Patrick Keiller: The Robinson Institute – review

'A fascinating, absorbing grand tour of a ramshackle mind' … Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute at Tate Britain. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute is based on a long and partly fictitious walk through Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. We travel in the company of Robinson, an imaginary itinerant ex-prisoner and "scholar of landscape" who has featured in several films and other works by Keiller.

   1. Patrick Keiller
   2. The Robinson Institute
   3. Tate Britain,
   4. London
   5. SW1P 4RG

   1. Until 14 October
   2. Venue website

Trudging the London to Aberystwyth Road, and with detours to North Yorkshire and a desolate Cumbrian peat bog – site of the former Blue Streak missile testing facility just north of Hadrian's Wall – Keiller's Tate Britain commission is a meditation on the British landscape, politics, economics and history, from the Otmoor Riots to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The presence of such disparate artists as Andreas Gursky, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Dennis Oppenheim represent the interconnectedness of the local and the global.

Keiller's seven-part installation is a tour of works from the Tate's own collection, and a long stroll back and forth along the Duveen gallery, where paintings and drawings, photographs and prints, film footage and much besides line the length of the space, interspersed with vitrines, an 1830 threshing machine, reading tables and lengthy wall texts. It is a fascinating, absorbing grand tour of a ramshackle mind.

Lumpen black bronze sculptures by Lucio Fontana and by Hubert Dalwood, squat on the floor below a giant full stop painted by John Latham. Each was made within a year or so of each other, around 1960, and all have an air of finality. Little wonder – nearby, in a vitrine, is a copy of the agreement between the UK and the US for the sale of the Polaris nuclear missile, and across the way Quatermass II, a movie based on Nigel Kneale's clunky but still frightening sci-fi thriller, runs on a monitor. A shiny but slightly menacing 1967 sculpture by Kneale's brother Bryan Kneale glowers on the floor nearby. Coming across cloud studies by Alexander Cozens and John Constable, you expect to see rockets slewing through their skies, and below an LS Lowry industrial townscape hangs an Ed Ruscha pastel, emblazoned with the phrase There's a lot that's mad here. But it's the world, not the art that's crazy. The end of the world, in one form or another, is presaged everywhere along Robinson's route. There are signs and portents everywhere, including meteors that fell in North Yorkshire in 1795, and near Bicester in 1830.

Here's a photograph of protesters dancing beyond the fence at Greenham Common, and there a handkerchief commemorating the 1819 Peterloo massacre. It all makes a kind of sense, but mostly only to Keiller's alter-ego Robinson. We glimpse the eponymous Robinson – who might look like one of August Sander's 1920s pair of German vagrants, or a Hertfordshire tramp once painted by Michael Andrews. He might be Robinson Crusoe himself, or even Beatrix Potter's Little Pig Robinson. You can even pause to listen to a 1963 recording of Ray Charles (full name: Ray Charles Robinson) singing That Lucky Old Sun along the way.

Southern England is a land graffitied with neolithic carvings, tunnelled through with fuel pipelines, speared by radio masts, cordoned off behind fences. Keiller has photographed the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign outside the atomic weapons plant at Aldermaston, and filmed fields of waving opium poppies growing near Didcot power station. Great English landscapists and poets meet Piero Manzoni's canned shit and fossil ammonites quarried from the Cherwell valley. Phew. Even Hugo Chávez is here, among the vitrines and posters, books and videos, pamphlets and other ephemera.

I am surprised Keiller hasn't persuaded Ian Sinclair and WG Sebald to join this apocalyptic, bucolic pilgrimage, but they're here in spirit. Fascinating and absorbing though it is, Robinson's roundabout way is hardly the road less travelled, but we're in good company, and Keiller makes us see things differently.