A Guided Tour of Dante's Inferno: A Sculptural Installation by Janet Van Fleet
This installation was born out of my interest in the interface between literature and the visual arts. I am certainly not the only artist to swim in these waters: Dante's 600-year-old story of his trip through hell, with Virgil as his guide, has inspired artists from Botticelli to Rodin.
The eleven-sided structure is 14 feet in diameter and 9 feet tall. It is designed so that people begin by walking around the outside, where they find a summary of the text, a visual outline of the narrative, and copies of 365 small watercolors that form a daily diary of the year during which I built this piece. Viewers then enter the inside of the structure, where they see a center pole with "Virgil's Hands," take one of the hands, and walk clockwise past display surfaces illustrating the nine circles of hell. Some people find Virgil's presence comforting; others find it constraining and perhaps a bit irritating. Dante had both these experiences too.
I tried to make this installation a faithful representation of Dante's text - a kind of three-dimensional illustration. In some cases I have shown the specific characters whom Dante interviewed on his journey. In many others, I have created generic souls experiencing the punishments which Dante details. This offered me an opportunity to create more of an "equal opportunity Hell" than Dante's text afforded. There are two kinds of characters one encounters in the Inferno - the suffering damned (whom I have mostly represented in clay and photographs of those clay figures printed on transparent fabric) and everybody else: their keepers, tormenters, and assorted characters from classical mythology with whom Dante has populated his underworld. I have come to call these the "Employees of Hell," and chose to make them mostly out of blue paper mache. For me, suffering and agony are real and as poignant as I tried to make these small clay figures. What causes us to suffer, however, is more problematic, and may be as much of an unreal, grotesque projection as the Employees of Hell.