Christ’s Compassion

Guillermo Galindo (b.1960) is an experimental composer, and a visual and performance artist. Trained as a composer in Mexico City, his multi-media practice focuses on erasing conventional limits between art forms. Indeed, the sculpture Ropófono exists at the intersection of fine art, music, and performance. It has been defined as a ‘three dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic-sonic object’ (YBCA 2022); when fully used, it is equally an assemblage that includes found objects and a musical instrument that the artist plays during performances. 

Ropófono is part of Border Cantos, a collaboration with photographer Richard Misrach which brought together Misrach’s photographs of the US–Mexico border and Galindo’s sonic sculptures created from clothing and objects left behind by refugees attempting to cross it. Together, they document, visualize, and give voice to the human aspect of the immigration crisis.

The title is an invented word, a play on the Spanish words for clothing (ropa) and gramophone (gramófono). The loom-shaped object (a powerful symbol of home in Latin America) is made of several items of clothing found at the border, tied around a wooden frame; when the loom is turned, the rubbing of the fabric against the wood creates a sound which is amplified by contact microphones attached to the structure. The instrument gives voice to people whose names, stories, and even fate after they entered the US are unknown to us. They represent the great multitude of the ‘harassed and helpless’ (Matthew 9:36) in need of a shepherd, of recognition, and of an amplified voice.

They are many. Galindo has ‘harvested’ just a ‘few’ (Matthew 9:37) of their traces, noting that his work is ‘meant to enable the invisible victims of immigration to speak through their personal belongings’ (Misrach & Galindo 2016: 193). The music, alongside the visual presence of the object, memorializes those often-invisible victims.

References

Misrach, Richard and Guillermo Galindo. 2016. Border Cantos. Photographs and text by Richard Misrach. Instruments, sound installations, scores, and text by Guillermo Galindo. Introduction and Epilogue by Josh Kun (New York: Aperture)

‘Guillermo Galindo Biography’. 2022. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), available at https://ybca.org/artist/guillermo-galindo/ [accessed 5 January 2023]

Robert Colescott (1925–2009) was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher best remembered today as disruptor of the art-historical canon by appropriating iconic paintings and reimagining them to include Black figures. The intention was to make visible those who have been traditionally invisible not only in the history of art, but also in American history more generally (Platow & Simms 2019). 

Modern Day Miracles is in many ways typical of Colescott’s work from the 1980s, when he turned to tougher, often more political, subjects, while also introducing biblical and mythological stories or symbolism into his works. At the same time, the compositions became more crowded, more dynamic—people from different eras, narratives, or cultures are brought together, overlapping, often clustered in the foreground, as if urging us to pay attention; to see them.

There is an urgency conveyed in such compositions, the reason for which becomes clearer when considering the subject matter. Here, a large Jesus figure, robed in white, stands out in the middle right ground, his eyes closed, his hand touching a Black woman directly in front of him. The figures in the foreground, although spatially closer to us, are significantly smaller than the two central figures, as if to reinforce their relative invisibility. Several scenes are described here: a bedridden woman is being examined by a doctor with a stethoscope, another female figure standing by her side; next to them a man is eating, while a smiling young boy looks on; further back, a woman is cooking a fish on the stove. The entire scene is lit by one lamp on the bedstand, its colourful lampshade one of several vibrant colours punctuating the composition.

Jesus’s presence in this otherwise domestic scene, combined with the painting’s title, emphasizes his message of compassion for all those who are ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’ (v.36). In an indictment of ongoing inequality, the painting suggests that the modern-day ‘miracle’ is the very fact that Black people have access to healing and medicine, to food and electricity.

Dirck Jacobsz. Vellert was a painter and printmaker active in Antwerp c.1511–c.47. We know that he was a master of the painters’ guild of St Luke and that he took on pupils. Although no paintings have been securely attributed to him, a relatively large number of drawings have (Konowitz 1997). Many of them are designs for stained glass windows—the part of his practice for which he seems to have been most famous. 

One such drawing is Christ Preaching in the Synagogue and the Pharisees Bringing the Woman taken in Adultery. The design would have fitted a roundel, common in contemporary architecture as either a stand-alone window or part of a multi-panelled one.

In the centre left foreground of the drawing, Jesus is shown on a bench in the act of preaching, surrounded by a circle of people seated on the ground. Several other figures are standing further back, observing the scene from afar, engaged in conversation. The architecture, though ostensibly depicting a synagogue, is in fact that of a contemporary church, complete with pier statues under elaborate canopies and a rood screen in the background, crowned by a large scale, enthroned statue.

A group of men and a woman is entering from the right, their movement suggesting that the woman is being pushed forward, possibly against her will. They are bringing her towards Jesus for judgement. This has been interpreted as depicting the Pharisees and the woman taking in adultery (John 8:2–11).

Together, then, the two scenes in this drawing tell a story found in John’s Gospel. Here, however, I have chosen to use their proximity to illustrate Christ’s teaching—and practising—of compassion, as described in Matthew 9:35–38. In the latter passage, we learn that Christ healed ‘every infirmity’ (v.35) of the people that he met. And infirmities may take many forms, moral as well as physical.

References

Konowitz, Ellen. 1997. ‘A “Creation of Eve” by Dirk Vellert’, Master Drawings, 35.1: 54–62