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Missionary Man: Matthew Collings at the Museum of Contemporary Art
by Chris Jones

"Man is but a network of relationships." (1)

"Hell is other people" bemoaned the lonesome Jean Paul-Sartre, peering through a blinkered perspective a world in constant conflict with his own. No connection did he feel with the intelligent scores warming his big clever bed, or succor did he glean from the thousands listening close to each provocative lecture. By perceiving relations with the other from the disconnected place of objective argument, formed textually on pages atop a desk, Sartre missed the warmth and reality of a lived interaction with those about whom he wrote. He disregarded the lively life of people outside his study that cared enough to listen, to think then riotously act, in direct response to his ideas. Through a comparably objective purview, the amiable Matthew Collings shared with his proximate audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, a similarly disconnected attitude.

As a thinking but unpolished Rodin, Collings sat carefully on a small leather chair perched low and spot lit upon a diminutive black platform, thereby into surrounds reflecting the brilliantly lit, high-mod chair and white plinth arrangement, from where he launched himself to the art world in This is Modern Art’s uberrific introduction. As with the highly influential television series, Collings spoke to the $25 a head audience at the MCA through a batch of intelligently clipped and carefully coordinated sound bites, pronounced clean and sharp without hint of a slip. Each utterance was trimmed nice and precisely to form short knockabout sentences crammed full of deft analytic observations, building what became a carefully formed, but altogether brief, informal lecture, presented precisely without script from the hip. Unfortunately, without the guidance of an essay or documentary slides, the free-form content of the lecturette delved only as deep as Collings’ memory allowed, thereby meandering somewhat untethered through a broad, nostalgic return to YBAism plus problems arising from it. Like his hero Clement Greenberg, but without the balance of cigarette, vodka and bald arrogance, Collings relied purely upon a subjective recall of events and a witty corral of anecdotal evidence, all qualified by a scientifically inflected belief in the objective authority of art history and theory. Ironically, these exalted realms were relied upon all too infrequently to guide his meander: The term aesthetic was used only once to describe a tantalizing area of discussion deemed too broad for the limited parameter of the presentation, as were a host of potentially fruitful discursive avenues traversed only tentatively before being deserted. Instead, and in order to enlighten the congregation of ‘The Role of Seriousness in Contemporary Art’, Collings chose to present himself as the art work under analysis, and not the provocative set of “ideas and events” alluded to between memoirs.

As art analyzer opened for analysis, Collings presented an ironic figure; less a centralized Rodin, more a decentralized Anthony Gormley, with scatterings of miniature people cast about the floor reliant upon the determining role of a proximate viewer. On one side of the ironic coin Collings revealed a Sartrean intention to “philosophize the moment” in a role characterized valiantly as “describer of events and ideas”. Whilst in this role, Collings intends to penetrate the “edifice of theory” through a self-proclaimed “mission of enlightenment”. On the other side of the coin, and jarring wholly against the independence of his lonesome modernist mission, he admitted complete dependence upon the guidelines of “objectivity” in order to authorize his soon to be televised quest to analyze the history of painting. Consequently, by extending himself schizophrenically into the super-crucial role of neutral describer -- super-crucially needed in an over-interpreted, under-thought contemporary art world -- disconnected from the sway of opinion, whilst at the same time interpreting what he analyses with reference to opinions which in fact are objective art history, Collings claims for himself a role completely frustrated. The heroic denial of obligatory interaction characterizing his televisual missionary role was illustrated precisely in the fragmented content of the over-priced lecturette.

As mentioned above, Collings presented himself to the crowd as a charmingly descriptive mouth-piece of YBAism: Short, sharp and comfortably reclined, he lionized tigerishly the like of Emin, Hirst and Lucas, whilst rebuking the tide of “soft art-writing” and the “vacuity” of “popularity based art, bubbling along its wake. But, were not these descriptions, of both the good and the bad, garnered from experiential interaction with the analyzed art world, and the artworks and artists therein? Was not this three-way object further analyzed through televised interviews with living, breathing artists standing nearby? Was not this same triadic object analyzed, explained and interpreted in comparison to similarly formed precedents included to the lineages of art history by previous living writers; that is, were not Emin, Hirst and Lucas understood in connection to previously described interpretations of pop, conceptual and post-conceptual art? In reality, the contemporary art world Collings inhabits, experiences then analyses, is replete with tender webs of interaction; living proximities and closenesses which characterize each object beneath analysis. To claim that through this seamless web yet another objective “mission of enlightenment” is worthwhile is pure mythical fiction: An autoerotic jab in the long arm of the BBC. All an enlightened mission through the history of painting will provide is simply more idealistic claims that continually, and blindly, disregard the lived world from where the object of analysis continually comes, in order that yet another groaning grand narrative can be absolved upon screen. This disregard for the subtleties and groundedness of perception is a serious absence in any descriptive analyst’s tool-kit.

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, probably the finest writerly describer of the delicacies of lived perception, “He who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at”. [2] I for one hope that Collings will admit the fine and lively connections which link the art world that he looks at, before launching himself into another televisual mission. The results could be the admission of a network of frustrated aesthetic interests lurking as lively connections between anecdotes.

[1] A. de Saint Exupery, in, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, London, England, 2002, p.530.
[2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, pb. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, America, 1968, p.134.