MEGAHERTZ

MINUTES

THE FIRST INTERGALACTICART EXPOSITIONJONATHON KEATSJUDAH L. MAGNES MUSEUM

CURATORʼS STATEMENT

Jonathon Keats’ art is a persistent, absurdist sabotage of modern rationality and its institutions. Nothing is spared Keats’ critical eye (with a barely perceptible twinkle). Keats usurps the habitual pro-cesses and mechanisms of science, law, politics, economics, and religion. Out of these mechanisms he creates ongoing and boundless performances that have no beginning or end. There is no public or private Keats — he is in character at all times. The great ironic effect of his everyday theater is created by the lack of what we are conditioned to perceive as a solid boundary between the rational and insane, the real and fictional. Keats forces us to experience the artificiality, or at least the historical specificity, of this boundary.

Keats is a young Jewish man in the 21st century acting the role of a late Victorian-era gentleman. He is a fiction writer, an art critic, and an artist — a man of letters. He is a naturalist, an inventor, and a philosopher — a man of science. He romances ma-chines that record and mechanically reproduce yet his fountain pen still traces impeccable letters on textured rag paper. He revels in classification systems, charts, and graphs, yet his mind spins

fantastic stories of beauty and murder. Keats plays the role of an amateur.

Keats’ character takes us back to the turn of the past century. It was the end of an era for amateurs — solitary men of letters and science who pursued their intellectual passions in search of truth and pleasure. It was the time when science was being appropriated by state and corporate interests and turned into a purely prag-matic, professional enterprise. It was the time when art-making was becoming the only legitimate refuge for those who stubbornly refused to participate in a pragmatic, rational, institutionalized order of modernity. Keats’ life-as-performance imitates the mechanisms of this order but vacates them of pragmatism, frees them from the straightjacket of expediency. And that’s why it deserves the name “art”.

Incidentally, the late 19th century also represents the time when Jews discovered that they, too, could be artists and, as artists, no longer outsiders in the world of gentle (or gentile) men.

Dr. Alla EfimovaChief Curator

Judah L. Magnes Museum

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ABSTRACT ART

The artists exhibited in The First Intergalactic Art Exposition are unknown to us. As with much outsider art on our own planet, we are not given names or dates, let alone the context of creation. Also, like much outsider art here on Earth, extraterrestrial abstract artwork has not traditionally been acknowledged. In fact, only recently have we recognized that such works exist: that some of the distant signals detected by ultrasensitive radiotelescopes might be art-istically meaningful.

Historically, scientists have dismissed data for lack of mathematical regularity. Astronomers have deemed unbefitting of intelligent life transmissions that don’t obviously encode scientific truths. But why would extraterrestrials bother to broadcast self-evident statements about gravitation or thermodynamics? Intelligent beings trying to communicate with the deepest meaning possible, in the most universal language available, would most naturally express themselves through art. And that is what we find when we study signals such as SHGb02+14a, the basis of this unprecedented museum exhibition.

To derive a visual image from a radio trans-mission is technically simple: Pictures

perceptible to human eyes are decoded using radio frequency to signify color, and time signature to specify orientation. Of course, there are myriad rule sets by which an image might be encoded. In the case of extraterrestrial abstract artwork, which comes to us unburdened by artists’ statements and anthropological data, de-coding is the first step in the interpretive process. Accordingly, this exhibition features three possible representations, none definitive, of the same signal. All of them are shown at the same 45̋ x 45̋ size, printed onto canvas using high-precision giclée inkjet technology.

While it’s too soon to predict how this work will change our understanding of intergalactic diversity, or the commonality of intelligent life everywhere, the value of ongoing interplanetary exchange is undeniable. Consequently, this exhibit is not only a destination for extraterrestrial art, but also a point of departure for art from our planet: Applying the algo-rithms used to decode SHGb02+14a, I have encoded an abstraction of my own composition, continuously broadcast from the Magnes into the cosmos between July 30, 2006 and January 14, 2007.

Jonathon Keats

UNTITLED (SHGb02+14a)VERSION A

UNTITLED (SHGb02+14a)VERSION B

UNTITLED (SHGb02+14a)VERSION C

THE FIRST INTERGALACTIC ART EXPOSITIONA PROJECT BY JONATHON KEATS

JULY 31, 2006 – JANUARY 14, 2007

JUDAH L. MAGNES MUSEUM2911 RUSSELL STREET BERKELEY, CA 94705510 549 6950 WWW.MAGNES.ORG

Introducing the public to abstract art from elsewhere in the cosmos, and broadcasting terrestrial abstraction to audiences throughout the universe, the First Intergalactic Art Exposition is part of the REVISIONS series at the Judah L. Magnes Museum.

This exhibition is made possible with support from Martin Muller and Modernism Inc., San Francisco, the Fleishhacker Foundation, and members of the Magnes Art & Culture Council.

Ten percent of catalogue sales earnings will be reserved as royalty payment for the extraterrestrial creators of artwork in this exhibition.