GreenS13192474: Accumulate / Disperse

The title for the project was Accumulate and Disperse, I chose to interpret this from the angle of greed. I was thinking about how people accumulate wealth and indulge with expenditure. I immediately thought of how greed is seen as a sin, which moved my thought process to the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, particularly the first poem – Inferno, which takes Dante through the 9 circles of hell. The fourth circle is greed, headed by the Greek god of wealth – Plutus.

For my Piece I chose to recreate a dollar bill, a symbol of money and wealth – with iconography of the sin. The face on the bill is Plutus himself, with golden eyes representing wealth being all that he sees, wearing a fur coat and surrounded by gold. I also included a twist on the common phrase ‘In God We Trust’ which is found on the American Dollar Bill, changing the word God to Greed – showing how the people who would be found on this particular circle of hell would have given up God in favour of money. The note itself if bordered with a greek pattern, harkening back to Plutus’ origins as a Greek God.

I am quite disappointed with the piece as a whole, I feel the concept had room for a strong piece but my execution was weak – hindered by poor time management and inexperience with the medium which I had chosen to try something new.

"Those whose attitude toward material goods deviated from the appropriate mean are punished in the fourth circle. They include the avaricious or miserly (including many "clergymen, and popes and cardinals"), who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. The two groups are guarded by a figure Dante names as Pluto, either Pluto the classical ruler of the underworld or Plutus the Greek god of wealth (who uses the cryptic phrase Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe), but Virgil protects Dante from him. The two groups joust, using as weapons great weights which they push with their chests:

… I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?

The contrast between these two groups leads Virgil to discourse on the nature of Fortune, who raises nations to greatness, and later plunges them into poverty, as she shifts "those empty goods from nation unto nation, clan to clan." This speech fills what would otherwise be a gap in the poem, since both groups are so absorbed in their activity that Virgil tells Dante that it would be pointless to try to speak to them – indeed, they have lost their individuality, and been rendered "unrecognizable" (Canto VII)."

- The Fourth Circle of Hell (via Wikipedia )