Abstract
These essays are a welcome addition to T&T Clark’s excellent series ‘Scriptural Traces: Critical Perspectives on the Reception and Influence of the Bible’. For many readers of Theology their subject matter – the interplay between the visual arts of New Zealand, Australia and Oceania and the texts and traditions of the Bible – is likely to be as unfamiliar and challenging as it was initially to the Church Missionary Society and even, perhaps, to Captain James Cook himself. Indeed, our own sense of entering visual terra incognita is heightened by the virtual absence within this volume of any comparative or parallel frame of reference to anything within the Christian art of the West. Instead, most contributors draw extensively and creatively – if at times somewhat unpredictably – upon some of the high priests of European critical and postmodern cultural theory. For example, Roland Boer mobilizes Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics in his witty and acerbic appraisal of the New Zealand born, but Australian domiciled, artist Reg Mombasa, whose myriad and highly inventive images of the ‘Australian Jesus’ who mutates, iconographically, from amiable suburban hedonist (backyard barbecue, beer-can toting, etc.) into the innocent victim of violence, homophobic bigotry and environmental destruction. Here, as Boer reminds us, ‘in theological terms, we might speak of a shift from the Jesus of a mild resurrection to one of the stark cross’ (p. 63). Similarly, Anne Elvey’s discussion of the impact of the bound Bible as a physical implement for colonizing Australia’s indigenous peoples – as emblematically portrayed (p. 170) in the photographic artwork of the late Michael Riley (himself from aboriginal stock) is framed not only by the Lukan presentation narrative itself, but also draws very fruitfully upon Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida’s overlapping theories of touch. These, for Elvey, imply that ‘the Bible, precisely as a material/cultural artefact, is inculturated by Indigenous people, not only as a symbol of violence and hope, but as part of evolving Indigenous cultural narratives’ (p. 179).
The remaining essays are predominantly case studies of the relationship between biblical text, artistic representation and cultural location within an exclusively Oceanic context. They include critical commentary on specific artists who often articulate their Christian beliefs and identity – both visually and verbally – in very different ways. For example, Darryn George effectively elides his Christian faith and his Maori heritage through highly formalized, and colour-coded, modernist abstraction, while the hyperrealism of Gail O’Leary’s sculptures masks the 42 years of personal turmoil and professional rebuke she endured as a Sister of Mercy whose ‘vows of poverty and obedience were ongoing obstacles to the development of her talent and skill as an artist’ (p. 140). Other contributors are more directly focused on visual exegesis per se. Judith Brown’s reappraisal of Colin McCahon’s art (with, to this reviewer, its strong echoes of Georgia O’Keefe) as ‘both a pictorial presentation of landscape and the symbolic presentation of the land through the motif of the Promised Land’ (p. 258) is both sensitive and acute, while a lengthy, but exceptionally illuminating interview with the Maori artist (and Anglican priest) Tony Brooking clearly demonstrates how his treatment of Genesis 1—2 in his painting Te Timatanga (The Beginning) really sheds new light on the biblical text itself.
In the late eighteenth century, William Cook, the LMS missionary to the Marquesas Islands, was told by a local chief he was seeking to convert that ‘as our nations are different, so are our gods’. Today, in the early twenty-first century, this pioneering collection will surely provide strong, and visually compelling evidence to the contrary.