Ulrich Krempel

Mischa Kuball

TOWER OF POWER

 

THE TOWER over 60 feet high: the brewery buildings grouped in functional

harmony, harbouring the brewers‘ coppers, and permitting full view from

top to bottom, and from bottom to top. The fermentation vessels are

accessible over their entire height via the large stairway, an architectural

creation in its own right and already the venue of many an exhibition in

the past. lt is the focal point of the production process, the edifice that stands

out most within a complex of many different functional buildings. The exterior

of the tower bears little more than a reference to the installation inside; not

until one enters the tower Is one confronted by its redesignation, from basement

to attic. The media are light, movement, sound, projected images, ever changing,

refracting, disintegrating images; Mischa Kuball combines them into a new,

all-embracing unity:

the Tower of Power.

 

WALKING UP AND DOWN the stairs, the visitor gradually experiences the

installation. On each level he can move around in the adjoining rooms; everything

is redefined, indeed, everything is going through a constant process of redefinition,

becoming experienceable in an ever different way, and yet the visitor cannot grasp

he connection as a whole, only the individual aspects. Not until one experience has been

added to the next does the visitor gradually come to comprehend this rededicated

building as an installation. The individual rooms, each differently conceived, play

with light, with moving light, with projections of known and alienated imagos,

with quotations from the history of art, with elementary, fragmentary texts. The city,

though physically absent from the tower, is likewise omnipresent through images and

quotations. Language, as ‘one of the fundamental social codes‘, plays a dominant

role in the installation. The sounds are an organized interplay of the tower‘s resident

noises: “Constant fermentation takes place in the vessels, a fundamental tone

which is perceptible as a slight vibration.“ N-Tribe (Harald Grosskopf/ Steve Baltes)

have taken up this tone, modifled it and commented upon it in their composition. Just

as Mischa Kuball accentuates the installation with pictures and imagos, constantly

modifying our perception through the rapid changes and movements of light,

N-Tribe (Harald Grosskopf/Steve Baltes) operate in the realm of sounds. The

movements of the viewers, the movements of the projections, the movements of

the light and the complementary sounds are the elements which essentially constitute

our experience of the installation.

 

THIS BOOK documents the installation, its individual sections, its individual

elements. Like the tower, whose exterior announces the installation, the book‘s

cover refers briefly to the contents. The text is right here, precisely where your eyes

have at this very moment come to rest. And from here I refer you to the inside pages

of the book for further elucidation and documentation, for the ultimate, complete

experience. Make your way through the installation with this book under your arm!

Or, once you have viewed the installation, open the book after reading this text.

So please turn over now!

 

 

in: Mischa Kuball: Tower of Power. 1998

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