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City Gallery
30 May - 22 Aug 2004 |
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Curatorial
Statement | Artist's
Résumé
'The equation of Fag Time
is simple - things you smoke or eat go in, unspeakable shiny,
viscous things come out. Like a bacteria cell on a TV ad for
bleach, the large ball with the Cyclopean eye and lungs like
old boot soles draws desperately on an equally globular rollie
- two decomposing grey spheres leaking, seeping, suppurating,
spreading squid-like in a splatter of smoke, tar, bile, vomit,
something excremental along the way.'
Writer Sally Blundell's above description of Peter Robinson's
Fag Time 1 captures the intense physical presence of
the work. Robinson, a former cigarette smoker, presents us
with a cautionary warning. Two large blobs squat on the floor:
made from chicken wire, papier mache and polyurethane foam;
their grey lumpy surfaces form a lunar landscape. Elongated
trails of excrement drip from the blobs, sprawling across
the floor. Like a left-over prop from a 'Just Say NO' presentation,
Fag Time 1 is a grotesque reminder of the joys of abstinence.
Fag Time 1 offers a return to the rawness and cutting wit
of Robinson's work from the mid 1990s: work that commented
on cultural politics and the commercial exchange of the art
world, brashly shouting slogans and cultural stereotypes with
an often frenzied air. After the sleeker style of recent years,
when Robinson's work expanded its gaze from a localised to
a wider plane - nothingness, existentialism, the internet,
the universe - Fag Time 1 reinvokes the humour and
insistency of Robinson's earlier works, maintaining a broad
scope, but bringing back the weirdness, the rough humour and
the immediacy. Robinson is back as agent provocateur.
Emma Bugden
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