But artists, like the rest of the population, also pay subconscious attention to the culture as a whole. They know, at some level, about the momentum that's going from antiquarianism to barbarism.
Peter Plagens 1
We begin in the middle, which is sometimes said to be an end.
To paint is to be situated within a tradition of painting. There is no outside; 2 one is always already within a subsuming succession of painters and of paintings in which every painting augments, extends, and modifies the tradition. 3 In Michael Collins' works, the alterity of the past is at once postulated, through quotation 4 or allusion, and transcended. The past qua past is employed in its otherness, even as its utilization appropriates it as an aspect of the present. The notion of tradition is not itself that which is temporally other, but rather that within which past and present practices are subsumed, in a set of objects whose interrelationships entail a mutually constituting relational field of meanings. 5 Thus, as Hans-Georg Gadamer notes, "participating in an event of tradition, [is] a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated." 6
One's initial situation as a painter is an entrance, to use George Kubler's term, the coincidence of the opportunities entailed by sequential position and biology. A felicitous entrance is one in which temperament, training and the possibilities afforded by a particular position in the sequence are in accord. 7 As Heinrich Wölfflin noted: "Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development." 8 The enterprise of the painter, of the artist working in any medium, entails discerning and formulating those possibilities enabling the extension of the enterprise, enabling oneself to continue. If this is a difficult time to be a painter, it because this is a time which for many seems to entail a foreclosure of possibilities; indeed, as Yve-Alain Bois asks in "Painting: The Task of Mourning:" "is . . . painting still possible?" 9 Since 19 August 1839, when Paul Delaroche perhaps exclaimed "From today, painting is dead!" the claim of the death of painting has been enunciated with increasing frequency and urgency in service of various agendas, as Jeremy Moon has urged:
The charge that painting is finished, whether made defensively to justify a lack of feeling for the medium itself, or from the Utopian viewpoint that traditional artistic conventions have become outmoded, or simply from disenchantment with the latest manifestations of the art, is an old refrain. Painting is always finished, of course. 10
As painting, so art. After the claimed end of art, in the putative post-historical period of art, understood as the coincidence of the artwork and the knowledge of its conditions of being as such, 11 artworks, paintings, the practice of painting, nevertheless perdure. To engage in the enterprise of painting is to engage its situation, the historicity of its situation, and the several models of its situation postulated in theoretical discourse, which now must subsume those models proposing an endgame. The artwork is a synecdoche of the artist's situation of being-in-the-world, always already entailing the reciprocal connection of the individual and the social formation: a fragment of a whole, the artwork serves as a transitional object 12 bridging the isolated self and the social formation. 'World' denotes a whole, intentionally posited if incompletely filled in both synchronic and diachronic aspects. Any positing of that wholeness, an Edenic echo, for some has come to seem less plausible as the end of the second millennium of the common era approaches. The successive critiques and problematizations of the Enlightenment Weltanschauung and of the modernist paradigm have de-centered and fragmented many of the presuppositions requisite to a master narrative. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard posits this as definitive of the period: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives." 13 To speak of cultural paradigms and master narratives is to regard the matter at a broad level of the social formation; it is no less a matter of the lived experience of the self as de-centered and fragmented, at once isolated and engaged.14 Consider the self-representations of the artist in Self Portrait in the Garden of Classical Ruin, and in Light Wraps You; the self as alienated and dispairing.
This rehearsal of the situation in which these works have their coming to be is both a citing of the ongoing cultural discourse as the site in which these works have their being and a partisan intervention in that discourse. As such, it both shares the historicity of these artworks and of the field of discourse in which they are embedded and in which they are interventions, and consequently acknowledges that the distance it presupposes, as Yve-Alain Bois urges:
remains fundamentally unavailable to anyone attending to his or her own discourse. One cannot be, at the same time, embedded in a field and surveying it from above, one cannot claim any secure ground from which one's own words could be read and judged as if written by someone else. But this impossibility is far from being a loss, for it obligates the autoreferential discourse to admit that one always takes a stand. The strategic nature of the field, often repressed or simply taken for granted, cannot but be asserted; any field is a field of forces in which any discourse maintains a position. 15
These nine recent large paintings by Michael Collins engage both the historicity of the current situation of painting and the situation of the painter within the lifeworld, at once referencing the enterprise of painting as a historically conditioned representational practice and the lived experience of being in the world. The artwork presents a world. In the world presented in these works by Michael Collins, references to the artist's situation in the lifeworld, to the classical Roman world and the worlds developed from that world, 16 our world, are rendered in a luminously dark vision. Classical Mediterranean architecture is referenced as ruins-in-progress, 17 dissolving into a ravenous nature figured as Central American flora at once lusciously verdant and terrifying in its indifference to the works of human enterprise, a perduring nature mocking the pretense of the superstructure of culture to transcend temporality. The world of these works is the domain of the sublime, in the elegiac mode. This is the western world, at the end of the second millennium of the common era, looking at once outward and inward, backward and forward, in a play of confidence and doubt. Yet it is not as if everything has vanished on the opposite side of a discontinuity: vestiges and more than vestiges remain, and even a vestige is a relayed signal. 18
Collin's use of the architecture and sculpture of the classical Mediterranean world references the past as ideal encountered through a via negativa, and consequently transformed into a metaphor for loss, for absence, for decay, for death. These works of architecture and sculpture are the representation of that past to us: fragmentary and hidden, something to be uncovered, an other requiring interpretation. Perhaps their appeal for us entails precisely those qualities, in which we recognize both our selves and the transience of our own historicity, the fragmentary character of our selves and our culture, and our mortality. Walter Benjamin asserts that:
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. 19The trope and its motifs are not without related though distinct precedents. The motif of Death in Arcady 20 is one line, extending from Giovanni Francesco Guercino's 21 to Nicholas Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego paintings, 22 and to Joshua Reynolds' 1769 double portrait of Mrs. Bouverie and Mrs. Crewe. Even in Arcady, even in the luminous landscape of Burial Grounds, there is death. The motif of the Rise and Fall of Civilization is another line: e.g., Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire series of 1836, extending from The Pastoral or Arcadian State to Desolation, 23 with an echo among contemporary works in Anselm Kiefer's Osiris und Isis, 24 representing a pyramid, that most stable of architectural forms, truncated and eroded by time; a moment in Kiefer's project which at once deconstructs and reconstructs a culture and the art form in which the artist depicts that culture, of which the art form and artwork are parts. 25
The representation of the artist as metaphor for the embodiment of the painter appears in several of these works. The painting as metaphor for the body is fundamental to pictorial metaphor. 26 Even where the artist is not represented as figure, this metaphor obtains. The role of embodiment is deeply implicated in the iconography of the medium--the syntactic articulation of the morphemes of the medium--as it is engaged in the facture of the artwork. 27 In these works, the trope of embodiment is manifested on a formal level by Collin's consistent propensity for bilateral symmetry about the vertical axis of the work, referencing the bilateral symmetry of the body of the painter and thus enacting the trope of the painting as a surrogate embodiment, a "quasi-subject." 28 This metaphor is extended in the palpable tactile painterliness of execution as an overt trace of the hand. The emphasis of the artist's hand, through its trace as touch and écriture, 29texture, and gesture, comprises a compensatory move, a reaction against, the division of labor in industrial production. 30 The hand is a synecdoche for the embodiment of the painter, entailing the artist's presence-to the artwork qua object in the course of its facture. The facture of the work is a mediation of surface and depth, the paired contraries being both the ur-trace of figure and ground and a reiteration of the metaphor of painting-as-body.
The title of Broken Family assimilates the representation of the house to its use as place of dwelling, the architectural parallel of body as locus of in-dwelling. The closed space of Broken Family is as of a view within a Roman domus in Pompeii, across the atrium with impluvium; a bright rectangle suggests the passage through the tablinum into the brightness of the peristylium. The house is an uninhabited ruin: the fountain of the impluvium is dark, dry. A dead tree is uprooted to the right, its branches marks across the image plane as cracks in a mirror. Almost grisaille, the palette is restricted to achromatic grays with small areas of red. The areas beyond the central square defined by the four columns is dark, nearly black.
The classical temple in Self Portrait in the Garden of Classical Ruin is a roofless ruin, the garden referenced in the title is a wasteland devoid of vegetation but for a tree to the right. The cella of the temple is luminously red against the grays of the temple. The image of the artist appears to the right of the temple, a torso and head self portrait, close to the picture plane. Rendered in two point perspective, the vertical center line placed at the proximal column of the temple structure and coincident with the conjoined edges of the two panels of the diptych, the temple opens the middle distance of the field otherwise brought parallel to the picture plane by the position of the figure with torso parallel to the picture plane, and by the sweep of the horizon and sky. Figure and temple cella are warm in a cool field, volumetric, relatively focused, comprising areas of primary and secondary compositional climax. 31
Light Wraps You, with a grisaille figure on the central axis in front of a large, unfocused sculptural form, evokes the lush vegetation of a Central American tropical rain forest. The sculptural form is suggestive of the figurative sculpture in the left middle distance of Paul Gaugauin's D'oùù venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Oùù allons-nous? 32 or the figure of Jupiter in Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele. 33 The title references one of Pablo Neruda's poems from Veinte poemas de amor:
En su llama mortal la luz te envuelve,
Absorta, pállida doliente, así situada
contra las viejas hélices del crepúsculo
que en torno a ti da vueltas.
Muda, mi amiga,
solo en lo solitario de esta hora de muertes
y llena de las vidas del fuego,
pura herredera del dia destruido.
Del sol cae un racimo en tu vestido oscuro.
De la noche las grandes raices
crecen de súbito desde tu alma,
y a lo exterior regresan las cosas en ti ocultas,
de modo que un pueblo pálido y azul
de ti recién nacido se alimenta.
Oh grandiosa y fecunda y magnética esclava
del circulo que en negro y dorado sucede:
erguida, trata y logra una creación tan viva
que sucumben sus flores, y llena es de tristeza. 34
The intensely colored tropical foliage in the foreground of Swept Away is rendered parallel to the picture plane, a screen through which the central ghoulish figure emerges from a pool. The rear of the space is defined by a row of heads, again essentially parallel to the picture plane, observers like the ancestral masks worn by mourners at an ancient Roman funeral. The representation is thus enacted with metaphors universalizing the particularities of lived experience. Catacombs, Exodus, and Mass of Shame share several iconographical and formal aspects: in their respective depiction of classical sculpture in grisaille, in their utilization of bilateral symmetry, in the compositional conceit of enclosure and release. Exodus, like the figure silhouetted in the arch at the center of the painting, is bilaterally symmetrical. The architectural framework suggests a barrel vault penetrated transversely by arches. Strongly backlit by a luminous yellow to red field, the architecture is rendered in grays. The composition thus elicits the gaze through a dark passage toward a bright terminus, warm and thus salient against the dark, recessive field. The movement from dark to light, of a bright center surrounded by darkness, is a perennial trope of transcendence. The figure in Exodus is doubled by a skeletal form, a sinister Doppelgäänger as memento mori. The keystone of the proximal arch suggests a bucranium. The dark field of Catacombs is punctuated by a central piece of sculpture, rendered in grisaille; a second figure seems to merge into the drapery of the supporting post of the sculpture. The relatively bright central sculptural form is flanked by two vertical rectangles, lighter than the surrounding field. Within the basilica interior of Mass of Shame a sculptural group of nude figures, perhaps derived from Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, 35 form a baldacchino of stone as flesh, or of flesh as stone. An ambiguous tension obtains between the grisaille rendering, a conventional coding of the painted representation of carved stone, and the apparent animation of the figures. An arc of red robed skeletal figures forms a semicircle defining the space beyond the strongly vertical punctuation of the central sculptural group.
The sumptuously worked impasto of Burial Ground, along with the heightened intensity of color is in contrast to the stark wasteland of the terrain, broken only by few vestigial trees and shrubs, and punctuated by burial mounds. The tension between the physical facticity of paint as medium and the figurative reference of the image, between signifier and signified, is thematized as the autoreferentiality of painting as the content of painting. This 'twofoldness' of surface, in Richard Wollheim's terminology, enables 'seeing-in', the perception of a differentiated surface qua surface and as not surface, preceding and enabling representation. 36 The perceptual disjunction of paint qua paint and paint as other than paint is the disconcealing of the representational syntax of painting through the veiling of signified as paint and the unveiling of paint as signified.
In The Crossing, the sequential time of narrative is collapsed into a heightened moment of simultaneity permeated with foreboding and dread. The large central vertical cone of light illuminating a clothed female figure in fetal position emanates from above and outside the visual field of the painting, as if from the searchlight of a police or border patrol helicopter. Two smaller, oblique cones of light, one to the left and one to the right, illuminate smaller sections of the painting from beyond the respective sides. A beam of light at the upper left emanates from a flashlight carried by the first of a group of four dark walking armed figures, illuminating a tree trimmed into a standard or cross topped with flowers; the silhouetted form is polyvalent, referencing both a vertical figure with arms spread to the side and crucifixion. The flattened, deeply serrated foliage of the foreground plants are silhouetted like a flattened rib cage against the darker ground of the middle distance. The sagging arc of a bridge trestle is silhouetted against a luminously ominous sky of yellow, orange, and red.
After all, even after its putative end, painting remains as it was in the beginning, which was already at its end, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes: "the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future." 37 Going forward, then, entails a return ab origine. 38 Merleau-Ponty has elsewhere urged:
There is thus no art for pleasure's sake alone. One can invent pleasurable objects by linking old ideas in a new way and by presenting forms that have been seen before. This way of painting or speaking at second hand is what is generally meant by culture. Cézanne's or Balzac's artist is not satisfied to be a cultured animal but assimilates the culture down to its very foundations and gives it a new structure: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those which have already been uttered by ourselves or by others. 'Conception' cannot precede 'execution'. 39
Michael Collin's paintings are ambitious: in scale, in execution, in the gravitas of content sought through the authenticity of lived experience. These are not small ambitions to have for painting, now, or at any time in its history which these paintings extend.
| Broken Family | 60 x 72 inches | 1997 |
| Burial Grounds | 72 x 72 inches | 1994 |
| Catacomb | 91 x 61.5 inches | 1994 - 1995 |
| The Crossing | 71.5 x 98 inches | 1990 |
| Exodus | 82 x 62 inches | 1994 - 1995 |
| Light Wraps You | 79.5 x 53 inches | 1996 |
| Mass of Shame | 115 x 78.5 inches | 1994 |
| Self Portrait in the Garden of Classical Ruin | 50 x 100 inches | 1994 - 1995 |
| Swept Away | 72 x 72 inches | 1994 |
Michael Roque Collins received the Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Houston in 1978, with additional post-baccalaureate study in 1984. He is currently a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree from Southern Methodist University. He received a Mid-America Arts Alliance / National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Painting and Works on Paper in 1994. Recent exhibitions include: Michael Collins and Michael Kennaugh, Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center, Baylor University, 1998; Texas International, University of Texas at El Paso; Establishment and Revelation, Dallas Visual Art Center; Summit Bound, Virginia Miller Gallery; Visions of Landscape, Virginia Miller Gallery, 1997; Interplay: Celebrating the Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Slover McCutcheon Gallery, Houston; Thirty Two Texas Artists, University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston; Order and Chaos, Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, 1996. He is represented by Virginia Miller Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida.
Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this intermittent immortality.Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1954, 1963), pp. 293-294; author's emphasis. UP
If ever the barbarians gain possession of the world they will be forced to adopt some of our methods; they will end by resembling us.
In its mortal flame the light wraps you. Wrapped in thought, pale mourner, thus situated
against the old spirals of the twilight
that revolve around you.
Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of the hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.
From the sun a bough of fruit falls on your dark garment.
The great roots of the night
grow suddenly from your soul,
and the things that hide in you come out again,
so that a blue and pallid people
your new born, take nourishment.
Oh grandiose and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn in black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation so alive
its flowers perish, and it is filled with sadness.