Most art museums accept works on loan from other museums. But none have accepted them from other galaxies. Until now.
On display at Berkeley’s Judah L. Magnes Museum through January is an exhibition literally out of this world: “Revisions: The First Intergalactic Art Exposition” by Jonathon Keats, a San Francisco conceptual artist, critic, philosopher and amateur talmudic scholar.
The key term is “intergalactic,” as Keat’s work is something of a two-way street (as long as that street is a few million light-years long). The bulk of his show consists of 45-inch-square canvases on which Keats visually interprets intriguing radio signals picked up by SETI scientists in the 1980s.
For the cosmologically challenged, SETI is the acronym for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
Keats took the radio impulses, plotted them as points on a plane, then calculated an algorithm to see what colors and patterns might emerge. “It looked to me like what might be extraterrestrial abstract artwork,” he says.
Keats returned the favor by converting the image of a 15th-century Jewish seal into an electromagnetic signal and broadcasting it back into space (using a slinky for an antenna).
When first picked up 20 years ago, those SETI radio signals suggested possible intelligent life somewhere out there. But before E.T. could phone home, the scientists dropped the research as quick as you can say, “Pluto is no longer a planet.”
That is, until Keats picked it up again years later.
“One reason the signals had been dismissed,” he says, “is that [scientists] weren’t finding them especially scientific. They didn’t seem to resemble codes, the numbers of pi or something like that. But I figured if someone was trying to communicate all that distance, why bother with something people already knew? I wondered: If I were elsewhere in the universe, what would I send?”
Given that chance, Keats says he would have sent art, and that’s what he presumed the extraterrestrials might have been sending, albeit scrambled in radio waves.
So what could possibly be Jewish about deep-space radio signals in the 1420 to 1638 megahertz range?
“It’s the ultimate outsider art,” says Keats. “Judaism is a diaspora culture that has historically had all sorts of issues to do with communication within a disparate community.”
Keats says his Jewish upbringing and his interest in Talmud impacted his artistic MO. “I came to see that the Jewish way of thinking was so deeply imbued in me, that that was how I approached this esoteric material.”
That Jewish upbringing took place in Corte Madera where Keats grew up. He and his family belonged to Reform Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael, where Keats was bar mitzvahed, but later moved to San Francisco. Keats attended Lick-Wilmerding High School, and later majored in philosophy at Amherst College.
In addition to his art career, Keats serves as art critic for San Francisco Magazine and writes about science for Wired and Popular Science. As a fiction writer he has completed a novel and he is working on a collection of tales drawn from the Lamed Vavniks (the supposed 36 most righteous people alive at any one time, according to Chassidic tradition).
Previously, Keats has had multiple solo exhibitions at Modernism in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum. Most of them were of the esoteric conceptual variety, the kind that often triggers the question, “But is it art?”
Esoteric or not, those past exhibitions were all decidedly more earthbound than the new one. And less hands-on.
Because this exhibit includes actual canvases, it’s unlikely skeptics will question whether Keats’s work is or isn’t art. But even if they did, it wouldn’t matter.
“I don’t care if people decided whether it is or isn’t art,” he says. “I do care if they’re provoked.”
“Revisions: The First Intergalactic Art Exposition” by Jonathon Keats is on display 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays-Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, through Jan. 14, 2007, at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St., Berkeley. Suggested admission: $4-$6. Information: (510) 549-6950.