Mechanical conifers

"Yeah, I guess I am a pyromaniac," artist Kal Spelletich says with a smile.

Whether in the form of a fire-spitting tree or a pine tree swinging around the room, the omnipresent and perpetual menace caused by technological advances is one of the salient themes of Spelletich's fascinating body of work. The artist is presenting a group of his technological-organic hybrid sculptures in the exhibition "Machines Without a Cause" at MeetFactory.

"Our culture has made an excruciatingly dangerous and arrogant claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature, claiming that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us," he says. "I feel compelled to do something, to pay homage to the perfectness of the natural world. 'So,' I thought, 'Why not start in my backyard with trees?' And yet, I try and show something ominous is happening."

A demonstration of the pyro antics Spelletich is known for opened the show with a bang, when first Spelletich and then Czech artist and MeetFactory founder David Černý repeatedly hit a button that set off a series of fiery bursts from a flame-thrower mounted above a desiccated Christmas tree suspended from the ceiling. As the flames shot out, in perilous proximity to both the dried tree and the gallery's electrical wiring, Černý looked like a little boy with an exciting new toy. It is precisely the kind of audience engagement that Spelletich hopes to bring about with his interactive art.

Technology, its role in our lives and its role in nature are at the root of Spelletich's interactive sculptures. Springing from a punk-Dada DIY aesthetic and backed by the artist's solid mechanical skills, Spelletich's work also harks back to the tradition of kinetic sculpture started nearly a century ago by Marcel Duchamp. Most of Spelletich's pieces require direct action by the viewer to set them in motion.

Born in 1960 in Davenport, Iowa, and permanently based in San Francisco since 1989, Spelletich is in Prague for three months as part of MeetFactory's artist residency program. Typically, he obtains materials to build his mad-scientist inventions from junkyards and dumpsters, also mining the surrounding Silicon Valley for cast-off technology that can be put to new uses. He came to Prague with a suitcase full of motors and planned to find all other materials locally. When he arrived in mid-January, discarded Christmas trees were plentiful and were a logical material for him, since he works extensively with trees.

The mechanical conifers in the show invoke a discourse about technology run amok. Cut from their roots, used for a brief time and then heedlessly discarded, and, in the case of Arbor Aeronautics, consuming instead of producing life-giving oxygen as combustion is triggered, Spelletich's post-industrial, post-nature hybrids speak about contemporary throwaway society and the dangers of messing with Mother Nature.

Apart from the piece titled Mercurial Aeronautics - a small, dry Christmas tree helplessly fettered in red tinsel and lying forlornly on its side near the entrance to the show (yes, there is an anthropomorphic element to some of the pieces) - all the sculptures in the show can be activated in some way. With a pressed button or a flipped switch, the passive element in art viewing disappears and viewers become engaged in a very immediate way, becoming co-creators in a sense.

Trees appear throughout the exhibition. Next to the fire-breathing Arbor Aeronautics is the more subtle Barnstormer, consisting of a ladder with a pair of large lateral branches, moving up and down like wings when a button is pressed. Appearing like a giant mechanical bird or angel, the sculpture's proximity to the flamethrower also calls to mind the fate of Icarus.

Root Hurricane is a motorized tree root that spins at high velocity, exuberantly sweeping green paint from a basin onto the white gallery wall at the flip of a switch. Visitors are thereby creating a continually changing drip painting on the gallery wall, coupled with the fun of making the kind of mess your parents would never let you make at home. This piece is a maquette for a future 40-foot tree sculpture.

In the back room of the gallery, Flying Tree orbits the room with an onboard wireless video camera. The footage captured by the orbiting Christmas tree, including the reactions and movements of viewers, is projected on a wall in the gallery's front room. The arid tree's endless rotation around the room seems to pose the question - in a literally revolutionary manner - whether the vicious circle of seasonal consumerism couldn't be changed into a more virtuous circle.

Spelletich's shows often include some kind of mechanical device to provide visitors with refreshment, and at both his open studio event in February and also at the exhibition opening, a slow-moving wine-pouring machine had guests - plastic cup in one hand while pushing a button with the other - wondering whether the art work would pour them a drink or dump red wine on their shoes (happily it is the former, a couple of centimeters at a time).

The show's curator, Pavel Vančát, invited the young Czech artist Richard Loskot to join Spelletich as a guest exhibitor. His work likewise involves the transformation of technological and mechanical detritus into interactive art. He has filled the middle room of the three-room exhibition space with a fragile, twittering organism of disused electronics parts that set one another off in a round-robin symphony of peeps, buzzes and the endless cycling through the FM dial of an old radio.

People who prefer to go to the theater or to see live music to feel a more visceral connection to culture have the rare opportunity at "Machines Without a Cause" to use their hands and become actively engaged at an art show - and it's a chance for the kid in all of us to have some fun.

The artist is doing a walk-though of the exhibition, with pyrotechnics, Wednesday, April 6, at 6 p.m., Saturday, April 9, at 2 p.m., and Thursday, April 14, at 6:30 p.m.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com