Michael seems to foreclose the possibility of us adequately defining his relationship to the artists whose styles and subjects he borrows (recreates, adapts, reworks). Nor does it seem possible to properly characterise his non-art range of sources without being left in contradictions. The artist pre-empts any logical connection between his constellation of competing, rather than connected references. Each painting creates such an impossibly circuitous ?narrative drive? that we are only left circling around ideas rather than gaining any point of entry or closure.



The artist, recognising that all artistic endeavour is a question of interdependence rather than sovereign autonomy, also recognises that we inescapably search for fixity of meaning for and for tidy solutions to the issue of causation. What, he asks, if we were to remember that the Latin word ?textum? simply means ?web?? Rather than establishing a mere ?dialogue? with his material or insisting on the past as irretrievably lost, Michael takes a different tack. His personal investment in the (ostensible) subject matter becomes impossible to discern. In fact, it becomes impossible to tell if he even has any. (In the past he has written, ?Someone once said to me ?Why would you put something you're interested in into your work??, and I kind of agree.?) As Tom Morton has recently written about the artist, ?his real concern is the moment when the source material he references fades into a new fiction... If referencing is a social contract, it often seems like Michael has torn it up to create a near impermeable private language.? This hermetic language throws us back onto our own resources, independent of the artist's direction. Whilst frequently referencing cinematic imagery, Michael expresses an ambivalent relation to the idea of the artist-as-auteur. Our only points of certainty are that the artist keeps us engaged with a delightfully light touch and splinters of humour.

Unlike painters from previous generations, Michael doesn't work in series; each painting is a unique combination of ideas and images packed into a single frame, never to be repeated. Moreover, Michael's technique never resolves itself comfortably into a recognisable signature style, but rather is perpetually a means to an end, deferring and complicating the relationship between the artist's own position, those of the protagonists represented in his pictures, and the ideas of the original image-maker(s). Flipping between one style and the next without a single programme or sequence, Michael appears to emphasise the plasticity of time, as though our memory banks were best thought of as random-access libraries, which we were at liberty to reorder and recategorise at will.

Morton has also remarked, ?quotation depends on a ?cordon sanitaire? of inverted commas. Do away with them and something quoted might be mistaken for something meant.? Indeed the artist's descriptions of his practice and methods of working emphasise how the character of an image is dependent on its ?user group?, or ownership: ?I'm interested in representing the quotation as commodity; its relation to new bourgeois capital; and its relation to struggles for supremacy in general.? Michael's ultra-elliptical cultural connections invite us to speculate about the relationship of images to the social constituencies that mobilise them. His strategy endlessly complicates that the relationship between image and ideology, so that it is never simply a form of one-way traffic. On the contrary, his practice echoes Baudelaire's conclusion that the most definitive experience of visual modernity lies in ?the sudden leaps of consciousness? which giant cities generate.

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