Description
Into My Glass
Conceptual photographic installation
November 2016 | Variable dimensions
I had immersed the crucifix in cold water, Christ of metal or wood plunged in transparent liquid, and then I waited for the freezer to do its patient work, slow transformation of water into ice, molecules that slowed froze crystallized, and Christ remained suspended there prisoner willing of this transparent block that enveloped him like a frozen shroud. And now November twenty sixteen I pulled him out at the exact moment when the ice began to melt, not too soon otherwise you wouldn’t see anything through the opacity of complete frost, not too late otherwise everything would have melted and Christ would have become visible banal, but this intermediate magical moment where you glimpse the silhouette through the cloudy transparency of melting ice, ghostly Christ in his tomb of crystal.
Into My Glass — into my glass, pun between glass the transparent material and glass the container you drink from, and both meanings overlapped because the ice block actually resembled a huge ice cube in a giant glass, Christ on the rocks, theological whisky where faith diluted slowly in the water of time passing. And my glass also as mirror, glace in old French, look in my inner mirror and see this crucifix melting, metaphor of my own faith or collective faith evaporating generation after generation, fewer people who truly believed, churches emptying, European Christianity becoming cultural heritage rather than living conviction.
November twenty sixteen, one year after Bataclan, and this image spoke of our inner faith, this mysterious thing that inhabited some and not others, that was strong in some and weak in many, that froze sometimes preserved intact in the cold of spiritual isolation, or that melted dissolved disappeared under the heat of modern materialist skeptical world. The crucifix imprisoned in ice represented those moments when faith was preserved protected sheltered from doubts and questions, frozen in absolute certainty, but this preservation was temporary fragile, as soon as temperature rose as soon as doubt seeped in the ice melted and faith became exposed vulnerable questioned.
The air bubbles trapped in the ice created this cloudy texture that obscured the vision of the crucifix, and these bubbles spoke of all those things that clouded our perception of the divine — theological contradictions, scandals of the Church, wars of religion, innocent suffering that God apparently allowed without intervening, all these unanswered questions that made that even when you wanted to believe you saw Christ only through cloudy glass, through opaque ice, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, « now we see as in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. »
The creation process was as sculptural as photographic, I had fabricated this ephemeral ice sculpture that would exist only for a few hours before completely melting, temporary art that would disappear leaving no trace except this photograph, and this temporality was essential to the meaning of the work, faith also was ephemeral changing, it froze and melted according to the seasons of our lives, strong in youth maybe then melting with experience and disenchantment, or weak at first then strengthening with age and proximity to death, cycles of freezing and thawing spiritual that each person lived in their own way.
November twenty sixteen and I thought of all those who lost their faith after Bataclan, those who couldn’t believe in a good God after seeing that horror, their inner crucifix melting permanently in the lukewarm water of despair. But I also thought of those whose faith strengthened, those who found comfort in prayer and religious community, their crucifix freezing stronger harder more resistant to the heat of doubt. Into My Glass spoke of these two opposite simultaneous movements, freezing and thawing, faith strengthening and faith weakening, and the image captured this unstable intermediate moment where both states coexisted, where Christ was visible and invisible, present and absent, clear and dark.
The verticality of the crucifix in the ice block evoked this tension toward ascent characteristic of Christianity, this aspiration to rise above the material world toward the spiritual heavenly kingdom, but at the same time the crucifix was prisoner locked incapable of truly ascending, frozen in its vertical position like we were frozen in our spiritual aspirations that we never realized completely, always this gap between what we wanted to be spiritually and what we were really, and the ice symbolized maybe this dogmatic rigidity that prevented faith from living breathing evolving, crucifix frozen in immutable doctrine rather than living Christ who adapted to the changing needs of humanity.
The edges of the ice block melted first, water flowing down the transparent walls, and this liquid water created channels tiny rivers that sculpted the surface, accelerated erosion that showed how time destroyed even what seemed solid permanent eternal, the ice melted the crucifix would soon be liberated but also exposed, and maybe that was the message — faith had to melt had to free itself from its prison of dogmatic ice to become liquid fluid adaptable again, living water rather than dead crystal, dynamic conviction rather than fixed certainty.
Into My Glass in November twenty sixteen, fifty-four years old, fourteen years in France, and I watched this crucifix melt that I myself had frozen, metaphor of my own relationship to the Christian faith of my Romanian childhood, this faith that had been given to me as a child under Ceaușescu when atheist communism made religion dangerous therefore precious, faith that I had frozen somewhere inside me to preserve it when I arrived in secular France where nobody really believed, and now this frozen faith melted slowly and I didn’t know what would remain when all the ice would have disappeared, maybe just an ordinary wet crucifix without power without magic, or maybe something new living real that would emerge from this spiritual thaw, liquid faith that could adapt take any form instead of remaining prisoner of one single frozen form, Into My Glass November twenty sixteen forever.
Cornel Barsan
November 2016
