Believing in Colin: “A Question of Faith” from “Celestial Lavatory Graffiti” to “Derridean Religious Addict”

This essay critically evaluates responses to Colin McCahon's religious paintings over the past fifty years, from A. R. D. Fairburn's dismissal to Laurence Simmons' deconstruction, and beyond to the reception of “A Question of Faith”. McCahon's religious paintings have evoked an ever-changing response that, it is argued, reflects the debate on the role and position of religion and Christianity in both New Zealand society and the wider modern-postmodern world. McCahon's religious paintings of the 1940s were attempts to locate in New Zealand the postwar Christian reconstruction of society, and yet they were rejected by a society not ready for the articulation of a modernist contextual theology. In the 1970s McCahon's return to contextual theology again provoked polarised responses, in part because of his appropriation of Maori spirituality. Likewise, his use of text, as the location of revelation in public space, proved discomforting to a culture more comfortable with a view of itself as secular and of religion as marginalised, privatised and sectarian. More recently the embracing of McCahon by overseas critics and galleries as a major modernist religious artist has forced a reappraisal whereby he has been relocated as a Pakeha prophet While the paintings themselves have often been critiqued, little if any work has been done that reads the critics as articulating wider cultural and societal responses to God, religion and Christianity. This essay discusses the various “McCahon's” that have been articulated by critics and argues that in both McCahon's art and the various critical responses, there is the groundwork for an emergent Antipodean contextual secular theology.