Losing Life and Finding Life

This striking image of an airborne Christ is by New Zealand painter Brett A’Court. It is part of his visual research into how to bring together the spiritual insights of the indigenous culture of the Maori people and those of Christianity.

In cultural terms it is a hybrid image, something that occurs when two cultures are in a process of mutual re-assessment. It is an exploration that has the potential to be offensive to either culture, but one that also carries the potential for new forms to arise that express the insights of both traditions.

Such imagery also responds to the colonial suppression of local cultures, allowing for innovations to arise from outside the usual orthodox channels. A Christ figure flying in the sky like a kite is such a form. It is a new thing, a potential aberration, but one full of potential for new insight.

The ‘Manu-Kahu’ in Maori culture refers to the Harrier Hawk, a bird considered to provide a spiritual connection to the divine. It also refers to the Maori cultural practice of making kites, which is a common recreational practice but has traditional religious meaning. Historically, massive kites were produced for significant ritual occasions. These could carry the weight of a human person, and in their ritual role were flown with up to a kilometre of rope to command vast terrains. These kites were considered in Maori beliefs to access the supernatural life force associated with animals, birds, and the dream of flight. For the artist, this provides an appropriate connection to a Christ figure who 'holds' the land with benevolence and grace.

This new and surprising iconography dislodges any colonial mentality that considers a European way of seeing things to be the only authoritative one. A’Court’s is a thoroughly contextual Christ for New Zealand, the land where birds have become the dominant species. Here we do not encounter an introduced species, carrying a foreign spirituality. This is Christ at home in the physical landscape of the Pacific.

For viewers in other contexts, it serves to expand our sense of encounter with a God at home in the world, an incarnation that honours the material world we inhabit, and that raises up the viewer’s gaze towards a spiritual horizon.

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. (John 12:32)

This painting, overwhelming in scale, typifies Colin McCahon’s painterly struggle to explore the space between belief and doubt. It is a direct response to Jesus’s inner conflict as he faces death and questions how his life might glorify God.

McCahon is New Zealand’s most well-known artist, having garnered an international profile. He is admired for his painterly calligraphic style and handwritten texts. In his lifetime, he was an artist driven by a theological interest in visualizing faith and its absence. Through affirmations and negations McCahon explores the ultimate horizon of existence. He dares to explore the role of the artist as theologian.

The vast surface of the canvas is structured by the architecture of the divine affirmation; ‘I AM’. The ‘I’ appears like a crack of light that both illuminates the composition and breaks it in two. To the left there is a darkly shadowed ‘AM’ that emerges out of the darkness, turning the affirmation into a question. ‘AM I’? Like a delicate filigree the text of John 12:27–36 shivers through the in-between spaces, evidencing erasure and re-inscription. There is no final or definitive edit. We see all the changes, and the jostling of words as they compete for importance in conveying a clear meaning. There is no comfort here in finding a black and white declaration, but rather a moderated surface that evidences the history of questions and answers, affirmations and negations, faith and doubt.

Metaphorically speaking, this enormous text work teeters under the precarious weight of its construction. Here is the universal human search for understanding rendered in the only thing we have available: humble and fragile phrases. McCahon delineates the intense drama of this passage from John, by giving material and visual expression to the contrast between light and darkness, life and death, doubt and faith. Given its size (207.5 x 597.7 cm), there is an invitation for viewers to inhabit this space and to feel the weight and significance of each gesture as it forms itself into words, phrases, defining and redefining what we understand God to be, the ‘I AM’.

In this small painting, Albrecht Dürer concentrates the attention of the viewer on the lone figure of Christ. There is no trace of the expected crowd of figures, including Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, the disciples, and soldiers, all of whom are usually depicted in attendance at Christ’s crucifixion. It is as though they are absent, or we (raised up as Christ is) are seeing over their heads.

The viewer of this intimate work is drawn in to be the only witness, to contemplate and grasp the meaning of this harrowing death. The sky has darkened into a thick descending blackness that seems about to eclipse even the dimly rendered horizon. Hope has been extinguished. The space is compressed and claustrophobic. There is nowhere else to look except at this dying human form.

Yet in contrast to the downward fall of black sky there is a clear counterpoint. The depiction of the Christ figure also suggests, if only metaphorically, a turn upward. Christ’s eyes are raised towards the heavens, and the warm radiance reflecting from his body is luminous against the sky. In this enveloping cosmic darkness—high and lifted up—Christ is a light for the world.

We also notice the loincloths that surround his hips have responded to an awakening breeze. As Christ expels his last breath, it is as though there is at the same moment a sudden influx of air, which like the verdant trees behind, welcomes this wind of change—like when a grave is opened, and the stench of death is replaced by the fresh air of hope.

Dürer has created in this work a compressed and intensely personal space of contemplation that leaves viewers hovering in their imagination between life and death. The figure carries the physical signs of both. Even as Christ breathes his last on Good Friday, there is already a premonition of the rising life of Easter Sunday.

It is an intimate viewing experience, and yet the painting’s setting of a single central figure against a dramatic landscape anticipates the sublimity of the Romantic tradition. The Latin inscription along the bottom of the work—‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’—elides Christ’s journey to the dead with his journey to the Father. The contemplation of this process of death and life playing itself out in the body of Christ invites the viewer into that same journey.