Art is philosophy by other means.
Michael Tine did not arrive at art through art. He arrived through ideas. He was a philosophy student, interested, as he says, in “the power of ideas,” and it was existentialism that moved him: a philosophy that put process ahead of conclusion. “As an existentialist, you live every day for that day and you live for yourself, and that in itself to me was a creative endeavor.” The work came out of that, and it still runs on it.
The turn he describes is from one kind of knowing to another. Philosophy, in his words, is “cerebral, rational, dialectical.” But there is another kind of knowledge, the kind “we carry in our heads” as images and symbols, and he became convinced it was knowledge in its own right, not decoration laid over the real thinking. “Thinking in images and symbols is a form of knowledge in itself.” He has been candid that psychedelics, early on, helped him notice the images moving through his mind and take them seriously. That is where it started. It is not where it stays, and it is not the point. The point is the standing claim underneath it: that a carved figure can carry an argument a sentence cannot.
This is why he resists the idea of a fixed plan for a piece. For personal work he does not start from a finished drawing and execute it. He starts closer to a blank slate and lets the image come up out of the stone as he works it. The process is the thinking; the piece is the record of the thinking having happened. A preconceived design would be answering the question before asking it.
It is also why he is at ease borrowing. He is open about his debts, including to the painters who floor him as draftsmen. He has called Géricault, and The Raft of the Medusa, among the work that has inspired him, and he is dry about what inspiration entails: he has “even stolen some of their work when I thought I could get away with it.” The remark is a joke and also a position. Images are common property of a sort. They move between makers. That belief has a serious consequence on the other side of the studio.
He does not sell his paintings. The reasoning is the same idea pushed all the way through. “Art belongs to everybody,” he says. “Once you own it, you can do anything you want with it. You can tear it up. You can throw it away. You can use it to wallpaper your chicken house. And nobody can do anything about it.” If the work is, in part, a form of public knowledge, then locking a canvas in a private vault is closer to destroying it than keeping it. So the paintings stay together and are meant to go, whole, somewhere they can be seen. The sculpture he does sell, and he takes commissions; the distinction is deliberate and he holds it.
There is a physical half to the philosophy that is easy to miss because it sounds like a preference and is closer to a principle. He likes to work big and by hand. Part of that is practical: in a large block, a broken corner is not a catastrophe, where in a small one a hidden crack can take the whole piece. But part of it is that the labor is not separable from the meaning. The hammer and chisel, the hours, the use of the body: at eighty-two he framed it simply, that he likes using his muscles and means to keep doing the work as long as he can. The slowness is not an inefficiency to be solved. It is how the thinking gets time to happen in the material.
The viewer is left a real job. If the piece is an argument made in stone rather than stated in words, then it is not finished when the carving stops. It is finished, each time, by the person standing in front of it, who supplies the reading. He tells a small story that gets at this: a menacing portrait he hung in a show, in front of which the women in the room stepped back and the men stepped forward. He offers it lightly, as a remark about human nature, but it is also a description of how he thinks the work works. The object does not deliver a message. It provokes one, and the provocation is different depending on who is there.
None of this is presented by him as a manifesto, and it should not be read as one. He is sardonic about his own work and suspicious of grand language for it. The philosophy is not a frame around the sculpture. It is the same activity, continued in another material. He came to the work through ideas and never fully left them; the pieces are where the ideas go to be tested.