Colin McCahon

Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning brings together scholarship from diverse fields all focused on either practices of journeying, or destinations to which such journeys lead.

Common across the contributions herein are threads that indicate travel as a core component — as a concept or a practice — of the fabric of identity and meaning.

Introductory overview of New Zealand artists who began working in film and video between 1970 and 1985, following their work up to 2010 and beyond.  This piece was originally titled A Place Near Here and  published in Illusions #35.  It has been significantly updated since then. Back issues of Illusions are available from PO Box 6476, Marion Square, Wellington, New Zealand.

A brief overview of landscape in New Zealand experimental film 1970 to 2015. Includes reference to recent Maori moving image making and possible future conceptions of landscape.                              Abridged and updated version of an article originally published in Illusions Magazine #41. Back issues of Illusions can be ordered from PO Box 6476, Marion Square, Wellington, New Zealand.

Considers responses to the work of New Zealand painter Colin McCahon (1919–1987) by abstract artists from diverse social backgrounds.  Uses these responses to think about the merits of a 'transversal' approach to art history.

Transversal art history, I suggest, provides a way to work across the categories of gender, ethnicity and sexuality that are currently the focus of much attention and anxiety in the art world. It is a method that retains space, however, for honouring the differences that histories which centre on those categories endeavour to acknowledge.

This paper explores the didactic artworks of the New Zealand painter Colin McCahon (1919-1987). His Gate and Waterfall series are part of his broader social project to transform perceptions of the environment and forge a path toward peace via art. McCahon was deeply concerned by the political attitudes associated with global conflicts, and was frightened of the destruction that was implied by nuclear warfare. His search for a pathway through conflict and into peace is epitomised in the Gate series. This series is a means of grappling with social obstacles and the problems of painting itself. McCahon’s solutions to these pressing concerns will also be examined via the Waterfall series, which encourages an ecological solution to wartime aggression. This series alludes to purifying light and spiritual enlightenment. This paper will introduce McCahon’s symbolic language and explain the means by which he hoped to teach his audience an approach to politics that favoured the path of ecological conversation over human brutality.

The Spirit of Colin McCahon provides a vivid historical contextualisation of New Zealand’s premier modern artist, clearly explaining his esoteric religious themes and symbols. Via a framework of visual rhetoric, this text explores the social factors that formed McCahon’s religious and environmental beliefs, coupled with justification as to why his audience often missed the intended point of spiritual his discourse – or chose to ignore it. The Spirit of Colin McCahon tracks the intricate process by which the artist’s body of work turned from optimism to misery, and explains the many communicative techniques he employed in order to arrest suspicion towards his Christian prophecy.

More broadly, The Spirit of Colin McCahon outlines a model of analysis for the intersection of art and religion, and the place of images as rhetorical devices within Antipodean culture. The emerging field of religion and visual culture is important not only to students of New Zealand art history, but also to a growing field of appreciation for the communicative power of images. The Spirit of Colin McCahon provides a helpful model for examining art and literature as social and religious tools, and advances the importance of visual rhetoric within studies of art and social expression.

Landscape has its own interiority. It is an interiority constituted by the same interiority that belongs to any and every place: through entry, movement, and boundary; through gate, journey and horizon. This essay explores the nature of the interiority at issue here, with specific reference to landscape and landscape forms, but also with an eye to the larger structure of place which it exemplifies. Drawing on the work of Colin McCahon, as well as the ideas of Georg Simmel and Martin Heidegger, the aim will be to sketch the inextricability of the three elements at issue, and so to demonstrate the character of landscape as residing, not in some uninterrupted stretch of countryside nor in what may appear merely as the scenic backdrop to human activity, but in the intertwining of horizon, journey and gate, and so in landscape as one form of the opening and emergence of place.

In 1885, Peter Bland’s ode to the colonial New Zealand experience ended with the evocative line “I hold back the dark with the blood of my lambs.”  This idea of blood in triumph over darkness is recurrent within colonial New Zealand art and poetry, and has led to a unique creative spirit within the nation. So too has the idea of blood formed the core of many national mythologies from the blood-sacrifice of the ANZAC troops to the national game of rugby. In this presentation, I will explore the role of supra-religious mythologies within colonial and modern New Zealand history, and how these work together to create a civil religion for the nation. New Zealand has explored a variety of nationalist discourses as a means of inventing and solidifying a unique sense of communal identity and ritualistic behaviours. Drawing on the creative output of many artists/poets including Colin McCahon, Allen Curnow, and James K. Baxter, I will explore the creative use of blood as a motif representing salvation and illumination in the dark of the colonial landscape.

I will argue that ceremonial, ritualistic, and recreational violence are important parts of the New Zealand national identity and civil religious identity. The battle at Gallipoli and the subsequent Anzac legend have been employed as a source of national identity and maturity. Anzac mythology provides a blood-soaked couvade where the birth of the nation becomes a rigorously masculine act. This show of strength and sacrifice is ritually echoed in the national sport of rugby, which allows for these same attributes to be acted out in a more playful sense. In all of these mythologies, blood speaks of kinship and lineage. The blood of heroes becomes a hallowed ichor, and celebrates the giving of oneself for the state. I will explore the ways in which these narratives have been employed to create the ‘natural’ citizen who is rooted in the soil and bonded with the land.

Report of an exhibition framed within Hollis Frampton's notion of a meta-history of all visual arts, a place where painting, cinema, and photography would all be seen as branches on the same tree. Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. February-May, 2014.

This text is part of the McCahon 100 celebrations which invites New Zealand artists, curators, and writers to reflect on a specific work by Colin McCahon. I have chosen a work which has an ecological message, but used a humorous approach to undermine the compulsory reverence accorded to this artist. Using a (light-hearted) ecofeminist lens, I question issues of colonisation, extractivism, and gender division implicit in the landscape genre.

A response to Anthony Lock's paper "Evolutionary Aesthetics, the Interrelationship between Viewer and Artist, and New Zealandism," ASEBL Journal 11.2 (2015): 47-48. Among the topics addressed are the notion of consilience, 'third culture,' evolutionary aesthetics and its relation to cultural critique, and the work of the New Zealand modernist painter Colin McCahon.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 5

Keywords: Consilience, Evolutionism, Aesthetics, Evolutionary aesthetics, Evolutionary psychology, Colin McCahon, Art criticism,

Colin McCahon, one of New Zealand’s major modern artists, dedicated a significant portion of his oeuvre to a spiritual exploration of the beach environment, which may be read as a site of imaginative pilgrimage.  Created as a means of engaging with death, McCahon’s ‘beach walk’ artworks correlate Māori walk to the afterlife with the Stations of the Cross ritual, based the journey Christ took before his execution. There is a clear performative aspect to these artworks. The viewer is asked to join in and journey with the artist. This is an act of spiritual travel that is aimed at a refinement of the self. McCahon uses the beach at Muriwai, Ahipara, and Cape Reinga as the backdrop for a metaphoric walk, based on Māori mythology, which bridges the living with the dead. His foggy beach environment creates a liminal space where the physical world changes form and permits a visionary experience. McCahon recounts the presence of dead companions during his beach walks and dedicated several of these artworks to his friend, the recently deceased poet James K. Baxter.

This paper examines the schism between intended message and reception in the case of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon (1919–1987). McCahon was heavily influenced by Christianity, for him linked inextricably to a message of ecological conservation, and he considered painting to be a prophetic task. As such, McCahon hoped to bring about the religious and behavioural transformation of his audience. McCahon’s Necessary Protection artworks use Christian symbols as a means of communicating the importance of faith as well as his fear of environmental degradation and the necessity of loving one’s homeland. However, McCahon’s complex symbolic lexicon has often proven to be too esoteric to have the intended affect on its intended audience.