This is the fifteenth in a series of thirteen Proclamations, Declamations, and Obfuscations by the Hi Pleest, Qfoydlhe G'KO. This deals with the artBLATTTic hBLATTTory of MU.
To understand the true nature of MU, you have to understand something of art history. In 2012, a brilliant young Trinidadian artist named Gary O'Bannon revolutionized the history of art forever, with repercussions which lasted from today, all the way to ancient Greece. O'Bannon's school of art, Neo-Trans-Post-Post-Modernism, was a complete rethinking of the Trans-Post-Post-Modernism of the early twenty-first century.
While Post-Post-Modernism transcended the experiments of Post-Modernism by revealing that the nonlinear and subjective visions were merely part of a greater transcendent scheme in which the subjective and objective were intermingled, and Trans-Post-Post-Modernism revised both views by commingling them in a new dialectic which reconciled Platonism and Formalism and presented a view of the universe which was complete, incomplete, neither and both, while transcending all four possibilities in a fifth, bizarrely incomprehensible precept, Gary O'Bannon's Neo-Trans-Post-Post-Modernism revitalized this concept with the understanding that since Formalism and Idealism were reconciled, then ideas about the world and the world itself were identical, or at the very least intermingled, and the experiments of conceptual art could be applied to entities in the real world, while simultaneously observing, in an almost classically Post-Modern metalogical twist, that the school of art itself could be the entity which was the subject both of those very experimental techniques it itself dealt with, and an extraordinarily long and convoluted sentence not entirely unlike this one.
Neo-Trans-Post-Post-Modernism was the final dissolution of the barriers between Art and Reality, and was one of its own first subjects. In an experimental work of Reality entitled "MOO", O'Bannon abandoned the concept of Linear Time. MOO was a resurgence of Neo-Trans-Post-Post-Modernist Revivalism in the late twentieth century. It was an experimental reality peice which won O'Bannon the coveted Golden Apple at Vanuatu's celebrated Earth-Sun-Moon Conceptual-Art Festival in January 2018.
Gary O'Bannon's detractors (including O'Bannon himself) claimed that he had not, in fact, made the change to history at all. They claimed that he simply told everyone he had: a merely Post-Modern, and somewhat cliche concept. This document is proof to the contrary.
Gary "Yari" O'Bannon was one of the great visionaries of his age. He knew that creating yet ANOTHER school of art would be the seed of a fruitless tree. Instead, "Yari" O'Bannon sought the fruit of a tree which predates time itself, the Tree Of Life.
At the Earth-Sun-Moon Festival, accepting the Golden Apple award, O'Bannon gave a little speech which left some of the brightest and most eccentric artists of the twenty-first centuries scratching their heads. Since he was never seen again after that speech, it is worth relating a little of what he said.
He said that the universe is made of language: a very high-order language which has been called the Logos. All Art is a pale imitation of the Logos, he said, in which the artist uses an inferior tool, and attempts to create a new reality. This invariably fails because artists use inadequate tools.
O'Bannon viewed our universe as a work of art which was its own creator, and in which he himself was a brushstroke, gear, or paragraph. O'Bannon saw his life as a kind of Post-Modern experiment in Reality: he denounced his own school of Art as phony and pompous. Some parts of the canvas, he said, are just a little more like an Escher woodcut than a Rembrandt. Some chapters are a little more like Finnegan's Wake* than Robinson Crusoe.
He told the artists that they had a sacred duty, which was to increase the scope of their works. He saw the world as the only Infinite Work possible, and dedicated his life to what he termed the "Interpenetration". This was a kind of self-referential process in Reality which gave access to higher and higher logical levels, a process of continual outward expansion from a relatively "fictional" level into a relatively "true" level, and so on, like Escher's self-drawing hands.
He referred to H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, and theirattempts to bring the reader into touch with the Unknowable. There is always an Unknowable, he claimed, and that is the purpose of Art: to make the Unknowable known, and find the Unknowable beyond that. To tear back the Veils of Maya, and not to create more of them.
At the end of his relatively short speech, he cast up his hands in the air and screamed "Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" Witnesses report that at this point he simply stopped moving. After ten or twenty seconds, members of the audience approached him, and discovered that what they had taken for Gary O'Bannon was in fact a supernaturally delicate structure of coloured glass filaments sculpted to look like Gary O'Bannon. The sculpture disintegrated at the sligtest touch, and O'Bannon was never seen again.
Oddly, a search of records revealed that there had never been anyone named Gary O'Bannon. The participants in the Earth-Sun-Moon Festival were received with skepticism, since no such festival had ever been scheduled in the reception hall they claimed to have rented. They were eventually diagnosed as suffering from a rare disease known as O'Bannon's disease, a type of brain tumor in the frontal lobes which causes highly detailed and conceptually complex hallucinations.
Eventually, they all lost the ability to understand the language spoken by those around them, and communicated to each other by means of elaborately woven patterns in thin leather strips. Each swayed softly to some inner music, locked in mental institutions, until gradually they were all revealed to be intricate clockwork automata, and not human beings at all.
The case was eventually explained away as a remarkably clever hoax, and dropped.
O'Bannon's greatest works in Neo-Trans-Post-Post-Modernist Art were his social works. Political parties, religions, and even more decentralized social institutions such as attitudes and cultural mores became his canvas during the mid 'teens.
This was the work which led to "Yari" O'Bannon's meisterwork, in which he sought to reverse the usual trends in art.
Normally, O'Bannon explained, an artist is influenced by the history and art of the culture in which he works. Gary O'Bannon wanted to break free of his culture - the endless Neo-Gruadian rehashings of late Atlantean art, the cheap derivatives of Hastur and Yaldaboath. Instead, he claimed, he would invent a new culture, an entire cultural, geographical, and political history of the world for artists to be influenced by.
Starting with the discovery of fire, through the highly implausible "Greece", and the brilliantly unorthodox "Renaissance", Gary O'Bannon created an entire fictional history of the world. It was in this social structure that he set his later, lesser opus, MOO.
O'Bannon's characteristic touches in his imaginary world included the patently absurd "Realist" art forms such as photography, and the curiously self-referential touch of making himself a fictional character in a peculiar post-modern experiment.
The broad, sweeping implications of O'Bannon's artistic influence have yet to be fully realized, but affect us to this day.