Letter From Berlin: Forgeries, Pheromones & Clones - Jonathon Keats

Jonathon Keats’ emotional paint set. The artist is revisiting Abstract Expression with his own Olfactory Expressionism:  He paints with pheromones. Viewers in Berlin will hopefully get more of charge from these works than from Pollock’s canvases.

Jonathon Keats has brought the cerebral into the art marketplace. Nearly 15 years ago he sat in a gallery for 24 hours looking at a nude model and selling his thoughts to art collectors. A few years later he copyrighted his mind as a sculpture. In 2004, he tried to genetically engineer God to get to the essence of the Divine.  He’s enlisted string theory to purchase real estate in other dimensions, and created a silent four-minute and thirty-three second ring tone remixing John Cage’s composition 4’33” .  And he even sold collectors the experience of spending money.

Now in a new exhibit in Berlin he’s presenting a dozen of his “paintings”  – made with mixtures of his own pheromones soaked in a linseed oil sauce – in order to get to the heart of Abstract Expressionism, artworks he accuses of being both passive and  unsuccessful. In addition to his show in Berlin at Team Titanic, the artist has a project opening in New York June 11-14, and a new book “Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age.” I asked the provocative and art critical artist some questions recently.

Read the interview and see more images here  on The Art Blog.

CALIFORNIA ARTIST JONATHON KEATS REBUILDS WORLD ECONOMY WITH ANTIMATTER

CALIFORNIA ARTIST JONATHON KEATS REBUILDS WORLD ECONOMY WITH ANTIMATTER – "CASH IS THE FOUNDATION OF ANY ECONOMY..."

October 15, 2009 - In the wake of global economic collapse, a conceptual artist has introduced a hedge against future catastrophe by creating a mirror economy designed to skyrocket as world markets plummet. The first holistic response to the great recession, this far-reaching financial innovation was formulated by Jonathon Keats, whose previous artistic enterprises include applying string theory to real estate development.
[PHOTO OF JONATHON KEATS BY: JENNIFER DESSINGER]

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," explains Mr. Keats. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

Backed by private Swiss funding, his scheme will be implemented beginning on November 12, 2009, when the First Bank of Antimatter opens in San Francisco's Monadnock Building, the location of Modernism Gallery.

The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Mr. Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception." 

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

"We want our customers to be confident that the antimatter is available on demand, but we're advising clients to conduct transactions strictly in paper currency," says Mr. Keats, who has used his artistry to design the money in multiple colors including red, blue and green. "The paper is cotton rag, archival enough to survive economic armageddon" he promises. "It's an essential asset in any balanced portfolio. Antimatter is a natural haven for wealth when everything becomes worthless."

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"The First Bank of Antimatter" opens at Modernism Gallery on Thursday, November12, 2009, with a public reception from 5:30 to 8:00 PM. The gallery is located at 685 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. The phone number is 415/541-0461. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 5:30. For more information, see www.modernisminc.com.

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Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, fabulist, and critic residing in San Francisco. Recently he choreographed the first ballet for honeybees at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has also exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, unveiled a prototype ouija voting booth for the 2008 election at the Berkeley Art Museum, attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, opened the world's first porn theater for house plants in the town of Chico, and petitioned Berkeley to pass a fundamental law of logic, a work commissioned by the city's annual Arts Festival. His projects have been documented by PBS, NPR, and the BBC World Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post, to Nature and New Scientist, to Flash Art and ArtUS. Additionally, Keats serves as the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and as a columnist for both Artweek and Wired Magazine. He's the author of two novels and an award-winning collection of stories recently published by Random House, as well as museum catalogue essays, monographs, and artist's books, and he is currently writing a book on linguistics for Oxford University Press. Since graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1994, he has been a visiting artist at California and Montana State Universities, and a guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the recipient of Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. He can be contacted at jonathon_keats@yahoo.com