The Photosynthetic
Restaurant (The
Crocker Art Museum,
Sacramento, CA,
2011).Photo courtesy
of the artist and Modernism Gallery, San
Francisco.
Martian meteorites. How often do people buy
into these schemes?
JK: When my works are monetized,
monetizing them is part of the work. To give
you an example: At the height of the 2006
California real estate boom, I applied string
theory to real estate development by adapting
the contractual framework for air rights to the
latest physics. I paid Bay Area homeowners
for legal rights to the half-dozen or so extra
dimensions of space they weren’t actually living
in, and then I sold subdivisions of those extradimensional properties through my own real
estate agency set up at Modernism Gallery
in San Francisco. Because string theory is
unproven, and might not even be provable
scientifically, I priced my parcels competitively
at 1/100,000 of the Zillow estimate on the
base property. The prices were trivial—
generally under $10—but the transactions
were essential. They were the means by which
people participated in the thought experiment
(nearly 100 purchasers on the first evening).
The transactions gave the thought experiment
meaning.
The same is true of my more recent projects,
such as the Local Air & Space Administration.
The research branch of LASA was based on the
Chico campus of California State University,
34
but I also launched an exotourism bureau,
since a lot of people are interested in space
exploration yet few can afford it. LASA was
able to offer far cheaper space travel than
companies like Virgin Galactic because we
reversed the travel equation, letting the moon
and Mars come to us as meteorites rather than
strapping humans to rockets. To let people
internalize these alien realms, I dissolved the
meteorites—producing lunar and Martian
mineral waters—and I sold bottles of those
waters at the San Francisco and Berlin offices of
the LASA exotourism bureau. As in the case of
my extra-dimensional real estate, the price was
nominal—under $50—but the transaction was
crucial because it cast LASA in the vernacular
of commercial space travel. The cost excluded
no one, but made people give more thought to
participation (as did the waiver I made people
sign before releasing the water).
Which I suppose brings me back to selling
rocks as a six-year-old child. Because our society
runs on money, I find that money makes people
take my projects seriously. And people have to
take them seriously in order to fully experience
their absurdity.
Read more about Keats' work here.
SciArt in America February 2014