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“Tomorrow”
Original painting:
The Candidate, Wolfgang Lettl (1996)
From Google (which apparently has an arts and culture section now?!): “In his speech, “Power, Beauty, and the Worm”, of April 3, 2003, Wolfgang Lettl put into words his thoughts about the painting, “The Candidate”:
Four anonymous male figures are attempting to erect an oversized “flat companion”. How he is to stay upright remains to be considered. Further back, in the red sky of dawn, there is a man from a clearly bygone time, bidding farewell to it. For the old patriarchal and feudal social orders are no longer suitable or working; technical and scientific progress and the resulting inevitably dramatic social upheavals call for adaptation, for a new image of the human being.
You would be mistaken to assume that I was guided by this theme in designing the painting, “The Candidate”, or that in the midst of a parliamentary election campaign I had been trying to show how such a candidate is being built up, his profile and face finally being moulded for maximum media impact which includes the matching discreet tie. No, I don’t want to be malicious, that would be quite inappropriate. I painted the picture as early as 1996, after all. What I was interested in was something quite different.
Painting’s primary purpose is not to depict an event or a fact; instead it carries its own purpose within itself, like the other arts. What counts are composition and colours, harmony and the play of shapes. There is, for instance, the delight of multiple opposites between the candidate and the group of men: One big one – four small ones, one rigid one – four living ones, etc. That the gentleman from Napoleonic times in the background has an important compositional function may be determined easily by simply covering him up. It then becomes clear how badly he would be missing if he were not there. Nor would we be ourselves without our past.
That a painting should also have a conceptual meaning is therefore not the initial intention of my work, but my experience, and I cannot give you a reason for it, has been that formal soundness will in the end also result in conceptual soundness, that form and content cover each other because one truth cannot contradict the other. The artist’s starting point is not reason but intuition, and my Dictionary of Foreign Words lists under intuition: “inner perception without the aid of reason”, or “immediate emotional understanding of what is essential”.”
The whole “Power, Beauty, and the Worm” speech is here: http://www.lettl.de/reden/macht.php
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Tomorrow could really mean a lot of things here. I took it as ominous at first, but it could really be anything.
Working with the painting though, I was wondering whether we’re going to end up walking away from the facade tomorrow or the facade will be allowed to fall. Lettl mentions that the “flat companion” can’t stay up on his own even if the figures in the painting manage to stand him up. Maybe OSDM has grown tired of holding up these walls, or as A said on Slack the other day, they’re done with us. I would hazard a guess that we’re more important to them than that though.
Another possibility is that we’re going to be the ones left to hold up the facade. More and more people have ended up with bits and pieces of information over the last few weeks. Maybe it was a test run to see how we do supporting OSDM and maintaining their fronts.
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Working with the painting though, I was wondering whether we’re going to end up walking away from the facade tomorrow or the facade will be allowed to fall.
I don’t know if I’m thrilled or terrified at this second option, but that’s where my head is at as well. I’ve posited a couple of times that everything that’s happened since we found out Joyce Carlberg was alive can be read as pulling back the curtain: glimpses that reveal every single step on this journey has been a lie and a manipulation.
The sense of betrayal and injustice that would come with confirming such a thing sure would make for an interesting chapter break.
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“…glimpses that reveal every single step on this journey has been a lie and a manipulation.”
I would be seriously surprised if we see anything other than exactly what they want us to see. More steps, more reveals, all part of a greater plan that we don’t understand. Whatever happens tomorrow is probably going to shake a couple more pieces from the tree, but we still don’t know what kind of tree we are standing under.
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I would be seriously surprised if we see anything other than exactly what they want us to see.
Agreed. I don’t think anything we’re being shown is by accident, any more than I believe any of these “leaks” or anything else over the last 18 months have been accidental. But what else have we seen? That the illusion of pulling back a curtain is an effective way to keep the masses quiet, fed, and happy while they still remain under someone else’s control.
We may learn nuggets of truth at various points, but it won’t because we’re in control or anything. Control is a lie and an illusion. And in the right circumstances, it’s a very useful one.
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