The Art of Collision: JG Ballard’s Crash

‘Crash’ by JG Ballard is a perverse and thoroughly engaging hellride through the dead-ended lives of a few’s obsession with the sexual unification of the human body and the cold, protruding, projectile shards of automobiles during harrowing collisions, on the highways and overpasses of the protagonists minds and bleak environs. Ballard’s words can be as cold as mirror glass entering the cornea and as removed as the approaching ambulance sirens in the distant greyness.

Some elements will need to be mentally abandoned just as soon as they are absorbed, such troubles can the sexual mechano-violence cause in an unprepared mind. As addictive as it is repulsive with a fine line in characterless characters, it can inspire the unimaginable in even the most glacial of readers. So what can it inspire in the most absorbed of artists? Here are some of the better ones.

From Cover Project

By Leona Clarke

By Alex Pines

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”

JG Ballard