Present Imperfect

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life | April 10, 2003

This morning, I dragged Eric to Bill Viola's Passions at the Getty Center. I had already seen it once, but there were too many people around and I didn't get to see everything I wanted to. Anyway, this time, we saw the hell out of it. We also saw a "making of" video on the exhibit in which Viola says that ideas like the annunciation, the crucifixion and the resurrection aren't "owned" by Christianity; that these ideas are "hardwired into our operating system." He then went on to explain that on the surface, his Emergence piece (in which two women help a young, apparently dead man emerge from a water-filled, tomblike structure) looks like the aftermath of a drowning. (The image of the dead boy is very like the statue on the Shelley memorial at University College, Oxford, in fact.), but to our subconscious, it's actually a birthing scene, as two women (midwives) assist another being into the world.

Now, I don't know if it's just that we're coming up on Easter here or what, but I was thinking about it, and if we're meant to accept that Christ is the embodiment of both God and man on earth, then the only time he is wholly human is during the two days when he's dead. Christ the man, after 33 years on Earth as (allegedly) God, after the crucifixion, is born into the world of man--as a corpse.

Come to think of it, Shelley was sent down from Oxford for distributing his pamphlet on the Necessity of Atheism. Hmmm...