Erased Ballard Interview
deutschart history
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In 1996 the artist, writer and curator Jeremy Millar interviewed the novelist J G Ballard, began to duplicate the tape before he transcribed it, and accidentally erased hours of the great man's thoughts. The ruined cassette, one long pregnant pause, could only become an artwork: Erased Ballard Interview (1996-2001). You listen, heart in mouth, just as Millar must have done, hoping that Ballard's cultivated tones will, any second now, interrupt the hiss. And at the same time you hear everything in this piece: the whole history of the avant-garde affair with emptiness, the dematerialisation of the work of art, its evanescence into pure idea or gesture, up to and including Rauschenberg's erasure of de Kooning's drawing - all of it, suggests Millar's blank tape, is merely an absurd error.