In collaboration with Charles Lane, Gregory T. Kuhn, John Anderson, Yauger Williams, Steven Allen, and Fernando Mares
"Here are the memories of the ruins of their beliefs." - Jean Cocteau
After four turbulent years serving the President, Secretary-at-Large Randall M. Packer of the US Department of Art & Technology took back the Department and made it his own. With the spectre of Orf as his guide (who bears witness to deteriorating conditions of the human spirit), the Secretary-at-Large declared a season in bell and began a perilous journey tracking the descent of post-apocalyptic America. The epic narrative culminates in the depths of the Other World, where Empire runs its course.
A Season in Hell is an allegorical descent into the hidden terrors, self-imposed demons, and amorphous culture of fear in the aftermath of 9/11. In my doppelgänger role as the Secretary-at-Large of the US Department of Art & Technology, I have positioned myself as an “artist-reporter,” tracking the mysterious, disturbing, and often perplexing trajectory of contemporary culture through a portrait of America as an underworld of turmoil and crisis. The work draws its influences from Arthur Rimbaud’s epic poem, A Season in Hell, Dante’s depiction of the doomed in the Inferno, and the legend of Orpheus, who transgresses the boundaries between life and death.
The Rupture
Once, if I remember well, I held Utopian Aspirations for the role of the artist on the world stage, I saw America transformed through revolutionary artistic thought, inspired by the avant-garde, Government revised, through techniques of media and virtualization...
Inauguration of Death [video]
I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope in this Hellish place. The nation's Capital has been transformed into a mighty walled fortress, armed to the teeth, locked-down, swept-clean - all joy has been strangled - on any suspicion, they would pounce with the stealth of a wild beast.
America's Grave
America’s Grave is a symbolic burial site for the nation. The media image represents the last remains of the corporeal body of America. Six video monitors display imagery and sound from broadcast television, corresponding to six circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: (1) Sowers of Discord (Bill O’Reilly); (2) Violent Against Their Neighbors (War on Terror); (3) Traffickers in Holiness (Tele-evangelists); (4) Profiteers of the People (Hurricane Katrina); (5) Falsifiers of Commodification (TV advertising); (6) Traitors Against Their Own (Bush Administration).
State of the Union: the Fateful Embrace [video]
The remix of President George W. Bush's 2005 State of the Union speech is set to Richard Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, a tale of two lovers who suffer a fateful embrace with love and death. In Bush's speech, a mother whose son died in the Iraq War embraces an Iraqi woman who had just voted in the recent election. It is an equally fateful moment of love and death staged in the grand theater of American politics.
Orf
We have entered a season in hell. No one knows exactly when it began or when it will be over.
My job is to sing about it, like the canary at the bottom of the coal mine, a warning that if we do not awake –escape from this dark tunnel: a labyrinth of lies crawling with untruths, the gases will kill us slowly imperceptibly one by one...
Orf 's Descent [video]
In this excerpt, Orf engages the speed and power of the aircraft, a weapon of mass destruction in the 21st century, singing: “swing low, sweet chariot coming for to carry me home,” evoking the extremist allure of the afterlife.
Fort Qualls, Crawford TX
Gary Qualls, backed up by a legion of fired-up locals defiantly declared, "how dare you bring your pitiful and unjust protest into my backyard of Texas and the front yard of President George W. Bush."
Orf's Immolation
Orf's Immoloation was an ambitious artistic response mobilization at Mardi Gras to contront deteriorating social and political conditions in Amerca that led to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. An immolation was staged by Orf at Jackson Square following a multimedia walk-through of the French Quarter. Images of the hurricane and its aftermath were projected on the caped figure of Orf while he sang classic American songs of defiance, catharsis and rebirth.
Religion of the Lie: Orf's Baptism
Orf emerges in Georgia, the deep South, on All Hallow's eve, one of the liminal ritualistic times of the year when the spiritual world makes contact with the physical world and magic is most poent. Orf speaks with the souls buried in the Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery, to engage them in the dangers of religious fundamentalism. He conducts a spectactacular Baptism, washing away the magisterial propaganda and seductive twists of scripture.
A Season in Hell [preview]
This preview of a Season in Hell chronicles the descent into American culture, tracking its hidden terrors and self-imposed demons, an Underworld of turmoil and crisis. Orf completes his journey to the lowest depths of America.
see also: seasoninhell.com