Monday 2 August 2010

Can I Wick It? Yes You Can

Hackney Wicked is an art festival whose location at the far reaches of the Overground saves it from the wanky excesses of Shoreditch-Hoxton.
Link
For three days, this area of scruffy streets and half-empty warehouses is transformed into a world of colour, music and bustle. As we came out of the station, a punk choir (the Hackney Secular Singers) was singing under the railway bridge, which was festooned with posters and flyers. Immediately it felt like something amateur and sprawling, a genuine community festival rather than a corporate association of venues and agents.

It centres on the 600+ artists who have opened their studios to the public for the weekend, plus gallery-based exhibitions, collaborative happenings, outdoor events (such as a coracle regatta and a re-enactment of the Cuban blockade), film screenings, and lots of live music, food, and colourful stuff to look at. The atmosphere was laidback, with a good mix of arty types and families, and best of all everything was free.

In one building alone, you could visit more than thirty studios: there’s a huge amount of work to take in, ranging from the memorable to the forgettable, but this plenty adds to the enjoyment. You know you can’t see everything, so just enjoy what you can. Highlights included Michael Nagle’s haunting photorealistic portraits and Natalie Thakur’s addictively odoriferous leather goodies. The Mother Studios building itself has spectacular views across the River Lea to the half-built Olympic stadium.

Down the road in a graffiti-blazoned yard, an old punk band howled about ketamine at a loose knit crowd of bikers who were chugging cider, balancing on old tyres, dandling punk babies, and flashing metal-skewered breasts at onlookers on the balconies of the neighbouring posh flats, while bull terriers and rottweillers squirmed on the hot concrete. It all looked convincingly hardcore, but this being an art festival, a discarded Guardian Weekend was blowing around, affording the extra pleasure of seeing Lucy Mangan's face stomped into dusty nothingness under oversized boots.

Meanwhile, as the sun set over Queen’s Yard, most of the stalls had packed up, though the jerk chicken was still drawing a queue. A woman in a turquoise net skirt was on stage, wrangling with a sound engineer, while footballs bounced lazily around the tarmac, smokers clanked bottles by the metal-glowing canal, and the diggers across the water had stopped for the day.

The festival finished on Sunday with a ceremonial burning of a wicker man. This was its third year; I’ll be back in 2011, and not only to see how the stadium is getting on.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Back to Life, Back to Surreality: The Surreal House

Surrealism hovers on the boundaries between the pretentious and the raw, between self-indulgence and horror. Both sides were on display last weekend at the Barbican Weekender, a two-day festival to tie in with the Surreal House exhibition. The Centre was alive with surrealist follies, some veering a bit too close to the dreaded world of Cirque, but others (the maze, the small children intent on building cardboard houses) capturing something genuinely fun and off-kilter.

The exhibition itself is thoughtful, wide-ranging and disturbing. The meaning of ‘surreal house’ is twofold: both the ‘domestic interior’ as symbol and object within surrealist art, and the influence of surrealism on architecture. En masse, the works here demonstrate that the house does indeed have a powerful place in the imagination and the unconscious.

At the entrance is Donald Rodney’s In the House of My Father, a close-up photograph of the artist’s hand; on his palm rests a tiny sculpture of a house made from scraps of his own skin , removed during one of his operations to combat sickle-cell anaemia (which killed him in 1998, at the age of 37). Next to the photograph, in a glass case, is the sculpture itself, entitled My Mother. My Father. My Sister. My Brother: miniature, tumbledown, delicate, horrific.

I’ve seen this photograph before, but it works here as a powerful way to introduce the theme of the exhibition. Being trapped in your own skin, your own family, your own self: the home as a place of safety but also as the site of the most primal childhood terrors; the materialisation of the unconscious into physical forms; the bedroom as the site of birth, dreams, sex, and death.

The lower level of the gallery has been partitioned into a series of irregularly shaped rooms with intriguing titles (Press to Enter!, Femme Maison, Panic Space). These initially appear somewhat disorganised, but resolve into a coherent whole as the exhibition continues.

Visiting these rooms is like exploring a fairground house of horrors, as you round cardboard corners in tentative semi-darkness. This works well to put you in a state of childlike apprehension and vulnerability. Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Bath), a cast of a bathtub in black rubber, is ominous and huge; escaping from it, you’re confronted by Freud’s chair, oddly spiderlike in its backlit glass case.

The ‘Who I Am’ room, apparently focusing on the notion of the house as self, is a series of horrors: an anonymous engraving from 1505 of a Tree Man (after this Hieronymus Bosch), a grotesque hybrid of man and wood, ruptured, split, mad-eyed, a face at the top and furniture at the bottom. A film of Andre Breton’s house plays at one end of the room. This is the self/house as broken, bodies sprouting into inhuman profusion.

Another room is dominated from above by Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy, a grand piano suspended upside down in the air, its keys madly sprung out. Every so often, with a resonant low note, the piano comes (back?) to life: the keys retract to their correct positions, the lid closes, the piano plays a tune before exploding once more into frozen agony.

It’s not quite clear what this has to do with houses. The exhibition leaflet says it’s ‘reminiscent of an airborne castle and is principal among the phantoms of the house’, but really I think it just adds to the atmosphere, as do Louise Bourgeois’ creepy, overspilling mounds of sculpture. Some other reviews have criticised this lack of tight conceptual focus:
Yet at times it could be said that the curator has taken anti-modernist irrationality too far. It is often unclear which way to turn when moving from one space to another. It is necessary to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get into the curator's mind, even when the often-baffling combinations of artworks are explained using wall text.
Personally, I'm not bothered by somewhat tenuous links if the artworks in question add to the enjoyment of the show as a whole. I didn't bother trying to 'get into the curator's mind' (especially as much of the wall text is practically unreadable in the darkness, never mind what it says) or to turn in the right direction; I think this exhibition is much better if you let yourself go a bit, wander vaguely, soak up the atmosphere. Without trying to, I did see everything that was there, in a fairly logical order and with no doubling back.

There is far too much here to do justice by listing individual works. The curators have included Big Names, with top-quality pieces by Dalí, Magritte, Giacometti, and so on, but this aren’t necessarily the most striking. Where it really succeeds is in the architecture of the exhibition itself. On the lower level, from within the house, it’s an unnerving experience of going through doorways and around blind corners; from above, there are strange lines of sight, cardboard roofs and blank windows, sculptures seen again from a new angle, visitors wandering around. This works brilliantly, as the upper level deals with surrealism and architecture. It’s an inspired melding of form and content.

Architecture featured includes Kiesler’s Endless House, models for a house based on the shell, the egg and the womb, and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the house that represented twentieth-century Modernism, photographed here after it had fallen into disrepair, along with many other architectural models which strive to materialise the unconscious into external built forms.

The are also many, many films to see, ranging from documentary footage of performance art (someone cutting a house in half, with great effort), to relevant clips from longer films (e.g. Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris), and even entire movies, such as Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, in the ‘Electric Cinema’ – a mock-up complete with comfortable battered red velveteen seats.

Visiting this exhibition isn’t simply viewing art assembled in a gallery space; it’s an affective and absorbing experience in itself, which makes it well worth the cost of entry.

(I had planned to include here a write-up of Tai Shani’s exhibition-linked performance piece, ‘Last Night I Dreamt I Was Venus from Beyond the Mirrors’, but I’m disinclined to put more thought and effort into writing a review than she did into devising and rehearsing it in the first place.)

The Surreal House, Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DS. 10 June – 12 September 2010.

Friday 28 May 2010

Overexposure: Exposed at Tate Modern

There’s a familiar trajectory when you visit a big exhibition, especially one dedicated to a single artist and arranged in chronological order. Typically, they begin with the artist’s first stumbling steps towards developing his or her distinctive style. These early works usually make sense viewed retrospectively, but tend not to grab you on their own merits. Combine this with the real-world adjustment to being in an exhibition (the need to toggle all of your own switches from ‘walking and going somewhere’ to ‘standing and being somewhere’), and exhibitions can often initially seem alienating, confusing, or dull. Stick with it, though, and the first drafts gradually give way to the more fully realised works, in a journey that takes you about ten minutes but probably took the artist twenty years.

Exposed takes this narrative and turns it on its head, with an exhibition that is instantly accessible, but becomes increasingly alienating. It doesn’t take much mental effort to look at photographs and video, our most familiar visual forms, or to think about tabloid subjects such as fame, sex, and violence. The first room features high-resolution close-up photographs of people walking the streets of New York, taken without their knowledge or consent - leading to a landmark legal case in which one of the subjects took the photographer to court, and lost. This introduces the main issues which dominate this exhibition: the ethics of photography, and the politics of looking and being seen.

(Oh, and America. It should be mentioned that the exhibition as a whole is overwhelmingly dominated by works from the USA: tenements in Tennessee, Hollywood stars caught unawares, strippers in San Francisco, street scenes in New York, discarded litter at the Mexico/USA border. Fair enough to an extent: if the twentieth century was the century of photography, it was also the century of America. It’s a shame, though, that the Tate couldn’t have put a more British spin on the idea. America is hardly short of exhibitions of this kind, and even if, as I suspect, this is targeted at transatlantic summer tourists, more could have been made of its real-world location. There are no photographs of London at all; Shizuka Yokomizo’s intriguing snaps of strangers at the windows of their homes, the only ones taken in the UK, are not distinctively British. This seems a missed opportunity.)

The first theme is ‘The Unseen Photographer’, featuring photographs taken surreptitiously with all manner of devices: cameras which appear to point in one direction while really capturing another, cameras disguised as books or hidden in pockets, or taken with extreme telephoto lenses. Some of these, especially the very old ones, are fascinating: a nineteenth-century snapshot of two young women sharing a book on a train shows a casual familiarity that a posed photo could never achieve. However, as shown most clearly in Lewis Hine’s photographs of child miners and factory workers (he was hired by the National [i.e. American] Child Labor Committee), these are mainly interesting for what they show, not for the process of showing. This is photography as documentation: evidence at the time, now vividly real social history.

The next theme, ‘Celebrity and the Public Gaze’, is less distinguished, save for a very early paparazzi shot of Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir in Paris. Slebs on display here include Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, and Paris Hilton; we’re veering into Heat territory. This exhibition contributes to the ongoing culting of Alison Jackson by including two of her large faked photographs of celebrities. Whereas the real paparazzi pictures confront us with the torment of those photographed (and have potentially serious consequences), Jackson’s pseudo versions add nothing to this.

From the very first room, when you as a viewer discover you’re looking at photographs of people who absolutely did not want to be looked at in this way, you are placed in an uneasy position. This feeling intensifies as you proceed onto theme 3, ‘Voyeurism and Desire’, with pictures taken secretly of women in changing rooms, unsuspecting couples having sex in cars, or young girls in the streets of a provincial town. Other than Susan Meiselas’ compelling photographs of carnival strippers and their audiences and Kohei Yoshiyuki’s documentation of the bizarre goings-on in a Tokyo park, few of the works here seem to have much to say about voyeurism and desire, as opposed to simply being expressions of voyeuristic desire. This is a problem. The Tate’s write-up talks of ‘the viewer [being] implicated in acts of voyeurism’, rather than ‘blam[ing] the camera’, but that’s not really an answer.

It is when you reach the set of rooms dedicated to ‘Witnessing Violence’, that this feeling of implication becomes overwhelming. In quick succession, you are presented with suicide and genocide, lynchings and shootings, executions and death camps, battlefields and bodies. These images are detailed, explicit, and horrific. But whereas a Francis Bacon painting (say) is allusively horrifying, which is to say it creates a sense of mortality and corporeality in a non-literal way, these are simply documents of actual appalling things that have taken place. And personally, I don’t want to look at piles of bodies at Dachau, or a man lying dead in the street, for aesthetic or intellectual pleasure. This is not about avoiding the reality and the horror of life, but because it is distressing and unnecessary (and maybe even, to use a contentious word, wrong) to peer at them.

Displaying these photographs doesn’t per se raise interesting questions or do anything worthwhile. Yes, photographs like those of a suicidal black South African man on a high ledge, and then jumping from it to his death in front of a jeering crowd, are sickening, but what does that prove? The Tate claim that such photography may ‘allow us to bear witness to a victim’s suffering’, or alternatively ‘anaesthetize us to the horror’, but all I saw were people gawking in a way that undermines their own dignity, as well as that of the broken bodies on display. There are better, cleverer, subtler ways to interrogate man’s inhumanity to man - and the role of the spectator in it - than to become part of the heartless crowd of onlookers.

Having been through these rooms, I was in a bit of a daze by the time I reached the final theme of ‘Surveillance’: a shame, as this section includes some fascinating projects by Sophie Calle and enjoyable works dealing with spying, military and civilian watchers, even if the stuff about CCTV is hackneyed.

There is a lot to see in this exhibition, and much of it is gripping and powerful. Undoubtedly it is worth visiting and taking your time over. However, as the Tate themselves state: 'Exposed explores the uneasy relationship between making and viewing images that deliberately cross lines of privacy and propriety’. The thing is, though, they really do. It's not necessarily the job of art galleries to find and show the most gruesome, intrusive pictures that they can. Maybe it actually isn’t right to hang or to look at some of these photographs. Man cannot always bear this much reality. No, nor woman neither.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera, Tate Modern, 28 May - 3 October 2010

Tuesday 18 May 2010

Cheese and Biscuits: Jaffa Cakes and Marc Quinn

JaffaCakes TLV is the UK's first-ever exhibition of contemporary art from Tel Aviv. On this evidence, I hope it's not the last.

The exhibition begins with a four-minute film, ‘What about me?’, by Etgar Keret, a renowned Israeli writer who is credited as the inspiration for the exhibition as a whole. This film is a short, funny parable of sorts featuring a young soldier guarding two posts in the vast empty space of the desert, a suited businessman with a passing resemblance to Alan Sugar, and a donkey.

Upstairs, one corner is dominated by Mika Rottenberg’s short film ‘Fried Sweat’. Indian musicians play drums and pipes while a hulking body builder works out, the sweat dripping off his muscles and onto a hotplate below. It’s a heightened, grotesque, blurry feast of colour and bodies: the endless loop of the film, the bulging eyes, the impassive musicians, the sweat sizzling in the pan. There's no single obvious meaning but the effect is visceral.

By contrast, Maya Attoun’s pen-and-ink drawings and rope sculptures are cool and calm and lovely. Her drawings ‘Daily Wonders’ and ‘Daily Wonders 2’ show women sketched in simple monochrome, magically hovering in the air while they perform household tasks, while the gorgeous sculpture ‘Bloom’ consists of red roses and their trailing black stems, all made from thick twisted rope.

The works of Know Hope, described as a ‘street artist’ who specialises in ‘whimsical personifications of urban objects’, repay a patient inspection. At first glance, they have a distinctive cartoony style with a faintly disturbing edge, like one of those odd late-night kids’ TV programmes. But looked at more closely, there’s something arresting about the repetition of motifs – the red heart on the sleeve, the bird, the blue teardrops – and the silent, unexplained struggles of his cardboard characters.

However, it is Nogah Engler’s paintings which stand out a mile, even beside these other intriguing and accomplished works. Engler paints stunning, strange, multilayered landscapes, with faint Breughelesque figures half-appearing among the dark trees, streaks of dirty snow, ponds of light, large square holes opening up inexplicably in the ground, sharp dark edges, a black dog suddenly in the corner of the picture, barking from behind a fragment of wire fence. These are the landscapes of half-remembered bad dreams. Engler is an oustanding and distinctive painter of works which resist complete comprehension.

What a contrast, then, to come out of this exhibition and enter White Cube on the neighbouring side of Hoxton Square to see Marc Quinn’s latest collection of sculptures and paintings. Where the works in JaffaCakes are troubling, quietly odd and beautiful, Quinn’s new collection is a dull riot of the superficial. And whereas I was almost alone in the Rove Gallery, White Cube was crowded with pleasure seekers getting their intellectually respectable pervkicks.

The exhibition consists mainly of shiny sculptures of celebrities such as Pamela Anderson (represented here by two more or less identical statues, neither of which look much like her) and Michael Jackson, and others famous for their transgressively modified bodies, such as Buck Angel, the transsexual ‘man with a pussy’, Catman, who has undergone extensive surgery to take on feline characteristics, and Chelsea Charms, a porn star with huge silicone-enhanced breasts.

The centrepiece of the main gallery is a oversized white marble nude of Thomas Beattie, who was widely hyped in the media as ‘the world’s first pregnant man’ (he is, in fact, a female-to-male transsexual who has only partially undergone the transition). Accompanying the statues are several very similar multicoloured paintings of vaguely sexualised flowers, with long pretentious titles (e.g.: Venus After Magellan (In the Night Garden); On the Separation of the Body and Soul (Easter Island)).

The White Cube's write-up states:
Although all modelled from life, these bodies seem to exist beyond the normal boundaries of classification - appearing almost 'trans-gender', or 'trans-corporeal' - throwing the very notion of identity into question, exposing it as a fragile, complex and multi-layered construction, interminably co-existent with their external physical selves.
Surely it's understating matters quite drastically to say that Buck Angel, a thickset tattooed man with female genitals, ‘appear[s] almost “trans-gender”’?

In any case, these are obviously, glaringly non-natural bodies, and simply displaying them doesn't do anything to disrupt the relationship between the experienced self and the perceived physical form. Art has tried to approach questions of identity, the self, and the body in many different ways, but just reproducing those which are already renowned for their self-conscious artificiality and blurring of boundaries doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

All of those who dabble in the worlds of online pornography, genderqueer, ‘furries’, and body modification have long been familiar with those featured here; they are celebrated examples of people who have deliberately undertaken extreme alterations for various reasons (such as attempting to conform more closely to a perceived ideal body, or to gain money or fame). But their fame isn’t restricted to underground subcultures, although the breathlessness and prurience of some of the coverage might suggest otherwise. One reviewer writes:
It's at once an unexpected ensemble – the risqué sculptures arranged in front of a series of vibrant psychedelic flower paintings – and shocking too. Shocking because the figures I'm confronted with haven't just been conjured up by Quinn in some kind of hormone therapy, plastic surgery, skin bleaching freak show; they are real life people, who really look like this. And have chosen to look like this.
It makes you wonder what kind of elevated cultural bubble people must live in to be genuinely shocked by the existence of these ‘real life’ bodies: Catman has been featured in documentaries on Channel 4 and Channel 5, while Thomas Beattie is familiar from a slew of front pages and Pammy was the darling of ITV teatimes way back in the early nineties. It is they who deserve credit for exposing identity as a construction not grounded in essentially natural physical bodies, if anyone does - not Marc Quinn.

The joke, or the serious point, of these sculptures lies (the reviews assure us) in their deviation from the idealised physiques of Greco-Roman statuary, a similar idea to Quinn’s earlier sculpture of amputee artist Alison Lapper, which occupied Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. But even leaving aside the fact that sculptures have historically depicted an enormous diversity of human bodies, it is difficult to see that this does anything more than highlight their abnormality by placing them in this frozen freakshow. Certainly this is suggested by the reactions of the exhibition visitors, goggling and giggling as they peer at the statue of Buck Angel being fucked doggystyle by chick-with-a-dick Allanah Starr. You can find this stuff online, you know - someone should tell them.

In the end though, the most significant difference between these two exhibitions is their affective power. Quinn’s previous project Self, for which he modelled a sculpture of his own head from his own frozen blood, had something immediate about it, but these works don’t. The statues don’t implore or beseech or threaten; no human connection is made; they leave you cold and detached. Compare this to the stifling heat of Rottenberg’s ‘Fried Sweat’, with its grunting, sizzling, straining flesh. The works in JaffaCakes refuse the crowd-pleasing shortcuts and leave you with a lot to chew on. And a smashing orangey bit.

JaffaCakes TLV, Pop-up exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s Rove Gallery, 33-34 Hoxton Square, London N1 6NN. 16 April – 15 May 2010
Marc Quinn, White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB. 7 May – 26 June 2010

Friday 12 March 2010

Crash: Homage to JG Ballard

Capturing the essence of JG Ballard rather nicely, Martin Amis writes:
Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.
It’s been twenty-four hours since I saw Crash, the Gagosian Gallery's 'homage' to the man in question, and I’m still waiting for the haunting to start.

There are undoubtedly works in this exhibition that disgust, titillate, please, impress, amuse – but haunt? There’s some kind of essential lack of affect going on at the Gagosian: a lack which is not one of Ballard’s faults as a writer. Even when the environments and the people he creates are sterile or alienating, the books produce some sort of feeling. They are always unsettling. And they don’t go away; their power to unsettle grows quietly over time.

There's a frisson of Ballard when you arrive; the fragment of Boeing 747 undercarriage which sits immediately inside the gallery entrance has a quasi-erotic charge simply because it’s so REAL and so BIG and so DIRTY. The size of the tyres! The giant grinding bits of metal! The fragility of the human body in comparison! (And not just the especially fragile human bodies which hang around surreptitiously adjusting their fringes at exhibitions like this.)

However, the only artwork which seems to share Ballard's power to 'come back and haunt you' is Mike Nelson’s installation ‘Preface to the 2004 Edition (Triple Bluff Canyon)’. This constructed space, placed between two of the gallery rooms, is almost nothing-y, almost evades description. You enter it through double doors and find yourself, incongruously, in a carpeted, octagonal room, something like a small lobby perhaps, with red lamps shining from the walls and numbers over the doors.

It’s utterly normal, mundane, and at the same time disconcerting in the extreme, because what the hell is it doing here? And what are you doing in it? The half-mirrored doors, through which you can see people moving around the main gallery rooms, like ghosts overlaid on your own misty-startled reflection, the overwhelming heat and stuffiness of it, the difficulty of pushing open the heavy wooden doors (some are locked), all contribute to the sense of panic and wanting to escape.

Despite being one of the least ‘Ballardian’ works in the exhibition in terms of its subject matter, the feeling it provokes is properly Ballard-like: both boring and haunting, quotidian and frightening.

By contrast, many of the other pieces on display are superficially Ballardian, explicitly portraying sex, death, gore, cities, machines, the distortion of the human animal in the inhuman built environment. But these are the general preoccupations of much modern art, and it definitely seems a stretch to claim that some of these works have any particular connections to Ballard. What, for example, is the relevance of the incest drawings of Hans Bellmer, or the similarly unpleasant painting by John Currin? If ‘perverted sex’ – or in Currin’s case, just ‘yuk sex’ – is sufficient to include it as a ‘homage to Ballard’, then pretty much anything in the world could be shoehorned in here.

The weakness of the links to Ballard means that the exhibition itself is close to incoherent, with no narrative to lead you from room to room, and no particular unifying idea within any of the rooms. This doesn't destroy the value of individually excellent works. The inclusion of Paul Delvaux, Dalí, and de Chirico is justified as they are known to have influenced Ballard, while paintings by Jenny Saville, Edward Hopper, and the brilliant young Northerner George Shaw are of such quality that you don’t mind the tenuousness - or downright absence - of any Ballard connection.

Many of the Big Names here are not represented by anything much worth seeing: the pieces by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Bacon, and Basquiat, for example, are very far from their best. You can’t help feeling that the Gagosian just wanted to get the most impressive list of names possible for their press release.

There are a couple of good visual jokes, like Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Proposed Giant Monument of Concrete Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, in the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway I’, and Jake and Dinos Chapman’s limited-edition ‘Bang. Wallop’ book (a messed-up pastiche of Crash).

One’s inclined to suspect, however, in a gallery which includes an installation of ‘235 clear contact lenses’ scattered on the floor – and then reprimands its visitors for treading on them – that any lulz are probably more luck than judgement.

In a nutshell, the Gagosian has cleverly put together an exhibition that packs several powerful punches to bring in the punters: lots of Big Names, explicit sex and gore, attached to an intellectually-respectable, recently-dead writer. It’s no wonder that even on a grey Thursday lunchtime, the gallery was packed. But that’s precisely what’s wrong with it: no wonder.

Crash: Homage to JG Ballard, Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia St, WC1X 9JD. 11 February – 1 April 2010