Mischa Kuball uses light as his signature medium. With it, he plays with contrasting ideas of image and symbol, the sacred and profane, power and powerlessness. In "Hitler's Cabinet" (1990) he uses the medium to probe historical archives and intellectual theories while he distorts physical structures and transforms stylistic references. Curiously, Kuball's continuing obsession with light for the exploration of intellectual theories and representational images has been associated with two opposed influences. On the one, the artist's historical outlook reflects back to earlier, utopian histories, for example, the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century or the Bauhaus of the early twentieth. On the other, Kuball alludes to the potential of light for the display of sculptural and political might, as under the Nazis. In this case, Albert's Speer's infamous, blinding, nevertheless awesome "Dome of Light" of 1937 is a particular example, as is the use of the intense light as both symbols in and strategies for Nazi architecture. Speer's overwhelming spectacle serves as the quintessence of what Walter Benjamin called "aestheticized politics." Kuball plays with the inevitable, paradoxical connection between these two strikingly opposed political and social ideologies. Rather than offer standard lessons about the social potential of one or the moral failure of the other, he shows how inextricably they are connected.
Cruciform in shape and large in scale, "Hitler's Cabinet" hugs the gallery floor. At first glance, its solid, industrial shape reminds one of the muscular and emotionally distant works of such Minimalist artists as Carl Andre and Richard Serra. Yet the humble materials Kuball uses, the reflected images, and the meanings of the symbolic forms in which the materials are configured contrast markedly with the hardness, heft, and hermetic, non-representational nature of Minimalism. Indeed, Kuball refers to his Minimalist predecessors, yet he seeks to inject purpose and content into Minimalism's ahistoricism. He uses slide projections that teach historical lessons, continuing an avant-garde tradition of installation and performance that critiques art-historical didacticism. Here one thinks of Robert Morris's renowned "21.3" of 1964, in which Morris masqueraded as the eminent German refugee art historian Erwin Panofsky mimicking a tape of "Iconography and Iconology", or of Dennis Oppenheim's installation of a puppet teaching a class.
Kuball's crosslike shape is made of inexpensive pressed wood, unpainted and unadorned. Each of the four ends of the cross is pierced with rectangular openings, through which 35-millimeter slides are projected onto the floor. Creating ghostlike, fan-shaped forms, these splayed images are stills from German films of the 1920s and 1930s. When lit, the stills transform the pressed-wood cross into a swastika; the durable industrial sculpture becomes an environment that performs electrically. These still photographs visually re-create Siegfried Kracauer's famous 1947 psychosocial history of German cinema "From Caligari to Hitler." According to Kracauer, the films made between the end of World War I and the election of Hitler set the stage for Nazism. Kracauer, a German-Jewish refugee historian, saw the aspirations and fears, the psychological frailties and political struggles of the German people, encoded in a wide range of German films. For example, he claimed that movies like Paul Wegener's "Student of Prague" demonstrated the insecurities of the foundations of self and that Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari glorified authority connected with madness. According to Kracauer, such manifestations of the German psyche would make the average German easily susceptible by Nazi propaganda, losing the ability to make sound moral judgments. In Kracauer's observations, many productions showed German traits of chauvinism, Romanticism, nationalism, and, ultimately, preference for tyranny over chaos. Thomas Elsaesser has thoughtfully outlined the pitfalls of Kracauer's postwar theoretical position: "he fill[s] gaps, smooth[es] out the narrative logic, invert[s] the causal chains, level[s] off intensities…and den[ies] ambiguities." Elsaesser shows how, according to a large corpus of feminist critiques, Kracauer's history could be easily be deconstructed as "phallocentric versions of politics and history."
The slide projectors in each of the four arms of Kuball's environment continually project the range of images that frame German cinema during the period between the wars. Kuball's projections are distorted and tinted an eerie shade of blue. They fan out in megaphone shape as if to trumpet the meanings Kracauer has so forcefully assigned them. On the surface they show Kracauer's theory as a constant parade of representations. One could say that Kuball's sculpture, or teaching machine, simply performs Kracauer's lesson in the gallery - that the symbols, images, and implications Kracauer found in German film between the wars equals the swastika, the symbol of Nazism. Kuball is certainly too well read, too critically astute, and too sculpturally playful to wish his installation to present such a straightforward confirmation. The artist makes us hyperconscious that - without text - the images are an archive, no more, no less: a highly specific mode of organizing representations that Allan Sekula has dubbed a "territory of images." By simply looking at the images, the viewer of this revolving archive must search for the clues through which Kracauer has orchestrated his brilliant, if now dated, transformation of culture into politics. Kuball's second-generation sculptural transformation of the hard cross into the more fleeting symbol of the swastika is a metaphor for the direct, deductive nature of Kracauer's synthetic narrative. In the deadpan flash of images and the seemingly easy transposition of one solid symbol with impermanent other, we note the artist's implied critique of the sociologist's forced interpretation. The artificiality of these contorted slides, and the fact they are projected onto the less worthy realm of the gallery floor (instead of the privileged space of the gallery walls), make us wary of the reliability of the meanings that have been assigned to them. Do we really see the Nazi future in these films, or does Kuball help us reenact the dark, sinister forms and symbols as they appeared to Kracauer's eyes? In fact, Kuball helps us unmask the larger issue Allan Sekula has observed about the way archives are often distorted as they are deployed: "In an archive, the possibility of meaning is 'liberated' from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, the loss of context."
Transgressive here is the way Kuball uses the images of film stills to transform his cruciform shape into a swastika, a symbol today forbidden by German law. Devious is the way it can be turned on and off. Kuball uses light to create this highly charged, illegal image that can be obliterated merely by pulling the plug.