should hold it,' I said to Carol. I walked round and lopped off a few of the noisier spars. 'Tomorrow I'll finish it off altogether.'" [60]

Unfortunately, that night, the monster plant-sculpture again bursts through Hamilton's bedroom window and a gigantic metal helix "hovered like a claw through the fractured pane" [61], its sonic core screaming down at him. The thing had grown back with a vengeance to twice its previous size:

"It lay all over the garden in a tangled mesh, like the skeleton of a crushed building. Already the advance tendrils had reached the bedroom windows, while others had climbed over the garage and were sprouting downwards through the roof, tearing away the galvanized metal sheets." [61]

Hamilton telephones his friend, Raymond Mayo, who comes over with an oxyacetylene torch and, after several hours of hard work, the thing is defeated; all that remains are heaps of scrap metal to be taken away by a local contractor to be melted down. That, though, isn't the end of the story ...

 

Firstly, Lorraine Drexel sues the Fine Arts Committe for destruction of her work and damage to her reputation. After ten months of legal wrangling, it's decided that Miss Drexel should be awarded $30,000. As if that wasn't bad enough, when leaving the newly built courthouse, a funny things happens: Hamilton realises the building is vibrating with a low rhythmic pulse.

 

It transpires that melted down parts from the sculpture had been used in the construction of the court and SQ:GS3 was now spreading and mutating like a virus all over Vermilion Sands . For as Hamilton realises, tiny fragments and molecular memory traces of the statue will be contained within "a dozen other buildings, in ships and planes and a million new automobiles" [65]. 

 

Soon, as Hamilton says, "'The whole world will be singing'" [65] and dancing to the strange abstracted sound of Lorraine Drexel's work ...      

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Inspired by the J. G. Ballard story we are to examine in this post, Venus Smiles is a sound sculpture by the German artist Tabita Cargnel. Consisting of resonating copper tubes suspended in a tensegrity type structure, it also functions as an instrument that can be played by one or more performers, whatever their musical background or competance. Tuned to the particular frequencies of the space in which it resides, Venus Smiles is designed to amplify acoustic properties, create novel interactions, and allow communication in a language beyond words. 

      For more information about her work, readers can visit Tabita Cargnel's website by clicking here. Alternatively, to see Venus Smiles being used as an instrument, visit her YouTube page by clicking here.

[b] See J. G. Ballard, The Complete Short Stories, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 51-65. Page numbers given in the above text refer to this edition. 

      'Venus Smiles' was originally entitled 'Mobile' and first published in the June 1957 edition of Science Fantasy (Vol. 8, No. 23). Ballard renamed and rewrote the tale for his collection of short stories  Vermilion Sands (Berkley Books, 1971). 

[c] One is reminded of D. H. Lawrence's poem 'Bare Almond Trees'. But whereras Ballard describes a metal artwork in terms of a living tree, Lawrence describes living trees in winter as possessing black, rusted trunks and looking like "iron implements twisted hideous, out of the earth". 

      See The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 253. The poem can also be read online at allpoetry.com: click here.