Cold-blooded confrontation

Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts! Thus raps Eminem, but it is also a pretty serviceable summary of the Andres Serrano show at the Barbican. To this hardcore melange you can also add the Klu Klux Klan, corpses, bodily fluids and religious figurines.

But there is an important difference: if Eminem reels off this list of shock horrors to take the mickey out of himself, rapping and US morality, Serrano deals with these subjects in such a pofaced and portentous way that it really gets on your nerves. He wants so badly to be iconic and political but it just comes over as painfully contrived.

There's no denying that Serrano's photographs are technically sumptuous and that the exhibition is beautifully installed, but this sits uncomfortably with the complexity of his gut-wrenching subject matter. There's so much human flesh here - from hearts and locked brains to a post mortem and an empurpled penis - but this blood runs cold: everything is so icily portrayed.

So don't be fooled into thinking these are confrontational images - most of Serrano's sitters don't even have eyecontact with the lens. His portraits reduce human beings to types, silent symbols of The Church, Nomads, American Indians or Female Bodybuilders. Unlike Rineke Dijkstra's searingly intense portraits, all traces of individual psyche are repressed in Serrano's apotheosis of the surface.

The only picture that comes close to oozing a shred of humanity is a Mother and Child - a droopy breasted, flushfaced woman who stares into the camera as a child lolls against her torso. When this image (together with some of his morgue photographs) was shown earlier this year alongside medieval crucifixes at the V&A, they delivered a sharp, emotive kick. Now, seen in bulk, Serrano's sex-and-morgue images are little more than tabloid-grabbing fodder - especially when set alongside his ridiculously fetishistic close-ups of rifles and colts.

The exhibition is designed to take you on a journey from the abstraction of ejaculate to the hardcore horrors of the morgue and other people's genitalia.

You will leave feeling ropey, but this is far less to do with Serrano's " outrageous" subject matter than with the way his images are taken: without a shred of complexity or compassion.

Andres Serrano: Placing Time and Evil. At The Barbican until 23 December.
Tel: 020 7638 8891.