The atrocity exhibition Read Online Free PDF

of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.
    Mimetized Disasters . The helicopter banked abruptly, pulled round in a gesture of impatience by the pilot. They plunged towards the underpass, the huge fans of the Sikorsky sliding through the air like the wings of a crippled archangel. A multiple collision had occurred in the approach to the underpass. After the police had left they walked for an hour among the cars, staring through the steam at the bodies propped against the fractured windshields. Here he would find his alternate death, the mimetized disasters of Vietnam and the Congo recapitulated in the contours of these broken fenders and radiator assemblies. As they circled overhead the shells of the vehicles lay in the dusk like the crushed wings of an aerial armada.
    No U-Turn. ‘Above all, the notion of conceptual auto-disaster has preoccupied Talbot during the final stages of his breakdown,’ Dr Nathan wrote. ‘But even more disturbing is Talbot’s deliberate self-involvement in the narrative of the scenario. Far from the students making an exhibition of an overwrought instructor, transforming him into a kind of ur-Christ of the communications landscape, Talbot has in fact exploited them. This has altered the entire direction of the scenario, turning it from an exercise on the theme of “the end of the world” into a psycho-drama of increasingly tragic perspectives.’
    The Persistence of Memory . An empty beach with its fused sand. Here clock time is no longer valid. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These images are the residues of a remembered moment of time. For Talbot the most disturbing elements are the rectilinear sections of the beach and sea. The displacement of these two images through time, and their marriage with his own continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of his own consciousness. Later, walking along the overpass, he realized that the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future.
    Arrival at the Zone . They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over the landscape of broken overpasses and crushed underpasses. The pilot walked down the slope to a rusting grader surrounded by tyres and fuel drums. Beyond it a quonset tilted into a pool of mud. Talbot waited for the young woman to speak to him, but she stared at her hands, lips clenched against her teeth. Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity. How long had they sat there?
    The Plaza . Later, when his two couriers had moved to the ridge of the embankment, Talbot began to explore the terrain. Covered by the same even light, the landscape of derelict roadways spread to the horizon. On the ridge the pilot squatted under the tail of the helicopter, the young woman behind him. Their impassive, unlit faces seemed an extension of the landscape. Talbot followed the concrete beach. Here and there sections of the banking had fallen, revealing the steel buttresses below. An orchard of miniature fruit trees grew from the sutures between the concrete slabs. Three hundred yards from the helicopter he entered a sunken plaza where two convergent highways moved below an underpass. The shells of long-abandoned automobiles lay below the arches. Talbot brought the young woman and guided her down the embankment. For several hours they waited on the concrete slope. The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.
    The Annunciation . Partly veiled by the afternoon clouds, the enormous image of a woman’s hands moved across the sky. Talbot stood up, for a moment losing his balance on the sloping