ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
McCahon’s Victory Over Death 2, 1970, is one of his most famous paintings in his
characteristic “blackboard” style, and, along with Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha, 1970, the first of the two Victory Over
Death paintings, is described by Gordon H. Brown as McCahon’s best work
(Brown 1984). In large letters over the right-side is written “I AM”, a common
biblical reference from Christ offering salvation. In a lighter shade of black on the
left side is an “AM”, only visible to the perceptive viewer, which creates a doubting “Am I?” before the asserting “I AM”. Around the piece are various passages
from the New Testament that concern doubt and salvation. They are so positioned
that no reading of the statements along a direction or axis will allow someone to
read the passages in their Biblical page order. There are no pictures, just the background, which contains illegible words amid patient shade changes, and words
written in various shades of black, gray and white (for a detailed analysis, see Forward, 2004). Forward uses the painting to explain the validity of different interpretations of art among many lines. As he writes about showing Victory to a group of
Christian teachers for the first time who were “one-hundred-percent-positive” that
the image “shone with light from the Cross (even though no Cross was visible)”,
even though Forward was unsure, it is important to remember “how many valid
ways there are of seeing a single work of art. That experience impressed on me the
difficulties of knowing what we see, of working out what it means, of the relevance if any of the artist’s life, and indeed the whole question of using words about
art at all” (Forward, 2004).
The sexual selection hypothesis for art’s origins describes artworks as indicating
characteristics, though artworks are broadly indicative of an artist’s personality,
views and the surroundings that have shaped them. In this sense, whenever people
look at artworks, they are looking at indicators of human presence and perspective
generally. Artists do not have to possess the qualities that a character they create
might have, but they have to possess some understanding or experience that can
allow them to create such statements in artwork. Hamish Keith first reviewed Victory by praising the almost professional control in an amateur style of Victory’s
handwriting, which takes the painting “past the point where technical considerations have any real relevance” (Keith 1970). This is probably because McCahon
was largely an autodidact. Jim and Mary Barr describe him as “more than anything
else, a New Zealander. The sort of man you would expect to bump into at the pub
with friends; not a man wrestling with images in the solitude of a studio” (Barr and
Barr, 1980, 140). Imants Tillers, who, along with fellow painter Gordon Bennett,
both independently borrowed the dominating “I AM” from Victory in order to create their own works, felt that the peaks and slides of the I, A and M are unshakably
reminiscent of Aotearoa's alpine, craggy topography. The piece has been noted
many times for its inclusion of only words when discussing the subject of personal
struggle, expressed through Biblical doubt and resurrection. The effectiveness of
this can only come from an artist who understands the material and how to best
convey it. And as Forward’s experience with the Christian teachers shows, the
painting can be felt pro-Christian, anti-Christian, neutral, atheist, religious fellowtraveller and so on because all can be seen in the work, like views of a prism from
different angles. “What this state of affairs highlights is that the intention of the
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