Ballardian

Nice article by Jonathan Jones tracing the influence of Surrealism, including in the works of Ballard. It’s as neat a summation as you’d want of one of JGB’s major inspirations:

When we speak of something being surreal, we mean something between funny peculiar and funny ha-ha. It is undoubtedly this comic dimension that made surrealism so popular in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and still does today. It survives as living culture, not as museum art. You would strain to discern the influence of, say, cubism in contemporary creativity, but it is entirely accurate to call the fiction of JG Ballard, the comic books of Alan Moore, the cinema of David Lynch and the fashion designs of Alexander McQueen surrealist. It’s equally valid to call TV’s Green Wing or Black Books surreal; after all, the surrealists adored the comedy of their day, especially Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. Dalí even collaborated on a film idea with Harpo Marx.
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They…took from Dada the belief that art is dead. Dada replaced art with readymade objects such as a urinal or a bike wheel. Surrealism added its own special intensity to the idea of the “found object” by emphasising the act of finding. A surrealist object cannot be just anything: it must be something that in the finder’s eyes is magical for reasons that can’t quite be put into words.
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[Andre] Breton’s Manifesto [of Surrealism] cites an amazing cast of surrealist predecessors, from Dante to Poe, but most of all Sigmund Freud. It might seem that what drew the surrealists to Freud was his insistence that sexuality is the driving force of personality. Yet what intrigued them equally were the Viennese doctor’s analyses of how dream images are formed and how the subconscious causes slips of the tongue.
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Surrealism is about time. It is about the tantalising and unreliable nature of memory, about the melting fabric of experience.
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Surrealism as we experience it today - when we speak of a surreal advert, a surreal sitcom - is just the dust, the shards of Europe’s last great revolutionary art.”