by kelly kong

A pig in a nun’s wimple, dressed with a sly smile and whispering into the ears of a man pardoned with indulgences—that is the image Hieronymus Bosch curates in the bottom right corner of the “Hell” panel in his painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. In central ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Bosch’s hometown in the Netherlands, St. John’s Cathedral towers above the city as an emblem of Catholic authority and surveillance. Beneath its imposing facades, however, is a lasting legacy funded by indulgences—a document bought to reduce your afterlife sentence. During the medieval period, the church widely preached the notion of the all-punishing God, making people so terrified of Hell that their life revolved around fleeing hellscape. Everyone sins. Purgatory after death was inevitable, so it became about fastening the journey to Heaven at full speed. Indulgence grants thereby became an industry, funding the Catholic church while they maintained the rein of mortality upon everyday citizens. The gold drip (Stock images) and barrels of cash from Barrels on Money by Victor Dubreuil serve as a (somewhat literal) representation of blatant monetary value within indulgence. While the church trains citizens to buy off their sins without actual accountability for wrongdoing, they profit off of others’ vice to establish more monuments of power, creating a loophole of abuse in authority and doctrine while manipulating the concept of virtue. What are sins and virtue when a sole source of power solely frames their conceptualization? How can accountability be just if those in power are profiting from it; are the sinners also victims? 
I scaffolded my composite image around St. John’s Cathedral because it serves as a direct reflection of the tangible influence that systems held with epistemological and ideological authority—for example, the power to create a lasting image of the fearsome God, hell, and the path to heaven. Next to it is a direct parallel I drew from the Catholic church to Prospero and the power he exerts upon Caliban, and to the justice system and its power upon prison inmates (as seen in Shakespeare Behind Bars: “​​How does one go on to embrace a tiger” that is the system?”). The church, the justice system, and Prospero all root their power in the art of construct. And as the archive points out, Bosch’s painting operates in a way mirroring: “‘It is a mirror,’ Latin speculum…the late Middle Ages  considered mirrors served speculation, a person’s reflection on the course of the world and one’s behavior and place in it.” This works in conjunction with The Tempest’s consideration of audience perspective: we see Prospero as the Colonizer the same way he sees Caliban as the monster, holding him in a singular narrative for our enlightenment. In doing that, we trap ourselves in the confinement of labels. In Bosch’s painting, we see the indulgence receiver as the victim of the church’s exploitation and render ourselves detached from our tag-a-war relationship with our present power systems, thus ridding ourselves of true accountability. The mirror lies within, on top, and facing the painting. Money cannot buy off sins, just as it cannot “pay up” for the losses and damage of climate change (images by Peter Dejong); prison time can never do true justice to the victim nor the perpetrator, just as how Prospero’s actualization cannot erase the years of the trauma he inflicted upon Caliban. The kneeling figure right next to the indulgence subject is above the prison bars to serve as a symbol of the autonomy the powerless still holds, as long as awareness of one’s autonomy still abides. Beneath it all, Warhol’s orange meditation on violence (Orange Disaster #5) and death in repetition is the raw form of tragedy buried within talks of art, power, and victimhood—despite its concealed position, no one escapes the consequences of our abuse upon humankind. At least we can preach that as an incentive to do good.