When JG Ballard exhibited a series of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in 1970, using a partially naked interviewer to gather audience responses, the show triggered an extreme public response, causing visitors to overturn and smash-up the vehicles for the show’s duration. Fuelled by this explosive human interaction, Ballard wrote Crash, a fictional piece which savagely explores the pornographic link between sexuality and car crashes.

In homage to Ballard, the Gagosian curators have presented a coherent and wide-ranging response to the impact and cultural significance of Ballard’s critical and provocative written work. Alongside inspirations such as Dali and Delvaux, work by Ballard’s contemporaries Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol are placed among an impressive array of recent artistic interpretations that develop Ballard’s principle themes of sex, violence, and vehicular destruction, whilst reflecting upon twenty-first century preoccupations with media headlines, celebrity deaths, and car crash TV.

Bringing the visitor full-pelt into Ballard’s world, Adam McEvan’s Honda Teen Facial, a massive and very real upturned Boeing 747 undercarriage, is thrust upon the visitor at the entrance, daring to connect Ballard’s sexual theory to more impressive and tragic accidents associated with passenger aircraft. Expanding themes of damage and destruction to even bigger structures, Rachel Whiteread’s Demolished and projections by Jane and Louise Wilson focus on the devastative power of explosive energy used in the obliteration of building structures and environments. Ballard’s concept of the intersection of sex and death is most closely realised in Paul McCarthy’s Mechanical Pig, a shockingly real and breathing peach-fleshed silicone sow attached to a mechanical contraption resembling a car engine, designed to shock the viewer by penetrating his or her comfort zone. As a set piece, the Gagosian presents a novel take on Ballard’s ideas, showcasing a veritable mixture of artistic responses that rework and redesign his themes to incorporate the concerns of contemporary society.

Until Apr 1

ROO GUNZI