Before his signature worked Atrocity Exhibition, crashand SkyscraperJ.G. Ballard has published three post-apocalyptic novels. Drowned World, Burning Worldand Crystal World. Each of these books offers a different perspective on large-scale environmental disaster, and the last one even provides a clue as to its inspiration: the original cover features an excerpt from a Max Ernst painting. Silent Eyes“This spine-like landscape, with its maddening rocks towering above the silent marsh, acquires an organic life more real than the solitary nymph who sits in the foreground,” Ballard writes. “The Arrival of the Unconscious” An article on Surrealism written shortly after Crystal World It was introduced in 1966.
First published in a magazine issue A New World (This includes Chris Marker’s La Jetée), this work is ostensibly Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism Marcel Jean’s History of Surrealist Paintingbut ultimately ends up conveying Ballard’s brief analyses of a series of paintings by various Surrealist masters.
Silent Eyes The “terrible structure” at the heart of René Magritte’s painting represents the landscape of our world “as it really is: a palace of flesh and bone, a living facade surrounding our own subconscious.”of The Annunciation “A neural totem, its circular, interconnected shapes a fragment of our own nervous system, an indestructible code that perhaps contains the operating formula for passing through time and space.”
Giorgio de Chirico’s Disturbing Muse“A vague anxiety began to spread across the deserted square. The symmetry and regularity of the arcades concealed an intense inner violence. This is the face of catatonic withdrawal”; depicted there is “a human being eroded by all transitional time”. In another work, he depicts a deserted beach as “a symbol of total spiritual alienation, the final stagnation of the soul”. The beach and the sea move through time, “linking with our own four-dimensional continuum, distorting them into the rigid and stubborn structures of our own consciousness”. There, Ballard writes, Sustainability Memory Works by Salvador Dali, whom he called “the greatest painter of the 20th century.” More than 40 years have passed since the “advent of the unconscious.” Guardian.
Ten years later, Declan Lloyd of the same publication theorizes: The experimental signage Ballard designed in the 1950s (previously featured on Open Culture) was a textual reinterpretation of Dali’s images. By the late 1960s, Ballard noted: 1995 World Art Interview“The Surrealists were much despised. For me, one of the reasons I was attracted to them was that I never trusted the British critics and everything they didn’t like seemed to me to be probably on the right track. I’m happy to be recognised as having been right in my judgement and theirs wrong.” He saw the long-term value of the Surrealist vision, which had seemed outdated by the Second World War: “All too quickly a new set of nightmares emerged.” One can only hope that he does not prove to have been a prescient thinker about the long-term habitability of the Earth.
Via Flashbak
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
