Contact: Jonathon Keats at [email protected] or Andrew Dietz at [email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RESEARCH REVEALS VISUAL ARTISTS PERFORM PHOTOSYNTHESIS
Groundbreaking Plan to Farm Agrifolk Art on Georgia Plantation Announced
ATLANTA, GA Sep 06, 2006
An accidental botanical discovery on a small island off the coast of Maine is expected to cause simultaneous revolutions in agriculture and fine art. Previously unaffiliated, the two industries will be merged for the first time in Forsyth County, Georgia, with repercussions anticipated in regions ranging from the Farm Belt to the Chelsea District.
The key breakthrough was made at the MacNamara Foundation on Westport Island, Maine, where conceptual artist Jonathon Keats was a fellow earlier this year. "From my studio window, I observed how spruce saplings moved in the wind," he recalls. "They were sensitive to their surroundings in ways that any artist I've ever known would envy." Mr. Keats provided one of the trees with paper and a pencil, which he tied to a limb. "I had a large supply of drawing implements," he says, "and, being a conceptual artist, I wasn't doing much with them myself."
While the drawings made by the spruce at first appeared rudimentary, Mr. Keats was reading a book written by Atlanta author Andrew Dietz, called The Last Folk Hero. Describing the closing circle between outsider artists and the commercial art market, the book alerted Mr. Keats to a central problem in folk art: Authenticity. "The trouble wasn't outright forgery," he explains, "but that folk artists had caught on to their folksiness, so that in essence they were imitating themselves. I saw that it was the same media-saturated self-consciousness that's debilitating contemporary art across the board." Except within the plant world.
"Plants are non-sentient. A sapling isn't making art to be a Robert Rauschenberg, let alone a Grandma Moses."
When Mr. Keats returned home to San Francisco, he contacted Mr. Dietz by telephone, confiding that he'd discovered a species of artist that was uncorrupted, and possibly incorruptible. "He told me that the future of folk art was botanical, and that he intended to start farming it," says Mr. Dietz. "He asked me if I'd consider acting as exclusive dealer for these artists. After writing The Last Folk Hero, I knew the market as well as anyone. I thought, 'Why the heck not?'"
Following additional research, Mr. Keats and Mr. Dietz determined that Georgia's seven million acres of tree farmland would provide an adequate agricultural base, and that young Leland Cypress trees, limber and resilient, were especially well suited to high- output artistic production. Because Mr. Keats has no farming experience, the Kinsey Family Farm in Forsyth County has granted him permission to work with their crop. On the weekend of September 16th, he will select fifty exemplary saplings, and, for two full days, will provide them with a variety of drawing implements as well as individual easels, to produce original works on paper. The finest examples will be exhibited by Agrifolk Art Associates, Mr. Dietz's newly-formed dealership, at Soho Myriad Gallery in Atlanta on October 14th and 15th. A documentary about the project, by critically acclaimed Atlanta film studio, Eyekiss and director David Edmond Moore, will be screened as well.
Mr. Keats is confident that the quality of this artwork will be evident to all. "This isn't just about artistic integrity," he says. "Non-sentience is often looked down upon by our culture, obsessed with SAT scores and IQ tests. Yet plants negotiate complex ecosystems that biologists struggle to comprehend. Their art is a byproduct of the intelligence, and the creativity, of their interaction with the environment."
Asked if this has made him rethink his own art, Mr. Keats grows pensive. "My projects often depend on complex processes such as radiotelescopy and genetic engineering. I'd have saved myself a lot of work had I known that the basic ingredients of artistic originality were water and sunlight."
About Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, novelist, and critic. For his most recent project, at the Judah L Magnes Museum in Berkeley, he exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork. He has also attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, and petitioned Berkeley to pass a fundamental law of logic – A=A – a work commissioned by the city's annual Arts Festival. He has been awarded Yaddo, MacDowell Ucross, and MacNamara fellowships, and his projects have been documented by KQED-TV and the BBC World Service, as well as periodicals ranging from The San Francisco Chronicle to The Boston Globe to New Scientist. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. For more information, please see www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/
About Andrew Dietz and Agrifolk Art Associates
Andrew Dietz is a writer and entrepreneur. He is the author of the widely-acclaimed book, The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit. This important narrative non-fiction work chronicles the stranger-than-fiction story of Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and the Quilters of Gee’s Bend, and their unique personal and economic relationship with the controversial art patron Bill Arnett, as well as Jane Fonda, Morley Safer and other unlikely cohorts, friends, and enemies. Mr. Dietz has recently launched Agrifolk Art Associates in order to promote agrifolk art and bring it into the broader culture through both traditional and novel art marketing approaches. Inquiries about the purchase of the agrifolk art produced during this historic project should be directed to Mr. Dietz at [email protected]
For more information about The Last Folk Hero visit www.thelastfolkhero.com and http://thelastfolkhero.blogspot.com
