1987 « DIE ANWEISUNG » BLN-WEST (DE)

DIE ANWEISUNG (the Instruction)

Fresco on billboard BERLIN, July 1987

The vision before the collapse …

July 1987. The Berlin Wall is 26 years old. It seems eternal, indestructible. No one imagines that it will fall in two and a half years. Experts promise decades of stability. The division of Berlin is an established fact, a political obviousness.
Yet, on this billboard in West Berlin, a classic temple is already leaning to the brink. The columns of the ancient order are losing their aplomb. Fire and water, elementary and uncontrollable forces, carry away the architecture of power. Nothing that is imposed by force can last forever. The structures that seem the most solid already carry within them the forces of their own dissolution.

Intuition is in nothing mystical, it is an intelligence of the living. It arises from a particular attention to the real, an attention that does not pass through reasoning but through sensitivity, the senses, a form of silent knowledge. The person accumulates impressions: the looks of passersby, the palpable tension, the unspoken, the hesitant gestures. The body records what the mind has not yet formulated. When I paint this temple that collapsed in 1987, I don’t «know» that the Wall will fall. But something in me perceives the instability, the fragility hidden under an appearance of strength. Intuition is this ability to synthesize a thousand imperceptible details into an image: the leaning temple. It sees before reason understands. It is a faster, more global form of intelligence that captures the sets where logic breaks down. Quantum physics today reveals to us what art has always anticipated: reality is not made of solid and separate blocks. Everything is interconnection, fields of forces, invisible resonances. The particles communicate instantly despite distances.
Complex systems exist under multiple states until one of them manifests.  Intuition works this way: it perceives the fields of possibilities before they crystallize into events. It captures what circulates in silence, how fear, weariness, stifled hope weave together a web that already ‘knows’ where it is going, even if no one can yet name it. In 1987, the Wall existed both as concrete evidence and as a possibility of collapse. The two realities coexisted. The visible one, official, proclaimed. The other underground, in germination, foreseen only by those who listened otherwise, trusted weak signals, subtle resonances, what the body knows before the head understood.

November 1989: the temple falls for real. What was anticipated becomes visible. Intuition, like an antenna, was right before the facts proved it right, as one feels the storm before it breaks out, as some animals feel the earthquake before the instruments. This ephemeral fresco, photographed between two cars coming from the East and the West, shows that another look is possible. A look that goes through appearances. Which perceives the future in gestation. Who trusts the silent intelligence of the body and sensitivity.

DIE ANWEISUNG event organized by Gero Gries and Christian Kuhn, brought together 152 artists in the public space of Berlin, 150 billboards, 8 double-decker buses transformed into mobile galleries. Art came out of museums to face the real: the noise, the hurried glances, the comments of the public and this vision waited for the real to join it.