Crash

In 1970, JG Ballard held an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab in London. This, the English novelist recalled six years before his death last year, was 'experimental psychology, using the medium of a fine art show', and was greeted with extreme public hostility; the cars, he said, were attacked. A hunch confirmed, Ballard wrote 'Crash' (1973), in which dying behind the wheel is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Gagosian's 'Crash: Homage to JG Ballard', organised with the Ballard Estate and featuring 73 artworks by 'artists attuned to the Ballardian universe', opens with a big gnarly lump of scrap metal; for a microsecond, the heart quivers. But it's not a car. It's a chunk of Boeing 747 undercarriage which Adam McEwen has sexed up with the title 'Honda Teen Facial' (2010).

Yes, that's kind of 'Ballardian' - but then, so is a lot of the world we live in. Ballard's 'Crash', literalising Freud's notion of the 'death drive', predicts pleasure deformed by ubiquitous urbanism and the meld of bodies and tech, and hasn't really dated. As has been widely remarked, Ballard anticipated much of the present's tenor and made dystopian outlooks rife: accordingly, art which underscores his themes might just as easily be 'art inspired by the world around us'. What we're celebrating here is a writer's soothsaying and discernment as much as his influence on artists - but, while we're at it, we'll celebrate Gagosian's stable of artists too, for although there are a fair number of non-gallery artists here, anyone represented who could be roped in has been.

Is Jeff Koons a big Ballard fan? Perhaps not, but his twin vitrined vacuum cleaners from 1984 suitably divulge the melancholy of consumer fetishism. Does Damien Hirst's numb figurative painting 'Suicide Bomber (Aftermath)' (2004-5), with its bloodied car hood, have anything to do with 'Crash'? Not really, but it's a wrecked car so that's OK. Glenn Brown's giant, lonesome, twinkling spacescape, 'The Pornography of Death (Painting for Ian Curtis) After Chris Foss' (1995)? Associative logic at work: Joy Division were the most Ballardian of bands, and Ballard's work is sci-fi of a sort. Ed Ruscha's photographs of swimming pools and Helmut Newton's nudes adumbrate Ballard's later focus on shenanigans in gated communities, and a Cindy Sherman photograph of a grotesque nude mannequin apostrophises the sexuality of inanimate objects.

The exhibition is a sort of fog in which everything fits vaguely or too well: such is the scope of the world Ballard mapped. But it regularly comes off like a curatorial exercise, and while some work is utterly apposite - Tacita Dean's photograph of Donald Crowhurst's trimaran Teignmouth Electron abandoned in a tropical landscape and, signposting the artist and writer's mutual admiration, subtitled with the latter's name; Rachel Whiteread's gridded images of tower blocks being detonated - the attempts elsewhere to force pieces (and artists) into it end up detracting and distracting.

The show is on somewhat firmer ground when it reverses to outline the effect that earlier art had on Ballard: artists he's name-checked as influences, from Giorgio de Chirico to Paul Delvaux, Richard Hamilton to Eduardo Paolozzi, are all present and correct. (One would like to know, too, how powerful an impact Warhol's 'Disaster' silk-screens, of which one features here, had on him.)

Mostly, the show just doesn't feel very Ballardian, despite humming along gamely in approximately the right key. That may have something to do with artists not wanting, really, to be seen illustrating a well-known writer's work, but the result is predominantly leached of authentic dread. As such, it may well lead a viewer back to Ballard, in which case the Estate will be happy.

Break out the books, and one is reminded what a prodigiously visual writer he was. 'The Drowned World' assembles itself in one's head as a vast, intricate, obsessively constructed painting of a tropical waterworld.
'High Rise' conjures up a giant geometric sculpture and contains a disintegrating society within it. 'Crash' is a fresco of diversely intersecting limbs and metal, semen and blood, irrevocably present in the mind's eye. That these visions didn't exist in the flesh would justify any artist's attentions; that they didn't need to leaves Ballard's ghost floating elegantly above this particular melée.