Shared Ambivalence

Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter, designer and poet, and one of the signatories of the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which announced an artistic and social movement excited by modernity and the future, a reaction to history and nostalgia (Lista 2001). The Speed of an Automobile does not overtly relate to Ezekiel, but provides an imaginative visual ‘intertext’. It is characteristic of the Futurists in emphasizing dynamism, light, and technology. Vehicles, including aeroplanes, often feature in their work, and the fact that this image presents an automobile is appropriate in an intertext to Ezekiel 1, the vision of the God of Israel upon a wheeled throne. The Jewish mystical tradition that developed from meditation on Ezekiel 1 came to be called ‘Chariot’ mysticism, following the later text Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 49:8, ‘It was Ezekiel who saw the vision of glory which God showed him above the chariot of the cherubim’). As I immerse myself in the Balla image, I fancy that I see a car in motion, wheels and perhaps even an eye. I see brightness and sparkling reflection. I also have a liberating sense of movement and optimism, new beginnings and new futures. There is no suggestion that Balla had the Ezekiel passage in mind or was even necessarily aware of it. But, as a viewer, I feel affinities between Balla’s picture and key aspects of Ezekiel 1, not only with much of its imagery but also with its call to new ways of being. However, Balla’s painting evokes for me other responses too, including anxiety and an awareness of things left behind, of dislocation and alienation. And these too seem to have their affinities with Ezekiel’s situation, in which Temple and homeland are lost and identity profoundly threatened. In combining such positive and negative themes, Ezekiel and Balla may be said to share an ambivalence, at least as I experience them. And indeed the Futurist Movement had its darker side, sometimes including glorification of violence and war, which would have an influence on the development of Italian fascism. Do such associations sully experience of Balla’s work? Or do artistic expressions rise above such matters? This question may not be entirely irrelevant to Ezekiel. How is experience of the sublime vision of chapter 1 affected by encountering later chapters of the book, some of which can seem vindictive and misogynistic? References Lista, Giovanni. 2001. Futurism (Paris: Editions Pierre Terrail)