THE FIRST

INTERGALACTIC
ART
MINUTES

EXPOSITION
JONATHON KEATS
JUDAH L. MAGNES MUSEUM

MEGAHERTZ
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 Efimova
Chief 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 EXPOSITION
A PROJECT BY JONATHON KEATS

JULY 31, 2006 – JANUARY 14, 2007

JUDAH L. MAGNES MUSEUM

2911 RUSSELL STREET BERKELEY, CA 94705
510 549 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.