The End of the Twentieth Century

Peter Robinson’s bazaar-style scatter installation The End of the 20th Century has been called a grim merger of exotica and cultural alienation. Picking through this wasteland, one discovers all manner of tack: Bill and Monica Russian dolls; a pornographic interracial love atlas; a golden Chinese junk; a reclining porcelain nude with detachable breasts – salt and pepper shakers; downloaded photos of transsexuals, aliens, Stephen Hawking and Marshall Applegate, the Heaven’s Gate cult leader; china clogs; buddhas; model planes and skyscrapers. A TV screens the 1962 global pseudo-anthropological shockumentary Mondo Cane (translation Dog World), while Malcom McLaren’s equally exploitive

early-1980s world music megamix Duck Rock blares out of a ghetto blaster. The ensemble is punctuated by signs, instructions, slogans, jokes. Graphics signifying lengths-of-road enhance the sense that the work is a kind of landscape. Robinson’s cultural core sample is a world tour of kitsch. Offering a radically deregulated view of the world (one familiar to any jaundiced cheap-thrill-seeking Netspace navigator), The End of the 20th Century is Robinson’s riposte to the worthy globalism that permeates the art world. (Summer at the New, 2004)

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