Metatext, 2017, Installation view Altes Gefängnis, Wittenberg / © Archive Mischa Kuball, Düsseldorf
Metatext, 2017
"Mischa Kuball's monitor presents elements of a lively and highly complex philosophical discourse, in which Martin Luther's contribution takes part as an important voice and meets discussants such as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the art theoretician Felix Ensslin. Fundamental questions are dealt with here, including those concerning the concepts of truth, law and justice, freedom and subjectivity.
Mischa Kuball's work makes parts of this discourse visible for a new readership. As an artist, he does not participate in the discourse, although, through his formal transmission and compaction, he underscores its continuing importance and topicality. The intellectual exchange of the participants can be experienced as a lively process; the reader / viewer is invited to get involved and become a participant in the exchange. In Kuball's work, the originally written, imaginary discourse between Luther, Lacan and Ensslin - three thinkers from three different historical periods - is translated into a lively simultaneity, which becomes the viewer's / reader's present.
Just as the effects of works of art are dependent upon the arctive involvement of a viewer, any intellectual exchange of ideas is also depent upon participants who can take up and continue the line of argument. Kuball conceived his work for an electronic medium that is capable of visualising the activity of the discourse. At the same time, because of its technical prerequisites, this medium is also implicitly dependent upon active participation: when the equipment is turned off, the dialogue can no longer take place." (by Kay Heymer in: Luther und die Avantgarde, ed. by Walter Smerling, 2017, p. 186)
Exhibition history
2017
Luther und die Avantgarde,19.05.-31.10.2017, Altes Gefängnis Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Wittenberg /DE