Crash: Homage to JG Ballard {read more}
Gagosian Gallery
- Charissa Terranova -
Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait of You + Me (Jayne Mansfield), 2007; smoke, wax and mirror; 41 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches framed; photo by Rob McKeever
Adam McEwen, Honda Teen Facial, 2010; Boeing 747 undercarriage; approximately 134 13/16 x 118 1/8 x 71 11/16 inches; photo by Mike Bruce; images courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London
“Sex x technology = the future,” the words of author J. G. Ballard, are scrawled in black across the bumpy surface of Loris Gréaud’s big white painting The Future. And they are the words that encapsulate the powerful spirit of Crash: Homage to JG Ballard, a paean in art to the British author, whose work distills not so much the spirits of our age but of those to come. Ballard is most famous in the United States for Empire of the Sun, his semi-autobiographical novel adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg. Stylistically, it is the most straightforward and linear of Ballard’s oeuvre. Otherwise, Ballard’s body of work offers, collectively speaking, a fantastically imaginative and swerving take on the psychopathies that go along with life in the age of high-tech mobility.
Ballard was masterful in the creation of mental landscapes that swoon between the parsimonious ecstasy of utopia and the decadent angst of dystopia. A fenced-off, dug-in man-made island between lanes of a super highway is the setting for a stranded architect in Concrete Island (1974). A derelict tower is host to a violent “lord of the flies” economy of survival in High Rise (1975). Robert Vaughan, “former TV-scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressways,” is the protagonist of Crash (1973), a novel in which the smashed-up car, healing wound and body brace constitute a triadic fetish that is at once primordial and futuristic. Needless to say, Ballard—his writing and the man—is addictive.
With a wide range of work, from paintings by Paul Delvaux and drawings by Salvador Dalí and Hans Bellmer to sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Prince, Crash: Homage to JG Ballard is a museum-caliber show in a storefront gallery. It is a generous, well-honed and devoted hymn to the much-beloved writer. The exhibition unfolds in six rooms, five individual gallery spaces, plus the reception area where Florian Maier-Aichen’s small glossy black-and-white photograph, One Day at Spiral Jetty, Ed Ruscha’s nine colorful shots of unpeopled poolscapes, Pools, and Dan Mitchell’s computer-generated collage of bureaucratic signage and space, Zodiac Hilton, all hang together. In this small ancillary grouping, viewers find the smooth, beautiful tension of the juxtaposition of specific contents. It is this union of contrast and the figural, consistent throughout the show, that makes the exhibition a redoubtable celebration of cerebral, unforeseen form. The works are by three entirely unrelated artists, showing three disparate spaces, yet they are united in their mining of the surrealist possibility that lies just below the surface of so-called reality. This was the mission of Ballard’s writing: to inscribe and reveal the uncanny in the banal, like the eldritch potentialities of a common shopping mall.
Richard Prince, Elvis, 2007; steel, plywood, Bondo; 63 x 76 x 182 inches; photo by Mike Bruce
Edward Ruscha, Fountain of Crystal, 2009; acrylic on canvas; 30 1/8 x 36 1/8 inches; photo by Paul Ruscha; images courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London
Surrealism was a two-pronged catalyst in Ballard’s young life, causing his initial turn toward medicine and psychiatry and his eventual shift away to the development of a new form of writing that reveled in the psychological undercurrents of modernity’s misbegotten technology. Works hung close-knit in the small viewing room next to the entrance bring home the role of surrealism in Ballard’s formation as a writer, as well as his own sense of artistry. Project for a New Novel is a 10-page collage by the man himself from 1958. It is an experiment in graphic pondering and design. Installed beneath it is Richard Prince’s American/English, a sculpture podium rendered in blue Bondo with the first publications of Crash, one from the United States and the other from England, situated in a case on top. The slip jacket of the American version shows a pudenda-shaped car. The British version focuses in on the phallus of a gearshift. Along the neighboring walls are a photograph by Man Ray, drawings by Dalí, Bellmer and Claes Oldenburg, and John Currin’s absolutely luscious painting Rotterdam, showing an almost drooling blond woman about to insert a throbbing penis into her vagina. Photograph, drawings and painting alike focus on the act of penetration—mouth-to-mouth in Ray’s photo of a couple kissing. This relationship becomes urban and infrastructural with Oldenburg’s Proposed Giant Monument of Concrete Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, in the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway I.
As with the natural and man-made forms in Ballard’s literary landscapes, the works in the gallery syncopate between the large, obvious and bombastic to the mid-sized, subtle and almost curt. Entering the gallery from the street, one thwarts the large tires of Adam McEwen’s Honda Teen Facial. It is a Boeing 747 undercarriage placed directly in front of the doorway. Prince’s Elvis, a sculpture of a fossilized muscle car rendered in Bondo, steel and plywood, offers a similar experience, scale-wise. Three works to the side of Elvis, Roger Hiorns’ untitled engine crystallized in blue sulfate that hangs from a cubic armature, his untitled small pile of almost invisible contact lenses on the floor, and Paul Delvaux’s surrealist painting Le canapé bleu make a trio of interwoven form and literary allusion. The stars in the sky of Delvaux’s painting connect formally to the slight twinkling of light off the surfaces of the lenses on the floor, which connect back to the glistening phosphorescence of the blue engine that hangs something like a freshly slaughtered, blood-draining pig.
Mike Nelson’s Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon) offers the best of both worlds: it is big but subtle. Constructed from found and new materials, an octagonal room carves out an extra-gallery dimension, or so it would seem. Suggestive of the large wooden portal of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, an old wooden door along the wall of one gallery room invites viewers behind the wall, through a small midway with an unmanned ticket booth. A used Styrofoam cup is stuffed in the space where one usually places money and receives a ticket, and the window above is covered by a few old posters. The viewer then enters a small octagonal room covered in green paint. It feels like the foyer or antechamber of an old cinema house. The viewer exits into another gallery space to find photo-work by Douglas Gordon, Adam McEwen, Cindy Sherman, sculptures by Paul McCarthy and Carsten Höller, and paintings by Jeff Koons and Jenny Saville—each work suggests a Ballardian dreamscape of sexualized technology run amok.
In all, the show functions something like ekphrasis in reverse. Ekphrasis is the rhetorical form that refers to elaborate descriptions of one form of art in another. It usually occurs within literature, wherein a poignant graphic account in words serves to bring forth something essential about a given work of art, often a painting. In the instance of Crash at Gagosian London, we find a select group of artworks—painting, video, sculpture and installation—that tell us something essential about Ballard. They bring home, both in a general way and through exacting references to passages of his writing, the breadth and profundity of his imagination. The show also tells us of the tight adjacency between Ballard’s writing and visual art.
Charissa Terranova is Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies and Director of Centraltrak, an artists residency at The University of Texas at Dallas.