Porn wives and kitsch trash

I bought a cheap painting from Golborne Road market last year. It was strange, funny and badly painted, but it had something going for it. All the paintings in this show have the same appeal. They are absolutely hideous: shamelessly grim, mind-numbingly rancid, but grouped together, they, too, have something.

They all belong to Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw, who has been buying art by amateurs from garage sales and second-hand stalls since

1974. He's attracted to the "psychedelic" and "psychotic" content of these lo-fi efforts. He doesn't know who did them, and doesn't care.

Everything is hung by theme - nudes, surrealism, portraits, psycho, adolescent fantasies, art history - thereby turning the ICA into a fabulously alternative Salon de Refuses. Many pictures are weird. There is a bodiless hand playing a piano-less keyboard. There is a timid triceratops nibbling a leaf. There are pneumatic bimbos, camp, crusty rockers and plenty of wobbly homages to Warhol, Kandinsky and Magritte. One artist calls himself The Master of the First Ladies, as if he was a medieval chronicler for the modern age. His subject matter is pornographic renditions of American presidents' wives - Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan et al, legs apart, plus the occasional inserted object. They grin with the perfect all-American, "Have-a-nice-day" smile.

What kinds of minds have done these? Are they bad, mad, dangerous or just your average small-town guys? The fact that we will never know makes them all the more fascinating. An American critic has said this collection is about "failure, inarticulation and rejection", a kaleidoscope of broken dreams of the silent American majority, you could say, but that seems to be too simple an analysis.

The most interesting aspect is the sinister sincerity that lurks beneath the humorous surface. We may knowingly chortle at one or two images, but there is nervous laughter also. The half-baked beliefs, the wistful trashiness, the confused aspirations and the sad anxiety in these dysfunctional images tell a story that is fast becoming Britain's too.

Until 5 November at the ICA Tel: 020 7930 3647.