Patrick Keiller, The Robinson
Institute
Tate Britain, 27 March – 14 October
2012
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The
peculiar situation of Tate in the nexus of ‘contemporary’ art – at least as
that concept functions as a coherent critical category – is that no Tate
Contemporary exists. Yet this absence of any explicitly institutional
embodiment of the contemporary as a temporal category leaves the Tate
collection itself open to any artistic, critical or curatorial agency that
might contemporize it appropriately. It seems that this is what Patrick Keiller
has attempted to do in The Robinson Institute, which spans the Duveen Galleries
at Tate Britain. The success of this first Tate Commission lies in its
construction of a set of conditions for contemporary art, and in its appropriative
embodiment of the idea of the contemporary itself.
The fatigued suggestion that Keiller’s work gains its productive potential from failure or absence will weary those familiar with the body of films for which he is most famous. Nonetheless, in this commission, Keiller adapts some of the strategies pursued in his cinematographic work to enormously intelligent effect. Notably, Keiller’s use of fictionalization pits this commission on the same level as the work of groups as diverse as the Bernadette Corporation, The Atlas Group, and Claire Fontaine – fictional collectives (or collective fictions) whose precarious existences nonetheless figure something of contemporary experience itself, given that this category – spanning the spatial and temporal disjunctions produced by globalized capital – is always, necessarily, something to be constructed.
Keiller’s films stage models of collectivity at the smallest level, the coupling of Robinson and an unnamed narrator, a strategy that allows the structural significance of correspondence to manifest itself clearly. This reveals itself in the first of Keiller’s ‘stages’ at Tate, entitled ‘Robinsonism’, although a further, retroactive fictional twist is the Institute’s presentation as the somewhat ecstatic findings of a group of researchers. These stages – some of whose titles (‘1795’, ‘1830’) bear meaningful comparison to the ‘plateaus’ of the second volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia – certainly fulfill the exhibition’s promise to manifest new relations between disparate historical, scientific and artistic phenomena, yet Keiller’s strategy rejects, or successfully ironizes, this often consensual framework.
The fourth platform (‘The non-human, the post-human’) hints at a disposition verging somewhere between the respectful and the pathological in its invocation of Robinson’s ‘Biophilia’. If this concept somehow displaces Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘vitalism’, Keiller appears to be hinting that a conscious ironization is the only artistic means by which to approach life’ and ‘the molecular basis of historical events’. Here, the curatorial juxtaposition adds a necessary dose of what the artist-critics of Jena romanticism – to which Keiler is indebted – theorized as Witz: a non-eidetic flash of ironic understanding that nonetheless held in check its etymological other, Wissen (scientific-poetic knowledge).
The Institute’s final stage, whose accompanying text deals most explicitly with the present financial crisis, also appears paradigmatic in the role it accords to text itself. In this context, all of the potentialities and ambiguities contained in Braco Dimitrijevic’s This Could Be a Place of Historical Importance (1972) congeal, harbouring the concomitant dialectic of melancholic resignation and tautological hope that characterizes contemporary practice. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) and Turner’s proto-abstract An Imaginative Historical Subject (1827) offer further textual ruminations on history, whilst Jiri Kovanda’s Two Little White Slats and Three Little White Slats (1980) figures the critical model of art history that Keiller’s whole project seems to valorize.
The Robinson Institute’s somewhat arbitrary ‘destination’ focuses, however, primarily upon the area of urban studies (via Debord and a video about Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon) in which Keiller has emerged as a somewhat canonical figure. The fundamental concerns of Keiller’s commission (whether explored through history, biology, astronomy or agriculture – or Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, for a final, conceptual throw of the dice) are articulated by Henderson and Paolozzi’s Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art) (1952), a collaborative work made for an exhibition at the ICA, only six years after its foundation, in which the artists acted as ‘editors’ alongside civil engineer Ronald Jenkins and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Keiller hasn’t in mind postwar brutalism’s nostalgia for the future and its own ‘contemporary’ situation, however. The exhibition’s anti-clockwise ‘journey’ is a subterfuge: visitors are drawn towards the pleasingly open reading space at the gallery’s centre, in which the truly contemporary, geopolitical resonances of Keiller’s engagement with writing are to be found.
The fatigued suggestion that Keiller’s work gains its productive potential from failure or absence will weary those familiar with the body of films for which he is most famous. Nonetheless, in this commission, Keiller adapts some of the strategies pursued in his cinematographic work to enormously intelligent effect. Notably, Keiller’s use of fictionalization pits this commission on the same level as the work of groups as diverse as the Bernadette Corporation, The Atlas Group, and Claire Fontaine – fictional collectives (or collective fictions) whose precarious existences nonetheless figure something of contemporary experience itself, given that this category – spanning the spatial and temporal disjunctions produced by globalized capital – is always, necessarily, something to be constructed.
Keiller’s films stage models of collectivity at the smallest level, the coupling of Robinson and an unnamed narrator, a strategy that allows the structural significance of correspondence to manifest itself clearly. This reveals itself in the first of Keiller’s ‘stages’ at Tate, entitled ‘Robinsonism’, although a further, retroactive fictional twist is the Institute’s presentation as the somewhat ecstatic findings of a group of researchers. These stages – some of whose titles (‘1795’, ‘1830’) bear meaningful comparison to the ‘plateaus’ of the second volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia – certainly fulfill the exhibition’s promise to manifest new relations between disparate historical, scientific and artistic phenomena, yet Keiller’s strategy rejects, or successfully ironizes, this often consensual framework.
The fourth platform (‘The non-human, the post-human’) hints at a disposition verging somewhere between the respectful and the pathological in its invocation of Robinson’s ‘Biophilia’. If this concept somehow displaces Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘vitalism’, Keiller appears to be hinting that a conscious ironization is the only artistic means by which to approach life’ and ‘the molecular basis of historical events’. Here, the curatorial juxtaposition adds a necessary dose of what the artist-critics of Jena romanticism – to which Keiler is indebted – theorized as Witz: a non-eidetic flash of ironic understanding that nonetheless held in check its etymological other, Wissen (scientific-poetic knowledge).
The Institute’s final stage, whose accompanying text deals most explicitly with the present financial crisis, also appears paradigmatic in the role it accords to text itself. In this context, all of the potentialities and ambiguities contained in Braco Dimitrijevic’s This Could Be a Place of Historical Importance (1972) congeal, harbouring the concomitant dialectic of melancholic resignation and tautological hope that characterizes contemporary practice. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) and Turner’s proto-abstract An Imaginative Historical Subject (1827) offer further textual ruminations on history, whilst Jiri Kovanda’s Two Little White Slats and Three Little White Slats (1980) figures the critical model of art history that Keiller’s whole project seems to valorize.
The Robinson Institute’s somewhat arbitrary ‘destination’ focuses, however, primarily upon the area of urban studies (via Debord and a video about Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon) in which Keiller has emerged as a somewhat canonical figure. The fundamental concerns of Keiller’s commission (whether explored through history, biology, astronomy or agriculture – or Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, for a final, conceptual throw of the dice) are articulated by Henderson and Paolozzi’s Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art) (1952), a collaborative work made for an exhibition at the ICA, only six years after its foundation, in which the artists acted as ‘editors’ alongside civil engineer Ronald Jenkins and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Keiller hasn’t in mind postwar brutalism’s nostalgia for the future and its own ‘contemporary’ situation, however. The exhibition’s anti-clockwise ‘journey’ is a subterfuge: visitors are drawn towards the pleasingly open reading space at the gallery’s centre, in which the truly contemporary, geopolitical resonances of Keiller’s engagement with writing are to be found.
