Round the galleries

I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict.

I admire J.G. Ballard, who died last year, but much of his writing leaves me cold — as if abandoned in one of the lunar jungles or deserts that Max Ernst’s paintings so often depict. It’s a deep chill of the psyche, a numbing of the human warmth that makes life bearable, and Ballard rightly identified it as taking over our culture. He wasn’t really a science fiction writer so much as a social commentator, dissecting our present dystopia — a remarkable and original voice, unafraid to describe the dark psychopathology of the human race, however ominous his predictions. At Gagosian Gallery (6-24 Britannia Street, WC1, until 1 April) is an exhibition entitled Crash, in homage to his famous novel (and the film based on it), an evocation of the Ballardian. I hesitate to call it a celebration because of the violent and destructive nature of much of the material on view.

Apparently, Ballard would have liked to have been a painter himself but lacked the requisite skills (that doesn’t stop a lot of people), and there are examples of work by artists here he deeply admired, such as Hopper, de Chirico and Delvaux. He was drawn to where science fiction and surrealism meet and had a sophisticated appreciation of art, but I wonder what he would have made of this gallimaufry. The Small Viewing Room is given over largely to pornography and perversity (Dali, Bellmer, John Currin), and in the main rooms a number of the big names have been corralled to demonstrate the commodification (rather than apotheosis) of technology and violence. Warhol, Koons, Lichtenstein, Richter, Hamilton, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Hirst — they’re all here.