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

Back in the late 60’s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications
(Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the artwork myself, and
arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a
commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within
the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue,
Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. 154
Oltre al collage anche altre tecniche adoperate dai surrealisti, quali frottage e decalcomania,
esercitano un’influenza sull’opera ballardiana 155 . E non a caso, dato che l’immagine è elemento
fondativo del testo, con esiti ‘esplosivi’, come sottolinea Burroughs nella prefazione a The Atrocity
Exhibition:
This is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing in art – literally blowing up [corsivo dell’autore] the image.
Since people are made of image, this is literally an explosive book. The human image explodes into rocks
and stones and trees: «The porous rock towers of Tenerife exposed the first spinal landscape […] clinker-like
rock towers suspended above the silent swamp. In the mirror of this swamp there are no reflections. Time
makes no concessions’ 156 .
Luckhurst propone una visione cubista, in termini pittorici, dello spazio così come viene
utilizzato nel romanzo. 157 Jeannette Baxter pone in relazione l’uso della pubblicità da parte di
Ballard con quello che ne fa Salvador Dalì, precursore in questo della Pop Art e di Warhol in
particolare 158 . Così Ballard spiega perché la prima versione pubblicata di quest’opera è priva della
componente visuale:
154 Vale, V. e Juno A. (a cura di), Re/Search n. 8/9, op. cit., p. 147.
155 «The text is a literary collage, a Surrealist potpourri assembled out of found objects taken from popular culture,
images culled from elusive art-works, fantasies woven round representative political events, obsessions drawn from the
fragmented psyche of its unstable central protagonist, and conceptual extrapolations from the hidden meanings of
everyday events. […] The juxtapositional approach is fundamental to the practice of collage, but The Atrocity
Exhibition is equally indebted to the example of frottage and decalcomania, the techniques that Max Ernst and Oscar
Dominguez deployed so effectively. Decalcomania is especially relevant here, since it gave rise to defamiliarised artworks
in which a strange, mineral-like world is revealed. These haunting paintings not only distance human beings from
the world they inhabit but also evoke a pre-human past, with the result that an entirely different kind of reality is
disclosed. This transformation of one order of being into another is central both to the Surrealist project and to Ballard’s
The Atrocity Exhibition, which draws repeatedly on the Surrealist legacy.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit., pp. 58-59.
156 William S. Burroughs, “Preface”, in J. G. Ballard, a cura di V. Vale e A. Juno, Atrocity, op. cit., p. 7.
157 «The space [corsivo dell’autore] of Atrocity can be seen as Cubist. The condensed texts suppress the connectives
which might establish narrative links. Each paragraph or block appears as if superimposed on previous blocks. In “The
University of Death” the space in which the ‘events’ are enacted is continuously re-inscribed; in painterly terms, the
ground on which the figures are drawn is no longer fixed, the ground itself becomes a figure: this is Cubism as Rosalind
Krauss describes it [see Krauss, “In The Name of Picasso”, The Originality of the avant-Garde].» R. Luckhurst, op. cit.,
pp. 411-412.
158 «Ballard comments on the poor reception of Dalì’s paintings during the 1920s and 1930s and the financial
implications of this: “Dalì […] set out to use that other developing popular art of the twentieth century – publicity, then
shunned by intellectuals and the preserve of newspapers, advertising agencies and film companies. Dalì’s originality lay
in the way he used the techniques of publicity for private purposes, to propound his own extremely private and
conceptual ideas. Here he anticipated Warhol and a hundred other contemporary imitators.” See J . G. Ballard,
“Salvador Dalì: The Innocent as Paranoid”, p. 28.”» Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, op. cit.,
pp. 67-69.
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