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
© All rights reserved by the author.