Robinson World is centrally concerned with the dislocation of thinking. What happens when a mode of analysis fashioned in a particular context is sent into space? Utilizing the tricks of translation, contrast, and re-contextualization, the artist toys with topics ranging from the failure of critical models to the distortion of intellectual programs and the awkwardness of projection. He reworks ‘big picture’ thinking as a ‘pet topic’, an intimate and haphazard attempt at making sense of the world.
In the past, Robinson has faked primitivist sculpture; now he turns to faux-conceptualism. Lolling on the floor in the current installation is Superstring, a licorice-like creation that reveals a zero-shaped core at one end and the twisted form of an infinity sign at the other. The dizzying play of Robinson’s models (he incorporates models of the universe within a model that is a model of a model of art making) reflects their hopeless inadequacy.
The most surreptitious of Robinson’s examples of nothing may be design. His existential void is papered in an eye-popping pattern of zeros and ones. He chooses a decorative style aligned with 1960s Op-art and applies it with the relentlessness of a corporate branding program. Apparently, these patterns of zeros and ones conceal existentialist texts coded according to the digital formulae that drive computers. Robinson stretches modest-scaled statements like Sartre’s Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being like a worm, into long, unrecognizable chains of bytes. He measures the absurd amount of space it takes to represent nothing.
The glinting ones and zeros reference chaos theory. They allude to the fuzzy logic that controls such things as the volume of bubbles, the extent of turbulence, and the wobble of postmodern washing machines. They also read as the signature of IO, a name shared by the Maori supreme god, a mortal love object for the Greek god Zeus (subsequently turned into a heifer), and a moon of Jupiter.
Anna Miles (Extracted from Au contraire)
Satres Worm, 2001. Lambda print. 120 × 160 cm
Into the Void, 2001. Lambda print. 120 × 175 cm
Superstring, 2001. plexiglas. 10 × 500 × 30 cm
Zero Shift, 2001. plexiglas. dimensions variable
Memory Flower, 2001. plexiglas. 28 × 28 × 8 cm
Null&Void, 2001. sculpture. 15 × 40 × 15 cm
Courtesy of the artist
