The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

5. Ballard al cinema
Da sempre Ballard ha manifestato interesse per tutto ciò che rientra nell’ambito
dell’espressione iconica, dall’arte pittorica alle sperimentazioni sulla percezione visiva. Il contributo
delle arti visive al tema della commistione tra umano e non umano, tra organico e inorganico, così
come a quello del rapporto tra macchine e produzione artistica, è di primaria importanza. A questo
proposito in un’intervista lo scrittore ricorda l’impressione che gli fece l’incontro con l’arte di
Eduardo Paolozzi negli anni Cinquanta, le cui opere scultoree erano ibridi di questo tipo:
I was absolutely knocked out by the early Paolozzis. I got to know him extremely well a few years
later and have been friends with him ever since. He used to wander around car wreck yards and yards full of
old shipping machinery in Scotland and the like, finding old gear wheels and bits of machine detritus and
he'd assemble them into these extraordinary figures. These are powerful, twentieth-century archetypes. When
you see them actually standing as they stood in the outdoors about ten years ago - there was an exhibition at
the Serpentine - standing on the grass, you feel you are arrIving at some place where these ancient figures,
these Easter Island totems made of machine parts, are waiting for you. I think we screen out large areas of
possible subject matter for the visual arts when we will not consider the rubble and refuse in a car breaker's
yard or a machine or derelict machinery as the raw material for creating a poetically charged sculpture. This
idea had not occurred to anyone before Paolozzi. You can see in the machine elements a sort of mental
dimension. When I was a medical student, I soon got bored with physiology and embryology and anatomy,
and I homed in on the psychology department. I remember Richard Gregory was doing his early experiments
in visual perception and it struck me that a lot of the ordinary photographs of after-images, retinal afterimages,
and the like were very close to the images produced by abstract artists, such as Mondrian. This
struck me as being somewhere in the central nervous system. Paolozzi's work is somewhere between
circuitry and organics, a hybrid 385 .
Probabilmente il lungo cammino che nell’opera ballardiana porterà fino a Crash inizia
proprio qui. In fin dei conti i protagonisti di Crash non sono altro che crash test dummies viventi,
gli antesignani di una nuova identità post-umana 386 . Già in The Atrocity Exhibition avevamo
incontrato una prima versione più letterale di questi personaggi simbolici: dei pupazzi di plastica
dentro un automobile, i simulacri del pilota e della donna dal volto ustionato che ossessionavano il
protagonista 387 . L’elemento alienante, perturbante, è la presenza contemporanea nell’uomo divenuto
un ibrido tra la macchina e l’essere umano, di stati contrapposti quale l’artificiale e l’animale,
laddove la sessualità e le sue funzioni nel caso della macchina si manifestano come un fatto
385
William Feaver, “The film of Kennedy's assassination is the Sistine Chapel of our era”, The Art Newspaper n. 94,
July 1999.
386
«[…] Crash witnesses the birth of a post-human identity, which is based on a fusion of animality and ‘machinality’
fuelled by and explored through sexuality and violence. […] Ballard‘s (and Cronenberg‘s) new adapted version of man
is a hybrid between animal and machine, which in its final stage is only programmed for its own destruction.» R. Vidal,
op. cit.
387
«[…] a wrecked white car with the plastic dummies of a World War III war pilot and a girl with facial burns making
love among a refuse of bubblegum war cards and oral contraceptive wallets.» J. G. Ballard, Atrocity, a cura di V. Vale e
A. Juno, op. cit., p. 15.
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