City Arts

Kuball (section)

Mischa Kuball (b. 1959 in Düsseldorf) lives in Düsseldorf and has held the Chair of Media Art: Holography and light art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne (Academy of Design) in Karlsruhe since October 2007. His exploration of architectural and spatial structures began back in 1980 with cutouts and collages on cardboard.

But he has long since forsaken solid supports for his images and turned to a phenomenal material that spans vast distances with ease, can be seen from afar, and thus therefore serves as an excellent means of public communication: light.
This article focuses on Kuball’s temporary works with a view to getting closer to the artist and his medium.

Megazeichen, Düsseldorf, 1990

Mannesmann had never looked more stunning. The corporation’s 23-storey Düsseldorf building shone forth in semiotic signs far into the big city night. The façade, which by day donned an outer skin of endless window squares on its rectangular frame, reconfigurated by night into gleaming horizontal and vertical stripes of light in keeping with its visual rhythm. The technical means to that effect were strikingly simple: for six weeks the lights were left on at night in certain offices and corridors in the highrise. The illuminated windows combined to form Megazeichen, or “Megasigns”, hence the title of this 1990 project, which is now history, as is Mannesmann itself. For in the year 2000, after its most successful business year on record, the group lost its spectacular battle to take over the British telecom giant Vodafone.

Megazeichen

That for a brief spell Megazeichen had the power to turn a hub of business interests into something quite different says a lot about the art of Mischa Kuball. Like other artists of his generation, he keeps his art out of the museums. Much of his work is temporary – and thrust smack into the public realm. Its potential lies in public discussion, in the social, political, ethical domains, as Peter Weibel puts it in his essay on Kuball . The art of Mischa Kuball does not use solid materials, but light – artificial light. In essence a technological medium propagated through space both as an electromagnetic wave and as a stream of particles, at the same speed as optical waves. So everything visible in this world is connected to light. The artist works with these physical properties – as well as with the urban night in city streets and public squares, the shadows and darkness of interiors, to make connections visible by means of illumination.

Greenlight, Montevideo, 1999

A light above the entrance to a house can mark the presence of its inhabitants. The light shines for them. In the Calle Democracia in Montevideo, Uruguay, Kuball mounted simple green building-site lamps above the door frames of derelict walled-up buildings along the street. The surrounding neighbourhood, Barrio Reus, was a hub of Jewish immigration in the 20th century. At dusk the row of green lights would create an irrational effect against the crumbling façades, against sinking back into the oblivion of history.

Peepout (Leerstand), Leipzig, 1994

Light Bridge

A light beam can bridge the distance from one side of the street to the other. In Leipzig, Kuball directed two searchlights from an inhabited flat at the uninhabited flat across the way. The light cones made the absence of occupants glaringly apparent. In the aftermath of the end of East Germany, this was a symbol of the upheavals that occurred there, outside and inside four walls. In Leipzig empty dilapidated dwellings became objects of financial speculation that brought, for some of the new owners, not profits, but ruin.

The association of light with awareness or realization is nothing new, indeed it takes us back to the foundations of Western thought – and faith. From the philosophy of antiquity to this day, light has been a metaphor for the cognitive phenomena of mental perception and insight. And ever since the age of the aptly named Enlightenment we have attached ever greater importance to these processes of the mind.

Zwei Abendräume für Köln 2006 (cooperation project in St. Peter’s and St. Cecilia’s/Schnütgenmuseum)

Ever since the birth of Christ the light that shines forth out of the night and the darkness has been associated in Western religion with such metaphysical phenomena of faith as revelations and epiphanies. Architectural masterpieces like the Hagia Sophia or Chartres were erected in this spirit, which is likewise manifest in every other church edifice of the Middle Ages. Medieval Christians considered the apse, the semicircle enclosing the altar, the most sacred place of all, the very specific site of the presence of God. That is why this part of the church was the brightest, illuminated by the greatest number of windows.

Book cover

In the Gothic church of St. Peter (built from 1513), Kuball placed four slide projectors, rotating in the same and opposite directions, in front of the apse on the ground floor and in the gallery. The projectors’ discrete vertical and horizontal light beams “groped” their way around the church, intersecting for a few moments to form a great cross of light. Kuball thus turned the place of faith into an ongoing endeavour to locate faith. In the silence of the church, the mechanical light produced by means of science and technology took on the function of a search beacon. Not all the fundamental problems of existence have been solved or resolved by rational thought since the Enlightenment. Much as modern, enlightened man may doubt or even negate the world view of faith, his search still goes on for a confrontation with God.

Mischa Kuball: ...in progress. Projects 1980-2007. Ed. Florian Matzner. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007; in German/English, ISBN 978-3-7757-1926-1