Alasdair Macintyre web page

The art of Alasdair Macintyre

Elevation: Exhorting the Rise of Spirit

Only just beneath the surface of the uncluttered, visually delightful and entrancing nature of Alasdair’s pieces – indeed, what might be called the ‘innocence’ of his aesthetic – lies depths that are at once psychologically insightful and spiritually effervescent.

From the wonderful self-revelatory honesty of his Journeyman exhibition, to the playful but telling critique unfolded in Infiltration, Alasdair’s work is a celebration of all that is most good about human beings, albeit in close juxtaposition with what most threatens to stultify the expression of this goodness: viz, fear, the denial/distortion of truth, and the limitation of the world of meaning to the safe confines of mediocrity. Alasdair’s works proclaim a devout wish that the human spirit be freed to express itself openly and in its full vulnerability, and to be thus released from the self-justifying reflexes that breed violence against both self and others. Ultimately, his is a wish that we may all ‘have life and have it to the full’.

This spiritual effervescence is no mere pop psychology, for despite and through its immersion in the imagery of popular culture, Alasdair’s work is undergirded by a spiritual wellspring of energy that we perhaps glimpsed more explicitly in his recent Sanctus exhibition, but which is nonetheless palpable throughout.

It is therefore not surprising that Alasdair would find in the astonishingly enduring rock band, U2, ample inspiration and appealing dynamics for his own explorations. For in many respects, albeit in a different artistic medium, U2 are harbingers of a similar message and petitioners of a similar cause. Alasdair shares Bono’s keen eye for all that is ‘fake’ that distorts the human spirit, and as with him themes of justice and compassion arise out of this context. Like the U2 ‘wordsmith’, ancient Christian themes emerge in Alasdair’s work through poetic attention to signs of transcendence that erupt from out of the immanence of contemporary life.

There is a wonderful range and complexity of emotion in this exhibition, a range that is deepened by the inevitably rich intertextuality of Alasdair’s work. There is the telling juxtaposition, for example, between the title piece, in which U2 themselves are literally elevated while lovingly tending to Koons’ famous Puppy, and the comic-tragic pathos of The Pursuit of Happiness (is a warm crayon), recalling as it does themes from Infiltration. The continuation of the Ian Fairweather motif (see the earlier Prelude to Ascension) reintroduces the theme of solitude, the anachronistic and incongruous items of distraction here nonetheless underlining the timeless nature of the spiritual quest that for Alasdair is as much enactable through intense contemporary creative engagement as it was within the medieval monastic lifestyle he so evocatively portrayed in the exhibition Sanctus. And then there is the stunning way in which U2’s haunting and tragic Until The End Of The World is in Alasdair’s piece of the same name transformed into a ‘parousia’ in Smurfland with the final coming of the Smurf Artist Messiah (“Strumpf”, for those who missed it, sounding much like the French for Smurf!).

Who said spirituality, passion and a great sense of humour were incompatible?

Dr Richard Colledge, Brisbane, June, 2007

Dr Richard Colledge is Academic Dean and Lecturer in Philosophy at

St Paul’s Theological College, Banyo, Brisbane.