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