Published 2010 by Tāhuhu Kōrero Toi Art History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
48 pages
190 x 150mm, softcover, with black and white illustrations
Edited by Christina Barton
ISSN 1176-5887

Colin McCahon in Australia is an intriguing new response to Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most important modernist artist, by acclaimed Australian art historian, Rex Butler. Butler’s argument, builds on the idea that the ultimate meaning of McCahon’s work lies not in what he intended for it, but rather how his ideas are taken up by later generations. Referring to the work of visual artists such as Scott Redford and Geoff Newton and the novelist Peter Carey, Butler offers a powerful new way of thinking about the prophetic character of McCahon’s painting. By exploring what he calls the ‘afterlife’ of McCahon’s work, Butler shows us how not just McCahon’s , but all great art, functions as a kind of material and spiritual ‘leap of faith’. His text will make us think differently about the achievements of New Zealand’s greatest artist, but it also invites us to re-envisage the nature of great art in general.

Rex Butler is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Queensland. He is well known as a contemporary art critic and writer and has published a number of books on critical theory (Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, 1999; Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory, 2005; Borges’ Short Stories, 2010) and written and edited various books on Australian art (A Secret History of Australian Art, 2002 and Radical Revisionism, 2005).