Peter Robinson

The End of the Twentieth Century

The End of the Twentieth Century by Peter Robinson

Artwork Detail

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)

Title
The End of the Twentieth Century
Artist/creator
Peter Robinson
Production date
2000
Medium
mixed media
Dimensions
275kg
Credit line
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery, 2003
Accession no
2003/45
Copyright
Copying restrictions apply
Department
New Zealand Art
Display status
Not on display

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