You Are Witnesses

I first saw Colin McCahon’s Victory over Death 2 1970 one Friday afternoon after it was included in a McCahon satellite show for the Biennale of Sydney at the University of Sydney, where I was studying. (Actually, I was at the Law School in the middle of the city, but came back one afternoon to see if I could chat with one of my old art history lecturers. I hated law and wanted some art-historical company). When I couldn’t find anybody—it was a Friday afternoon in academia, after all—I decided to visit the show, which I didn’t know anything about—they didn’t teach much contemporary art in those days—and when I came out about an hour and a half later as it was closing I was a different person.

This was the show whose opening McCahon famously missed—a story told beautifully in Martin Edmond’s Dark Night: Walking with McCahon (my first reading recommendation)—and the planned celebratory evening was apparently a disaster. I find it extraordinarily moving that McCahon missed his own worldly recognition while still alive—I guess we all miss our own Biennales—but he has certainly received it in his afterlife. And that is my subject today: McCahon’s 'victory over death', both the work and his own victory over death. And throughout—my second reading recommendation—I draw on a book I wrote with my wonderful New Zealand colleague Laurence Simmons, the obviously named Victory over Death: The Art of Colin McCahon.

Where to start? Well, I’ve already started or we’ve already started the thing I’m going to write about—in fact, we’re already doing it, as you will see at the end—but, first of all, how about a brief history? There is nothing original in what I am about to say. The story has already been well told by Peter Simpson in the second volume of his biography on McCahon, Is this the Promised Land?, of how the painting ended up on the wall in the National Gallery of Australia. For a long time, James Mollison, at first acting director and then actual director of the Gallery, had been a huge fan of McCahon. Even before the Gallery was opened in 1982, high level requests were made to acquire one of his works for the collection and New Zealand decided to gift his Victory over Death, both to commemorate Australia’s Bicentenary and as part of the Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement then being negotiated between the two countries.

An Australian parliamentary official was soon after quoted in a NZ newspaper as saying that ‘it looked like a school somewhere had lost its blackboard’. The Labour Opposition whip in the Australian Senate, Senator George Georges, said the painting resembled a ‘placard’ and reminded the Senate, given his background, of ‘Greeks bearing gifts’, speculating that the painting perhaps represented the notoriously philistine New Zealand Prime Minister Robert ‘Piggy’ Muldoon’s ‘revenge against the Australian people’. (Muldoon and Fraser had fallen out badly at a previous Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting and were barely on speaking terms.) And, just to prove I’m not politically partisan, the Liberal Senator Alan Missen called it an 'unsightly eyesore' and Liberal Senator Ray Withers is said to have exclaimed when first coming upon the painting (perhaps drunk himself late at night in the old Parliament House) 'Good Lord, it is 1am; it is time I went home'. And altogether the painting was pilloried in the popular press. In NZ in particular, it was seen—encouraged by Muldoon—as some sort of revenge against the bigger and better (except in rugby, of course) Australia, and in Australia it was wondered why we would ever accept such an unbecoming object for our national collection from little New Zealand. And all of this public notoriety had a considerable effect on McCahon, who started drinking even more heavily and wrote to his dealer Peter McLeavey around this time 'I’ve been going through a black hole with no star to guide me'.

But the painting—as it had already on the Director of the Gallery—began to weave its spell, and soon not only art critics and historians but artists began to acknowledge it as one of the great paintings in the collection, fully the equal of Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles—and, my goodness, they even look quite similar. One of my hanging recommendations: Victory over Death should occasionally be hung with Blue poles. Another: it should occasionally be hung next to Emily Kngwarray, maybe the borrowed Big Yam Dreaming from the NGV of 1995, as the two great Australasian painters. And there’ll be another hanging recommendation towards the end. But, for the moment, let’s look at all, or at least several, of the Australian and New Zealand artists who can be seen to be responding to McCahon’s Victory over Death:

There’s Auckland-based Maori artist Michael Parekowhai’s The Indefinite Article 1990.

There’s Auckland-based Maori artist Peter Robinson’s Boy am I Scared, Eh! 1997.

There’s Christchurch-based Pakeha artist Merylyn Tweedie’s source (origin and exclusion) 1987.

There’s little-known New Zealand artist Dale Major’s I Um Um 1991.

There’s Australian postmodernist Imants Tillers’ Hiatus 1987.

There’s Australian Indigenous artist Gordon Bennett’s Self Portrait (But I Always Wanted to be One of the Good Guys) 1990.

There’s now-Melbourne gallerist Geoff Newton’s Victory over Death 3 2004.

There’s East Kimberley-based art collective (the Nocketta sisters) Jirrawun Girls’ Kununurra Midnight Prowl 2006—actually a bit more McCahon’s Practical Religion.

There’s even Brisbane-based Anne Wallace’s (am I allowed to say this?) poster painting for Know My Name She Is 2001.

And that’s just a small sample. In fact, I’d want to suggest that all artists today are in some way like McCahon and that everything we do or say is in some way responding to him. Seriously, or at least provocatively. (It’s actually no weirder than—actually, it’s almost the same thing—suggesting that everything we do—at least in quote unquote the Western world—is in response to Christ and in the wider world perhaps to God. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.)

But let’s calm down and look at the original—again, quote unquote—a little more closely. What do we see there? Victory over Death 2, a big painting at 2 x 6 metres, was first exhibited along with the even bigger Practical Religion: The Resurrection of Lazarus Showing Mount Martha, 8 x 2 metres, at the Barry Lett Gallery in Auckland in March 1970. They are very much a pair, with McCahon’s first biographer Gordon Brown speaking of them together as 'the two Victory over Death paintings', and it is often suggested that Victory over Death 2 is subtitled 2 because Practical Religion is to be understood as Victory over Death 1.

Occupying the right-hand side of Victory over Death 2 is a huge I AM, stretching from the top to the bottom of the canvas, marked out in white paint on black. This I AM had already been seen in such McCahon works as I and Thou (1954-5) and I AM (1954). Of course, I AM is perhaps best known for being a quotation from the Book of Exodus, chapter 3, verse 14 ('God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’. And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, "I AM has sent me to you"'), although this same I AM is also to be found six times in the Book of Isaiah and ten times in the Book of John ('I am the light of the world', 'I am the resurrection and I am life', 'I am the way, I am the truth and I am life'). And in another, perhaps more literal or figurative way, this I AM cannot but remind us in its brilliant illuminated verticality of the body of Christ on the cross—and we will return to this in a moment—and in the dappled diaphanous vertices of its M of the famous mists of the south island of New Zealand, to Aotearoa or the Land of the Long White Cloud, where McCahon was born.

In this regard, Victory over Death can be seen as something of a conclusion to the long progressive abstraction of the landscape that McCahon had begun in the 1940s that is to be seen, for example, in the North Otago Landscape series of 1967 and would perhaps definitively come to an end with the Necessary Protection series of 1971-2. (The vertical I for its part can be seen to come from the so-called zip of New York School abstractionist Barnett Newman, whose work McCahon saw when he visited New York in 1958 while working as Deputy Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery. Newman can also be seen to be behind those vertical steep roads of Fred Williams’ Australian Landscapes, and the connection between them is perhaps another hanging possibility for Victory over Death.)

But the other undoubtedly striking aspect of the composition, extremely easy to overlook at first sight, is that before this Biblical I AM, white on black, McCahon has painted another AM, but this time black on black, in a slightly reflective polymer on top of oil so that it stands out against itself. As a result, that declarative self-confident I AM—'I am the light, 'I am the way', 'I am the life'—becomes a question, or at least is not asserted directly but only in response to a previous question or doubt. 'AM I?' 'I AM!' What is this necessary doubt in McCahon’s painting? Why is there a doubt or darkness that allows that 'I' or 'victory over death', in the same way that we would say that white would not be visible in itself but only against a black background? But equally, we might say, why is this doubt only a retrospective effect of certainty? Why does this black also not exist in itself, but is split, black against white or even black against black? All this, of course, is what is at stake in Christ’s Passion and the fact that Christ is not only a God but a man. It is what is beautifully captured in the painting by those words from the Book of John that McCahon transcribes. At first 'Now my soul is in turmoil and what have I to say? Father, save me from this hour'. And then his own rejoinder: 'No, it was for this that I came to this hour'.

And this brings us to all of those words from the Book of John that we find reproduced in McCahon’s painting, which tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and afterlife. McCahon was repeatedly drawn to this episode from the Bible around this time, as seen in such works as Are there not twelve hours of daylight 1969, Are there not twelve hours of darkness 1969 and If a man walks after nightfall 1969, which often featured the same excerpt from John.

In Victory over Death, McCahon reproduces passages from verses 27 to 30 and 35 to 36 from chapter 12 of John, which are said to mark that moment when Christ ceases His teaching and begins his Passion, speaking to his Father God, telling him in verse 27 that his 'soul is in turmoil' and in verse 28 asking him to 'glorify' or declare his name. To this request, God replies (and it is notably in capital letters in McCahon’s painting) 'I HAVE GLORIFIED IT AND I WILL GLORIFY IT AGAIN'. Importantly—and McCahon knew this as an informed reader of the Bible—this is often translated as, 'Son, in you I have glorified it and I will glorify it again', making the point that it is Christ himself who is the answer to his own request. But then, as John goes on to relate—and these words are also in McCahon—some in the crowd standing by misheard God’s words as either 'thunder' or an 'angel' speaking to Jesus, while Jesus for his part says to them 'This voice spoke for your sake, not mine'.

Finally, in verse 35 Jesus says to those looking up to him on the cross that 'the light is among you', while in the last verse McCahon transcribes, verse 36, he tells them 'While you have the light, trust to the light, that you may become men of light'. In other words, just as God suggests in certain translations that it is in Christ Himself that He glorifies His name, so Christ suggests that it is those looking upon him at his moment of death who must become that 'light' that He is and that they are looking for. And this again is to be seen in that moment in verse 30 where Christ replies to God 'This [his own] voice spoke for your [God’s] sake, not mine', but the spectators overhearing this mistakenly believe that Christ’s words are addressed to them, thus taking on the position of God.

In other words, one of the extraordinary things about the Biblical retelling of the story of the Passion, that moment when Christ overcomes his human doubt by believing in the fate promised to him by God, is that in effect it is those spectators looking on who become God, and thus it is they who are given the power to resurrect Christ or not. In fact, this moment of Christ identifying those who have come to watch his crucifixion with God or, to reverse this, those watching Christ’s crucifixion understanding themselves as addressed by Christ is a recurrent theme in both McCahon and the Bible.

Some eleven years before Victory over Death and in the same black-and-white style McCahon tells a similar story of Biblical mishearing in his Elias series (1959). We might take just three examples and the crucial questions they raise. In Elias: why cannot he save himself?, who is the 'he' and 'himself' here and, if it is Christ, how is Elias involved? Will he save him?, with the question 'Will Elias come to save him?', which again raises the fundamental question who is the 'him' being referred to here, and with the two possible answers 'Ever' and 'Never'. And, finally, You are witnesses with the words up top 'He is risen' and down the bottom 'He is risen from the dead' and in between, bringing them together, 'You are witnesses of these things'.

And, to begin to answer these questions, or better to think why they cannot be definitively answered, let us turn to the Biblical figure of Elias and how he features in the story of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The story is told in the Books of Mark and Matthew of the way that at the moment of His extreme doubt on the cross, when Christ is most unsure of the resurrection that has been promised him, he addresses the following words to God: 'Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?' or 'Father, father, why have you forsaken me?' (Mark, chapter 15, verse 34; Mathew, chapter 27, verse 46).

Now these words were heard by the witnesses gathered around the foot of the cross, one of whom was Elias, himself a would-be prophet and sceptical of his competitor in then contemporary Jerusalem. But Elias along with those other witnesses—and here we come back to what was going on in Victory over Death—misheard Christ’s words and thought that with 'eloi' or 'father' he was miraculously addressing Elias, whom he couldn’t possibly see in the milling crowd with his head tilted towards the heavens. And it is at this point that Elias suddenly does become convinced of the would-be prophet Jesus’ claims, is converted and, giving up on his own ambitions, instead becomes the first Apostle who will carry on Christ’s teachings after he is dead. That is to say, it is Elias himself, who, upon hearing or mishearing Christ’s words on the cross, if he cannot directly rescue Christ and keep him alive, becomes in effect the new Christ on earth in a kind of after-life. And the extraordinary thing is—it sounds almost iconoclastic, but it is the profound truth and lesson of Christianity—Christianity arises out of a kind of mishearing. It is not actually what Christ says on the cross that is transmitted and lives on, but what Elias thinks he says and hears. Again, it sounds almost iconoclastic, but it is the profound truth of Christianity, recognised from the first exegetes of the Bible all the way up to someone like 19th-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard: Christ is not the prophet he claims to be until Elias is converted by him. That is, if in one way Christ’s destiny is assumed, in another way it comes about only after Elias, is only a retrospective effect of him. Elias is not merely the earthly afterlife of Christ, but something like the very birth and origin of the Christ we know.

And if you think we go too far here, there is a very good and similar account of the Elias series given by Gordon Brown in his biography of McCahon. Brown too emphasises Elias’ mishearing of Christ’s call in thinking that his words were addressed to him (again, the ambiguity of 'his' and 'him' in those paintings) and Elias then assuming the role of God in attempting to resurrect Christ on earth if not in heaven, and the way that Christ’s presence among his Apostles in fact represents the true resurrection of Christ and proof that his Father and not just Elias was listening when he shouted his forlorn words to him.

This is Brown: 'Not only is there an ironic connection between what is said in relation to Elias and the assertion made by the passing people and the chief priest near the opening of the passage, but the final statement, "Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him", also has that element of inconclusiveness about it which, depending on the tone given to the words, can be interpreted in more than one way'. (And it will be interesting to think, after we fully explain ourselves, how this ambiguity might persist, how that moment of doubt remains necessary, even as Elias or the convert is understood to be the destiny or afterlife of Christ or McCahon.)

But, to step away from the directly religious and to translate what is going on in the Elias story into more worldly and perhaps recognisable terms, we might say that what occurs with Elias is what psychoanalysts or analysts of ideology would call 'interpellation': the fact we take words not originally addressed to us as addressed to us and become in effect the person addressed and even in a way the message itself. The famous example given of this is that of a police officer shouting out 'Hey, you there!' in public. Upon hearing this exclamation, an individual might turn around and – in the words of a famous philosopher explaining this—'by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty- degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject'.² In the act of supposing it is they who are addressed, the individual actually becomes the subject being addressed and responsible for what they think is being addressed. We see this all the time in a classroom. As I tell my students when I set an essay it is not so much a matter of me actually reading it at the end as me in their heads looking over their shoulder as they write it and them wondering what I’ll make of it. They in effect become me or, rather, I in effect become them, and they—hopefully—feel they have to be true to what I have taught them as they write their essay, although in truth what I have taught them is only and only lives on as them.

Is that not what I felt that long-ago Friday afternoon at Sydney University as I wandered alone and bewitched before his works—my memory is that there was no one else in the gallery and only a single bored gallery attendant at the front? If Martin Edmond is right, the opening night was a catastrophe—with Anne Hamblett, McCahon’s wife, bereft, the young minder from the Biennale who was meant to look after him in serious trouble and the New Zealand Ambassador furious at the humiliation of their artist not turning up – so it was likely that a few days later when I came to visit that obscure disaster was still hanging over the show. But did I still not feel somehow responsible for the work, that its destiny rested with me, not just as an aspiring art historian but as anybody? Did not McCahon—and I hope at this point the pieces are starting to come together—make me his Apostle, or better—but can we separate them, can we decide which it is?—did I not make myself McCahon’s Apostle, McCahon’s Elias, McCahon’s victory over death? Did I not save him (which is the same thing as him saving me)? Did I not speak for him (which is the same thing as him speaking for me)? And is this not what I have been doing here, trying to convert you to McCahon.

And the brilliant and paradoxical thing, just as surprising and unexpected in art as it is in religion, is that McCahon lives on no matter what I say. I might mishear him, misunderstand him, like Jesus mishears on the cross, the crowd mishears in Victory over Death or Elias mishears in the Elias series, but that does not matter. If in one way I feel that I am being addressed by McCahon, in another way McCahon and even his address to me, and certainly what he actually says to me, is only a retrospective effect of me hearing and responding to him. McCahon is what I say he is, although I can only speak or perhaps am only prompted to speak because of McCahon. And to prove this—although again this is just me speaking for him—let us go back to those artists I suggested were inspired by McCahon, influenced by him, channel him, appropriate him, are his earthly exegetes and Apostles.

Michael Parekowhai’s The Indefinite Article plays on a Maori pun around the word 'he', which can mean 'a' or 'an', this leaving any final identification open.

Peter Robinson’s Boy Am I Scared, Eh! can be seen to be about the exclusion of Maori people from Pakeha culture.

Merylyn Tweedie’s Source obsessively scrawls 'I am s/he' on the walls of the Govertt Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth.

Dale Major’s I Um Um at plays on his association with McCahon and then forgets it, with a clever pun on the rubbed out AM before I AM.

Imants Tillers’ Hiatus puts together McCahon with the Austrian-Australian artist Eugene von Guerard and the Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa.

Gordon Bennett’s Self Portrait uses Victory over Death to speak of the duality of his identity.

Geoff Newton’s Victory over Death 3 vernacularises and domesticates its predecessor, Victory over Death 2

The Jirrawun Girls’ Kununurra Midnight Prowl records the dysfunctional graffiti-scrawled outback community of Kununurra where the four Nocketta sisters live.

Anne Wallace’s She Is is a feminine or even feminist assertion of self-identity.

If we think about it—and it is in this way that McCahon goes against the usual art-historical notion of influence or the idea of him standing in for some identifiable movement or moment in art—there is no common style to all of McCahon’s followers. There is nothing particular he leaves behind or that those who take from his work see in it. Put simply, there is nothing in common to all those who come after McCahon, but McCahon is this nothing in common. (One of my favourite writers, the great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, suggests something similar when he writes of the various 'precursors' to Kafka he lists in his essay Kafka and His Precursors: 'If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other'.³) In this McCahon is perhaps like Christianity—I hope it is OK to say this – or any great text. There is no final orthodoxy or doctrine. It lives on through, it is, its Apostles, its interpreters. And if we read the Bible carefully—and certainly some of its great characters or incidents like Elias and Christ on the cross—this is even what it is saying about itself. This—and it is in this regard that McCahon’s paintings are great Christian paintings, are a proper continuation of that profound Western equivalence of art and religion—is perhaps the true lesson of Christianity. Christianity is and is about its own afterlife. Just as art, the art that lives on, is.

And, of course, Apostles Rex and Laurence want to say that this is the true meaning and intention of McCahon. This is not just the fact, the condition of the living on of McCahon’s work, but what McCahon’s work is about, what it understands about itself. (Paradox: even as we say that both Christianity and McCahon are only the retrospective effects of their interpretation, each interpretation is possible only, as we have suggested, if it understands itself as speaking for what is already there, that what it interprets already knows this about itself.)

And our proof for this? Let us start with the obvious. In McCahon’s You are Witnesses, with its words from Luke, chapter 24, verse 48, 'You are witnesses of these things… He is risen from the dead', exactly as with Victory over Death, it is McCahon himself who comes out of the tomb and arises from the dead each time our eyes rise up the canvas and we speak of him. (And, indeed, there is a beautiful tension or contradiction between our reading the work from top to bottom and looking at the work from bottom to top. The first we might say is sceptical and material and the second faithful and spiritual.) And in both cases, You are witnesses and Victory over Death—another hanging recommendation—we would be tempted to position the works high up on the wall, so that we as spectators have to look up in an act of belief, like Christ in his Passion. And, indeed, I seem to remember that, when the Gallery here had a specific New Zealand room at the bottom of a flight of stairs, Victory over Death was installed half-way up those stairs. We should always be looking up at Victory over Death: it is not just a painting, it is also Christ and McCahon up there.

The second work we would nominate as proof of McCahon’s work being about its own afterlife is one of his so-called Last Paintings, in fact said to be his last painting altogether, I Considered All the Acts of Oppression 1981-3, left face down in his studio at his death after McCahon stopped painting some four years before his death in 1987. The painting is even more pared-down and let us say expressionless than Elias and Victory over Death, consisting simply of text from the Book of Ecclesiastes and is seemingly unremittingly despairing. Here from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verse 1: 'I saw the tears of the oppressed and saw there was no one to comfort them'. But crucially for us McCahon has left the middle right-hand side of the painting blank above the lines—and we owe McCahon patron and collector Dame Jenny Gibbs for making the connection—'Here again I saw emptiness under the sun with our sons or brothers toiling endless yet never'. And there has been considerable debate as to whether McCahon meant it this way or simply ran out of painterly puff at the end of his life. But, in effect, we suggest, it opens up a gap for us to enter, add to and even complete the painting. It is the moment when McCahon opens his painting and his 'endless yet never' life and career up to the outside, to his own afterlife, passing it over to the other, his spectator, his interpreter, at the moment they lift it off the floor and mount it on the wall. It is McCahon hoping someone will hear him in his moment of doubt and despair and believe he is speaking to them. And I hope I can be someone like Elias speaking to you today and have made you believe. McCahon lives on in me and when I die he will have to live on in you. Like Elias, I believe that he is speaking to me and that by speaking of him I can save him and therefore myself.

There are only mishearings and misinterpretations—perhaps that is what troubled McCahon in his relation to Christianity, although in the same letter that he says 'there is a black hole with no star to guide me', he also says 'If God and I gave up our arguments, I wouldn’t paint again'—but we have to jump, to take the risk, like those birds he painted on those rocky outcrops off the coast near Titirangi, which at a certain point have to leave their nest and leap into the void without knowing whether they can fly. It’s like Christ on the cross not knowing whether he will be saved. He has to trust, to have faith. In whom? In us, his disciples. (If McCahon only exists because of me and I only exist because of McCahon, each of us also has to believe this for it to be possible.) And McCahon did, otherwise I wouldn’t be here writing this today. And I have faith in you, reading and listening to me. Thank you for that. Now go forth and spread the word.

This essay was originally presented as part of the 2024 Art Talks program.