I did take other pictures. We went down the path for about ten minutes, following the thunderous sounds of cracking ice while our eyes adjusted to the dark, until we reached the first platform. We stopped, and I could see the outline of the glacier but it was still undefined. There was supposed to be a full moon out that night but a thick canopy of clouds blocked it out. We continued walking until we reached a funny sign warning us not to cross, which of course we did. I thought I should take another self-portraitlii here in the style of a Casper David Friedrich painting, myself as the figure looking off at the sublime menace of nature, a reference to my favorite Friedrich paintings: Sea of Ice (1824), and Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818).liii I always thought the explorers in Friedrich’s paintings were ridiculously dressed, seemingly unprepared and drawn into dangerous circumstances by their curiosity. Realizing that I was not so different, I took the picture of myself with no jacket on. The air was surprisingly moderate.
We found the spot near the water we decided to be the safest and closest, with raft-sized icebergs slowly moving across the still water and the now ominous-looking piece of ice towering over us. I quickly set up the projector and as it warmed up we saw a faint square of blue light on the blue ice. I played a video I had been shooting and editing on the road titled MMDDYYYY, which was a landscape study made of footage shot from various buses, and after that we watched the sun on the ice. I had come here to melt the glacier, to defeat the edge.
3.
My favorite show when I was a kid was an 80’s British cartoon called Danger Mouse, and there is an episode that I only saw once when I was around 6 years old that I’ve thought about a lot since that day. In it, Danger and Penfold are travelling through space at warp speed and hit the edge of the universe.liv When I first saw them burst through and end up in a white void, it staged an absurd conceptual problem that I’ve always gone back to. When I found the episode again on youtube to capture these frames, the scene was exactly as I remembered it after 20 years.
