Kara Uzelman
Sommer & Kohl, Berlin, Germany
Kara Uzelman, 'The Cavorist Projects', installation at Sommer & Kohl, Berlin, 2009
Dr. Joseph Cavor was the scientist hero of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon. The Cavorist Projects (2009) is a site-specific installation by Canadian artist Kara Uzelman. While the former discovered a miraculous anti-gravity element, named it Cavorite and used it to build a homemade space-vehicle, the latter is devoted to an imaginary movement of acolytes who followed in Cavor’s starry wake.
Uzelman’s installation is nominally made up of the contraptions and detritus left behind by successive generations of this movement in the course of their researches. The dominant items are sculptures, but the installation also includes photographs, a video work, and an assorted collection of documents. These huddle together into one corner of the room, in a sort of altar-archive hybrid.
The contents of this corner (collectively named Cavorist Archive, 2009) are sprawling and various. Small tsotchke-like pieces – a Canadian dollar, a matchbook-sized sarcophagus filled with dice, a whistle, a kind of toy horseshoe and a glass jar filled with hair – rest on a cloth-bound copy of Nikola Tesla’s autobiography, turned to the chapter ‘The Art of Telautomatics’. Pinned to the wall, an illegibly signed hand-written letter reports that researches are entering a critical stage. Nearby, a title page snipped from the Wells novel salutes the Cavorists’ illustrious inspiration while another page taken from G.H. Dury’s forgotten book of cartography The Face of Earth (1916) bears a skilled pencil portrait of anarchist ‘Red’ Emma Goldman. ‘If we wanted, we could change the face of the Earth,’ reads the slogan on a hand-drawn circus poster.
Uzelman’s mixed-media corner shows how diverse materials – apparently sourced from garage sales – can be rendered coherent by means of a strong central narrative. Stretched between science and fiction, in this case the tale is recounted in Cavorist terms, though the structure of the story seems more general. A mythologized founding father; a utopian quest for a philosopher’s stone – it is hard not to hear echoes here of some of the other ideological isms which animated the twentieth century.
Uzelman’s sculptures also sound these echoes. In the centre of the room, a cone of magnetized metal (Magnetic Stalactite, 2009) hangs from the gallery’s ceiling. Individual components include metal spoons, forks and coins. Framed photographs on the wall (for example, Centre for Research, Observation and Technology – Cavorist Settlement, Yukon, 1993, 2009) document expeditions and field-work. A cheap television set, resting on a wooden log, plays a flickering video (An Outline of the Cavorist Universe, Volume 1, 2009) and pumps eerie music into the room. Nearby, two stained glass vitrines (Observation Tank A and Observation Tank B, 2009), the neck of one stuffed with twigs and the other with fabric, register the existence of obscure experiments. The feel of these pieces is occult and cargo-cultish. The magnetic stalactite suggests everyday life swirling around a charged central well, while the use of natural materials elsewhere gives off a bricolagical quality. The photographs record how stories can act to propel their partisans to the end of the earth. In all cases, the main point seems to be that quixotic enterprises organize collectives around them.
The final sculpture in the exhibition is an old-style reel-to-reel recording device, attached to an apparently non-functional microphone. The device comes loaded with a tape – an interview with quackish anti-gravity researcher John Hutchison, recounting outlandish stories of government interference and military surveillance. The tape seems to have been treated, and swiftly degenerates into dubby echos and abstract noise. The elusive Cavorite possessed anti-gravitational properties; the search for Cavorite was anti-entropic – and entropy always wins. A project that starts in earnest austerity descends into magic tricks, like the magnetic shoes (Magnetic Shoes, 2009) that Uzelman has climbing the radiator.
Daniel Miller
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