It's all to play for, as far as the history of art in our times goes. An era of cultural as well as economic excess is drawing to a close. The principles that inspired artistic production are soon likely to follow into the dustbin of history those principles by which our economies were run, carrying with them the reputations of some of the most successful artists of our times. Out will go the idea that near identical conceptual works of art can be mass produced by factory-studios until demand is exhausted; out will go the idea that high production values—shininess, the quality of fabrication—are enough to define the art of our time; out will go the idea that art can criticise greed and stupidity by imitating it. Modernism, it seems, has finally succumbed to the decadent super-sized clichés of some conceptual artists.
It's at moments like these that new directions in art emerge, and overlooked artists from the recent past are re-appraised; and I have recently spotted what seem to be a few green shoots of artistic recovery. Last year at the Haunch of Venison gallery, I came across an extraordinary kinetic sculpture by the British artist Mat Collishaw as part of his solo show "Shooting Stars." It was a zoetrope: an object of great technical complexity and historical resonance, based on the 19th-century precursor of the animated sequence, a rotating drum with a set of pictures inside. Glimpsed through slits, these form a moving image when spun. Collishaw's zoetrope, however, was three dimensional, inspired by one made by Pixar which he had seen in the Science Museum. It had 180 figures and rotated under a strobe light. He had spent nine months designing it. As it picked up speed, you could see scenes of sexual activity featuring a minotaur, the three Graces, a she-wolf and a cherub. It looked like a 19th-century engraving of a bacchanal, but more pornographic.
So I went to see Mat Collishaw, who lives and works in a large, unmodernised warehouse in north-east London. I parked my car in a covered interior courtyard piled high with old books and bits of 19th-century junk shop furniture, ascended an old iron staircase and found myself in a bright white space with a thin metal roof. One of the butterfly photographs was propped against the wall, and Collishaw took me over to his computer to show me how he made them: "I arrange the colourful wings and parts of these insects on glass, squash them flat, and put them under the scanner. There's a lot of trial and error involved, because the bits slip around the glass." He clicked on the screen; dozens of different butterfly arrangements popped up, "Then I chop them up and move them around in Photoshop." Nineteenth-century science had met 21st-century technology—and the result was art.
Born in 1966, Collishaw grew up in Nottingham, one of four sons in a religious family. His parents were Christadelphians, a tiny Christian sect numbering no more than 55,000 across the world. Collishaw grew up reading the Bible for two hours a night and going to church twice a week. He exhibited a skill in drawing from an early age; after toying with the idea of going into the army or being a musician, he found his way to Goldsmiths art college in the mid-1980s, where he studied with Hirst, Emin, Sarah Lucas and assorted other YBAs, under Michael Craig Martin. Collishaw exhibited in and helped install the "Freeze" exhibition, curated by Hirst in 1988.
On the wall behind Collishaw's computer screen full of crushed butterflies was an array of gruesome photographs of wounds. He drew my attention to one of a man with his penis bitten off. "The man had been dead in his flat for a few days and his dog just got hungry. A man with his cock bitten off is always going to be some kind of enigma." As I know from experience, artists—even the smart ones—like to talk tough. But it was with these images of wounds that Collishaw first made his name in the 1990s. At "Freeze," he showed "Bullet Hole," which is still his best-known work—a large photograph, taken from a pathology textbook, of the back of someone's head with a gruesome bullet wound.
Collishaw, however, soon left the gore-fest behind to head into more interesting historical territory. As he puts it, "When I got the umpteenth invitation in the post to take part in a group show called 'Gore and Gothic,' I knew it was time to stop." Still, there are several ways in which Collishaw might seem an odd candidate to pick as a flag-bearer for the future. He has been pursuing the same themes and making similar kinds of work since the 1990s: a fusion of decadent symbolism and modern video and projection technology. His inspiration and imagery has many similarities with Damien Hirst's—butterflies, Victorian science and pseudo-science, pathology books. His attraction to popular source material, too, was part of the YBA rebellion against abstraction. Sarah Lucas turned to fried eggs and cigarettes, Tracey Emin to sewn quilts, and Collishaw to photographs of wounds.
But there are two ways in which Collishaw diverges from his peers. First, he never secured major gallery representation in the 1990s, and consequently sank somewhat from view for many years. Second, his work is both more historically precise and more philosophically resonant than his peers'—delving deep into the details and footnotes of past science rather than its generic forms. For example, one of Collishaw's early sculptures, "Antique" (1994), was inspired by Joseph Wright of Derby's painting "An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump." In this picture, which hangs in the National Gallery, a scientist demonstrates a vacuum by extracting air from a flask containing a cockatoo. Collishaw reconstructs the flask on a wooden support, and projects a moving image of a bird onto it: a visual exploration of Barthes's thesis that photography is a kind of "death."
Similarly, in his 2008 "Shooting Stars" show, Collishaw took Arnold Böcklin's symbolist painting "Island of the Dead"—one of the most hackneyed and reproduced paintings of all time—and made a video in which the sun rises and falls across the island. It was a complicated work to realise, requiring the construction of a virtual 3D model of the island. You see the light of the rising sun play across the rocks in the foreground, and cast ever deepening shadows as it moves round. "I am interested in pictorial problems and illusions," he explains. "The challenges you are faced with when you make a two-dimensional representation of a real thing, and the conundrums and paradoxes you get into when you do it. That image was about death—that place you go to after your life. In the same way as the scene painted on the canvas, it is an inaccessible place. By rotating the sun round the isle, I made a flawed attempt to gain access to this place."
Even if it forgoes the shininess of many of the billionaire's baubles that have passed for art in the last ten years, the art of the future will still need to be alluring. That's one of the things Collishaw has got right. His works look spectacular. But they also touch on the difficult theme of the essence of images—something of great importance in our multichannel, virtual, image-flooded culture—and the question of what power images have to seduce us, being independent both of reality and what they show.
If a new direction in contemporary art is taking shape here, it's not yet clear what its final form will be. But Collishaw's ability to inject his creations with a true, troubling sense of life is treading new and important ground. As he explains, looking back at the cavorting, angry sexuality of the figures in his three-dimensional zoetrope, "If there is any way to sum it up, it's that once you animate things they will get up to no good. As soon as you give something a life, it is going to have a dark side. As soon as God animated Adam, he started misbehaving."
