STRAIGHT THOUGHTS
with Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is
a conceptual artist,
working primarily in
the medium of the
thought experiment.
His works range
from establishing
a photosynthetic
restaurant for plants
to selling blocks of
lead meant to slow
time according to
Einstein’s relativity.
Keats splits his time
between San Francisco and Italy.
By Ashley P. Taylor
Managing Editor
Jonathon Keats at the Epigenetic Cloning Agency (Modernism Gallery, San Francisco,
CA, 2012). Photo courtesy of the artist and Modernism Gallery, San Francisco.
APT: How did you get started as an artist?
When you studied philosophy at Amherst
College, were you planning to try a career in
art?
JK: The truth is that I began making art
without even realizing it. At the age of 6,
I started selling rocks. I’d set up a table in
the driveway of my parents’ house and set
some generic rocks on it. The prices were all
different, and all around the table were other
rocks on the ground, essentially identical,
that anybody could have for free if they
wished. Needless to say, I didn’t attract a lot
of customers, but there were a few, and oddly
nobody ever took a rock from underfoot.
Looking back—and probably giving myself far
too much credit—it seems to me that at the
age of 6 I’d figured out the basic form of what
I still do today. My streetside enterprise was
absurd, but the absurdity of it let me explore
30
the meaning of something society cares about
a lot with very little understanding: money. I
was naïvely experimenting with economics. I’d
instinctually stripped financial transactions of
purpose so that I could see how they worked in
the abstract.
When I studied philosophy in college, I
recognized that my reductio ad absurdum instinct
was actually a powerful philosophical tool with
a long history, but at the same time I saw that
historically thought experiments were limited
because they were a form of argumentation.
In other words, there was inevitably a point
to be made. That didn’t really fit my thinking.
I’ve never been interested in answers except as
foundations for new questions, so I figured out
pretty quickly that I was not going to stay in
academia. Instead I studied philosophy to learn
how to frame thought experiments rigorously,
and then I took that methodology out into the
SciArt in America February 2014