Plastic Jesus, real devotion

Mada

6 days ago

Xenia Nikolskaya's latest photobook Plastic Jesus presents a selection of photographs of Coptic merchandise and architectural interiors from her trips across Egypt between 2003 and 2010. The hardcover book, designed by Omar al-Zo'bi, includes 52 images, an introduction by Adam Makary and a love letter by Nikolskaya herself. The book derives its title from an American folk song — a religious parody about finding temporary solace in a plastic Jesus figurine, which opens with the following verses:
I don't care if it rains or freezes
long as I have my plastic Jesus
glued to the dashboard of my car
comes in colors pink and pleasant
glows in the dark cause it's iridescent
take Him with you when you travel far
Nikolskaya's voice rises a pitch when she asks me, 'Have you heard the song Plastic Jesus played by the famous actor in that scene?' I pull up a low-res Youtube video, which I watch a few times on repeat. In the 1967 chain gang drama Cool Hand Luke, a rebellious prisoner who refuses to submit in a Florida prison camp gains the admiration of his fellow inmates with his heroic attempts to escape. Luke, a small town guy, is serving two years of forced labor for breaking off the tops of parking meters, just because there's 'not much to do in the evenin'.' The establishment wants to beat him down, but Luke refuses to let anyone think they've broken his spirit. When he receives a telegram about his mother's death, his cell mates, in a show of respect, silently leave the room one at a time, allowing him to grieve in privacy. Luke sits on a bunk bed and, staring into space, grabs a banjo and sings the popular folk song Plastic Jesus as a requiem for his mother:
Get yourself a Sweet Madonna
dressed in rhinestone sittin' on a
pedestal of abalone shell
goin' ninety, I ain't scary
'cause I've got my Virgin Mary
assuring me that I won't go to Hell
Nikolskaya's reference to the folk song in the title of her latest photobook completes a journey that unfolded over twenty-two years, and which brought her from Russia to Egypt. The book launches in Cairo this month.
It comes at a time marked by a dramatic shift in the digital media landscape and the ways in which we engage with images and news stories. What coincides with a volatile global political moment is the possibility for horrific images of war, of detonated bodies, starved children, to be broadcasted live daily and reported by citizen-journalists out of closed military systems. To witness ordinary people forced to become heroes just to survive unimaginable pain under extraordinary conditions makes tangible the saint-like figure we often encounter suspended in the disbelief of fiction or religious scripture. We live in a moment where 'the saint-like heroes are the heroes of war,' as Nikolskaya puts it.
In the image of Saint Mark the Evangelist, the first pope of Alexandria, believers see the symbol of a religion born amid the quiet whispers of secrecy. Saint Mark, whose family is said to have been a close companion of Jesus Christ, was himself chosen as one of the Seventy Apostles. He established the first church in Africa and spread Christianity through various places in Eurasia. With the founding of the church in Alexandria, he became the first in an unbroken lineage of Coptic popes. According to Coptic tradition, he was martyred in 68 AD by a mob of Romans who dragged him through the streets for two consecutive days until his death. He was also the first to inaugurate a far grimmer continuity: the steady current of Egyptian martyr-saints.
A religion that spread under the threat of persecution would go on to favor concealable everyday objects over large structures to symbolize faith. The images of saints featured on ordinary items are redolent of a decentralized church, they are 'things that you have in your pocket,' Nikolskaya explains, 'in your car, your home. It's not the Cathedral of St. Mark, but for you, it can be as amazing as any of these monuments.' It is the church ever present in your home.
Plastic Jesus depicts 42 disposable but sacred artifacts collected, or rather purchased, from Coptic gift shops along various historic monasteries and church complexes down the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt. The photobook is designed as a counter-museum catalogue with local religious figures featured on fridge magnets, pillows lined in faux-fur, mugs, pens, watches, rubik's cubes, smartphone cases — all either laser-cut, carved or printed on variations of silicons, aluminums and plastics.
I. Coptic Kitsch
Plastic Jesus evokes a nostalgic desire for kitsch objects to counteract the colonial and class biases of 'high' culture. These ordinary artifacts that populate the lives of believers are found in a variety of ever-changing trends in any Coptic gift shop across the country. Essentially, they're keeping a cultural economy alive in rural Egypt, where many of the workshops and factories are found. Coptic-kitsch re-packages ancient imagery for a new generation of consumers (read: believers).
The book carries a certain air. It is cool, aloof, and doesn't give a shit if you think these objects are sacred — it tells you they are. The cover is laminated with a Gothic cross in hot pink pasted across an etching of Jesus Christ. Lined in matching pink paper, the book's sober typography and minimal color-scheme are designed to point your attention to the colors, textures and shapes of the 'flamboyant' artifacts in the collection.
It asks that we play a game of code-switching, to reconsider these objects, not in their pure materiality, but in the image of what they represent. It doesn't question the sacredness of these objects, but rather celebrates it. It is precisely because they are sacred that Nikolskaya creates a museum-grade catalogue to exhibit them.
Visitors in a Coptic church will often lay their hands and kiss icons on the church walls as a symbolic act to connect with a saint via a tactile engagement with their image. The image of a saint, believed to be sacred in the Christian tradition, is an imprint through which, in a collective effort of remembrance, the epic tales of struggle and the saint's attributes are kept alive. As Adam Makary points out in the introductory text, the preservation of sacred emblems is itself a sacramental act and a church duty. The images of saints also serve to reflect something back to believers by evoking their emotions. 'They're handlebars on a long journey,' Nikolskaya says when I ask her what they represent to her.
With an almost religious assertiveness, she dedicates the book to 'the people of Egypt,' emphasizing that it is 'made by them for them and for us to truly believe what we believe.' The bold font, all in capital letters, of the dedication text, echoes the graphic intensity of iconic works of contemporary feminist art: the neon-colored posters in Jenny Holzer's 'Inflammatory Essays,' wheat pasted across city streets and Barbara Kruger's 1980s stark slogans in Futura Bold, layered over found imagery.
II. Sacred Junk
In between a steady stream of softly-lit artifacts in Nikolskaya's Plastic Jesus are spreads of architectural spaces where some of the objects reappear in context. Having first travelled to Egypt in 2003 as an archaeological field photographer with the Russian Egyptological mission, Nikolskaya wryly points to the colonial underpinnings of the field: 'I was often surprised,' she says, 'by the artifacts they chose to save.' She leaves it at that. But her critique surfaces through her architectural photography, which highlights archaeological sites not just as historical locations but as significant spaces that continue to be utilized to this day. The ancient sites are lived-in, even when in the absence of people — they display traces of movement. Rather than kill an artifact in order to preserve it, Nikolskaya engages with the tradition while it is still alive.
These plastic trinkets, often dismissed as cheap commercial goods, are seldom included in the corpus of Coptic heritage. But by granting them museum-grade treatment, the book quietly insists that we reconsider them as tangible material of tradition.
However the parody, as highlighted in the following verses of Plastic Jesus (the folk song), is that, while sacramental value is often associated with being eternal, cheaply-made things are manufactured in cheap material, which is prone to breakage, wear and tear, and disintegration into microplastics—so, at what point in the breakage of a Jesus figurine does it stop being sacred? Can we dispose of a sacred object and if so, how?
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
riding on the dashboard of my car
though the sunshine on His back
makes Him peel, chip and crack
a little patching keeps Him up to par
Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
riding on the dashboard of my car
I'm afraid He'll have to go
His magnets ruin my radio
and if I have a wreck, He'll leave a scar
III. Holy Assemblage
Nikolskaya identifies as a secular Christian and places herself in the narrative. She seems driven more by curiosity than a set itinerary through the local landscape. Although she relies solely on natural lighting in her architectural photography, she manages to bring our attention to the stark contrast of colors and meaning. She highlights points of tension in the ancient sites: an electric fan on a bench near an altar in a fourth century monastery; a fluorescent pink satin fabric dripping off an old wooden cupboard against a wall painted in lime green; a digital embroidery of the last supper hanging crookedly above a row of plastic tables, themselves covered in Pepsi-branded tablecloths. 'If the light is there, you have the image,' she says, as if it were so effortless.
The photos in Plastic Jesus, in the sheer amount of detail they carry, invite you to indulge in the tense juxtaposition of old and new, holy and mundane, authentic and mass-produced. The book highlights the affective (read: emotional) experience of a niche cultural economy of Coptic-kitsch artifacts, and emphasizes the need for a more nuanced approach to cultural preservation. But in the age of the made-in-China and as we continue to witness the catastrophic effects of microplastics on our environments, wildlife and subaltern communities, the book may leave you wondering: Have we crossed a threshold whereby microplastics are now so enmeshed in the fabric of our lives that they have even become things of eternal sacramental value?
If the saints are with us, maybe they're made of plastic. Maybe that's the point.