Saturday 21 April 2012

200words: the robinson institute

Conspiracy theorists trade in insinuated causality, but we forgive this here for the pleasure of being swept along on a 'fictional' bucolic romp across the land we love - and love to hate, apparently. Dirty Old Blighty is rendered in Koyaanisqatic maximalism with a laboriously concocted miserablism, and the capitalist fish in this globalised barrel are poked at with Keiller's gift for statistics, hyperbole and dour visual association. Is this a guilty pleasure? Am I part of the problem by participating, by attending, by blogging? Haven't we Adbusted all this already? Curating on the brink of collapse: it's all a bit mundane now, a bit tired; car crash auto-voyeurism of a self-piteous kind has run its course, welcome to the age of post-environmentalism, a new age, an age so convinced of collapse, so aware of human depravity that we entertain the desperate 'fictional' fantasy that a 'network of non-human intelligences' might 'preserve the possibility of life's survival on the planet'. Keiller taps this superstitious sentiment in both the style and substance of the Robinson outings, free-associating fact and meaning in a wilful act of cognitive dissonance. ... Father, forgive me my oil for I know not what I am doing.

http://www.tate.org.uk/

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