De Micha?l Leruth
Curator’s Note
"J'expose le Centre Pompidou à New-York " de Fred Forest www.fredforest.space
Fred Forest has been an outsider and rebel all his life and he is not going to stop now. Not because he is eighty-four years old. Not because it is high time for him to step back and smell the roses as his work becomes the subject of a growing number of scholarly articles, doctoral dissertations, conference presentations, books, and exhibitions the world over (e.g., Brazil, United States, France, Bosnia, Germany). And certainly not because he has just been treated to what any other French artist would consider a consecration: a major retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris (July 12 – August 28, 2017). For Fred Forest, being a rebel is not the same as being a terrorist: someone who seeks to stir up discord through sensational acts of destruction. And it is not the same as staging outrageous publicity stunts: cultivating the branded persona of the “bad boy” for the sake of fame and fortune. It is about a passionate, uncompromising, and utopian commitment to freedom. About carving out small spaces, or liminal moments, of freedom—for freer uses of modern means of communication, freer perspectives on society, freer forms of human interaction, freer ways of making and sharing art—in a world where the institutional powers that be would have things otherwise. More controlled. More respectful. More hierarchical. More profitable. More predictable. More passive. More distracted by spectacle. More conservative. More appropriate. More structured. More carefully curated. Think of Bakhtin’s theories on the subversive nature of carnival. Think of Michel de Certeau’s analogy of poachers and trespassers who maneuver artfully in the proprietary cultural and urban spaces (lieux propres) shaped by and for the powerful. Think of Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones. Or think of Forest’s own definition of sociological art, a movement he helped to pioneer: neither sociology nor art, but a form of radical sociological praxis that operates under the cover of art.
It is no wonder, then, that Fred Forest’s artistic practice has often involved criticism of—and conflicts with—institutions of power. Beginning in the 1970s, Forest targeted institutional forms of power in the media, society, politics, art, and the economy with participatory experiments he described in terms of “trans-media events.” He first attracted attention as the “artist who pokes holes in media” (Vilém Flusser) in 1972 by inserting small blank squares in the pages of the prestigious Parisian newspaper Le Monde which he asked readers to fill with their own content (Space-Media: 150 cm2 of Newspaper), thereby turning a static and elitist type of media into a more interactive and democratic one. In 1973, he led a team that conducted an experiment in a retirement home designed to give back to the residents the power over their own image in a society obsessed with youth and productivity by organizing them into groups that made their own short video documentaries about their lives in and outside of the home (Senior Citizen Video). Later that same year, Forest was arrested by the Brazilian secret police (DOPS) after he staged a mock street demonstration (The City Invaded by Blank Space), for which the marchers carried conspicuously blank signs, as part of a series of interventions in conjunction with the Bienal de Sāo Paulo. He returned to Sāo Paulo and its Bienal in 1975, uninvited, to stage an alternative exhibition that offered a whimsical and critical deconstruction of the official Bienal in real time—in a space adjacent and hard to distinguish from the official exhibition venue—while treating the Bienal in progress as if it were the artifact of an ancient civilization (Biennial of the Year 2000, 1975). In 1977, he targeted the information and publicity-dependent speculative practices common to both the art and real estate markets by forming his own real estate promotion company and offering for sale at a public auction miniscule parcels of undeveloped rural land advertised as “artistic” in nature (The Artistic Square Meter)—an operation that led to a police investigation on suspicion of fraud and false advertising and was banned in its original form by the public prosecutor’s office.
These rebel tactics did not subside as Forest grew into a “mature” and “serious” artist. On the contrary, they continued in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—becoming more sophisticated and more audacious in some instances. One example is Learn How to Watch TV by Listening to the Radio (1983), for which Forest assembled an ad hoc network of independent FM radio stations (only recently legalized in France) to broadcast alternative audio to go with the official visual content of French television. Another is his renegade campaign for the presidency of Bulgarian national television in 1991 (Fred Forest for President of Bulgarian Television), for which he staged a surreal motorcade in the streets of Sofia and very nearly persuaded the incumbent to debate him on live television on the merits of his proposals for a more “utopian and nervous” form of TV. More recently, there was The Traders’ Ball (2010), which satirized the predatory speculative folly that caused the financial crash of 2008 through an installation of boogying traders (appropriately hollow mannequins) in Midtown Manhattan and a virtual dance party for avatars in Second Life. The critical gesture for which Fred Forest is most famous, however, is one that he does not even consider part of his artistic oeuvre per se: his citizen’s court case against the Pompidou Center (1994-98) over the lack of transparency and alleged insider deal making in the prestigious institution’s acquisitions procedures—a case which he ultimately lost on appeal before the Council of State but which gave him a celebrity’s platform on which to denounce the corruption and social insignificance of institutional contemporary art and also sealed his fate as a persona non grata of the French art establishment.
So, what, then, is one to think of the 2017 Pompidou Center retrospective that is the subject of Forest’s current counter-exhibition? Was it a gracious (or grudging) peace offering on the part of an institution finally giving a major figure in French contemporary art his due? Was it a cynical ploy designed to exploit and ultimately neutralize a still fiery dissenter? Forest had staged an attention-getting protest performance at the 2012 Vidéo Vintage exhibition at the Pompidou Center, having himself bound from head to toe in “vintage” Sony Portapak videotape and then cut free by the public to call attention to his exclusion from the exhibition. There is much to like in the thoughtful and well-furnished exhibition curated by Alicia Knock. It did a good job of presenting Forest’s pioneering achievements in video, media, and telecom art (although it ostensibly left out his experiments in Net Art after 1995). It also highlighted the subtle beauty of the content and artefacts associated with many of Forest’s actions—the result of a refined esthetic sensibility often overlooked by critics, but not lost on Pierre Restany, who considered Forest a worthy successor to Yves Klein’s poetic treatment of voids. Finally, it justly focused on the notion of Territory as the unifying principle of much of Forest’s work, as is evident in the retrospective’s title, Fred Forest: Les Territoires. Indeed, Forest has been thinking in terms of utopian territories ever since he started inserting small blank spaces in the media in the early 1970s. The exhibition did a particularly good job of charting the genesis of the Territory of the Square Meter from its conceptual origins in 1977 to the creation of a simulated independent state based at Forest’s home in Anserville (50 km from Paris, in the Oise department) in 1979-80. This long-running playful experiment in DOI sovereignty/imagined community falls into the category of “intimate bureaucracy” (Craig Saper), a recurring practice in modern and contemporary art, from Surrealism to Fluxus: an artistic, parodic, and utopian détournement of the bureaucratic structures of modern society. One could become a citizen of the Territory by purchasing a subscription to a square meter section of the grounds. Forest served as the Artist-President for Life and transformed the rooms on the ground floor of his renovated eighteenth-century manorial outbuilding into a most unusual seat of government. While the retrospective did not adequately examine the subsequent virtualization of the Territory leading up to its transposition in Second Life (e.g., The Experimental Research Center of the Territory, 2008), it did offer visitors an opportunity to visit and explore the Anserville site through a VR interface.
Its redeeming qualities notwithstanding, the retrospective was also problematic in a number of ways. The artist explains his grievances against the Pompidou Center on this website and throughout this counter-exhibition. They are worthy of consideration and are not trivial since they include allegations of discriminatory treatment and broken promises as well as the broader issue of who ultimately controls the message in such events, the artist or the institution (cf. Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968). For me, there was also a more basic problem: the retrospective betrayed the rebel spirit of Territory—and could not do otherwise given its institutional logic, no matter how “successful” it was according to other (institutional) criteria. Forest’s Territory, which is synonymous with his notion of a “realistic utopia” and extends far beyond Anserville to include virtually everything he has done as an activist artist, is not something that can be pinned down, put on display on walls and under glass, catalogued, and reconfigured so as to conform neatly to the academic categories of art history (Nathalie Heinich’s concept of the “tradition of transgression” included). It is a living and unstable entity that only exists fleetingly and episodically via the way that participants in Forest’s various projects interact with and through the temporary utopian interfaces he sets up. Above all, it is a rebel enclave, open to all nomads, forever insoumis (i.e., unsubdued and refractory). Forest sensed rightly that the retrospective represented an attempt to colonize the Territory, to make it part of the Empire of Art. So he resisted. He resisted first by staging two unruly and eccentric participatory events in the exhibition space at the Pompidou Center. He continued to resist by criticizing the Center relentlessly in social media both before and after the exhibition’s closure. And he resists today through this counter-exhibition at The White Box. There is no bitterness or ingratitude in this resistance. His act of resistance is performed joyfully and can be considered his ironic way of thanking the institution by giving it and its public a true taste of the Territory. For anyone who knows Fred Forest, this unceasing resistance was the only outcome possible.
Fred, may the Force be with you!Michael Leruth
Curator’s Note
Fred Forest has been an outsider and rebel all his life and he is not going to stop now. Not because he is eighty-four years old. Not because it is high time for him to step back and smell the roses as his work becomes the subject of a growing number of scholarly articles, doctoral dissertations, conference presentations, books, and exhibitions the world over (e.g., Brazil, United States, France, Bosnia, Germany). And certainly not because he has just been treated to what any other French artist would consider a consecration: a major retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris (July 12 – August 28, 2017). For Fred Forest, being a rebel is not the same as being a terrorist: someone who seeks to stir up discord through sensational acts of destruction. And it is not the same as staging outrageous publicity stunts: cultivating the branded persona of the “bad boy” for the sake of fame and fortune. It is about a passionate, uncompromising, and utopian commitment to freedom. About carving out small spaces, or liminal moments, of freedom—for freer uses of modern means of communication, freer perspectives on society, freer forms of human interaction, freer ways of making and sharing art—in a world where the institutional powers that be would have things otherwise. More controlled. More respectful. More hierarchical. More profitable. More predictable. More passive. More distracted by spectacle. More conservative. More appropriate. More structured. More carefully curated. Think of Bakhtin’s theories on the subversive nature of carnival. Think of Michel de Certeau’s analogy of poachers and trespassers who maneuver artfully in the proprietary cultural and urban spaces (lieux propres) shaped by and for the powerful. Think of Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones. Or think of Forest’s own definition of sociological art, a movement he helped to pioneer: neither sociology nor art, but a form of radical sociological praxis that operates under the cover of art.
It is no wonder, then, that Fred Forest’s artistic practice has often involved criticism of—and conflicts with—institutions of power. Beginning in the 1970s, Forest targeted institutional forms of power in the media, society, politics, art, and the economy with participatory experiments he described in terms of “trans-media events.” He first attracted attention as the “artist who pokes holes in media” (Vilém Flusser) in 1972 by inserting small blank squares in the pages of the prestigious Parisian newspaper Le Monde which he asked readers to fill with their own content (Space-Media: 150 cm2 of Newspaper), thereby turning a static and elitist type of media into a more interactive and democratic one. In 1973, he led a team that conducted an experiment in a retirement home designed to give back to the residents the power over their own image in a society obsessed with youth and productivity by organizing them into groups that made their own short video documentaries about their lives in and outside of the home (Senior Citizen Video). Later that same year, Forest was arrested by the Brazilian secret police (DOPS) after he staged a mock street demonstration (The City Invaded by Blank Space), for which the marchers carried conspicuously blank signs, as part of a series of interventions in conjunction with the Bienal de Sāo Paulo. He returned to Sāo Paulo and its Bienal in 1975, uninvited, to stage an alternative exhibition that offered a whimsical and critical deconstruction of the official Bienal in real time—in a space adjacent and hard to distinguish from the official exhibition venue—while treating the Bienal in progress as if it were the artifact of an ancient civilization (Biennial of the Year 2000, 1975). In 1977, he targeted the information and publicity-dependent speculative practices common to both the art and real estate markets by forming his own real estate promotion company and offering for sale at a public auction miniscule parcels of undeveloped rural land advertised as “artistic” in nature (The Artistic Square Meter)—an operation that led to a police investigation on suspicion of fraud and false advertising and was banned in its original form by the public prosecutor’s office.
These rebel tactics did not subside as Forest grew into a “mature” and “serious” artist. On the contrary, they continued in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—becoming more sophisticated and more audacious in some instances. One example is Learn How to Watch TV by Listening to the Radio (1983), for which Forest assembled an ad hoc network of independent FM radio stations (only recently legalized in France) to broadcast alternative audio to go with the official visual content of French television. Another is his renegade campaign for the presidency of Bulgarian national television in 1991 (Fred Forest for President of Bulgarian Television), for which he staged a surreal motorcade in the streets of Sofia and very nearly persuaded the incumbent to debate him on live television on the merits of his proposals for a more “utopian and nervous” form of TV. More recently, there was The Traders’ Ball (2010), which satirized the predatory speculative folly that caused the financial crash of 2008 through an installation of boogying traders (appropriately hollow mannequins) in Midtown Manhattan and a virtual dance party for avatars in Second Life. The critical gesture for which Fred Forest is most famous, however, is one that he does not even consider part of his artistic oeuvre per se: his citizen’s court case against the Pompidou Center (1994-98) over the lack of transparency and alleged insider deal making in the prestigious institution’s acquisitions procedures—a case which he ultimately lost on appeal before the Council of State but which gave him a celebrity’s platform on which to denounce the corruption and social insignificance of institutional contemporary art and also sealed his fate as a persona non grata of the French art establishment.
So, what, then, is one to think of the 2017 Pompidou Center retrospective that is the subject of Forest’s current counter-exhibition? Was it a gracious (or grudging) peace offering on the part of an institution finally giving a major figure in French contemporary art his due? Was it a cynical ploy designed to exploit and ultimately neutralize a still fiery dissenter? Forest had staged an attention-getting protest performance at the 2012 Vidéo Vintage exhibition at the Pompidou Center, having himself bound from head to toe in “vintage” Sony Portapak videotape and then cut free by the public to call attention to his exclusion from the exhibition. There is much to like in the thoughtful and well-furnished exhibition curated by Alicia Knock. It did a good job of presenting Forest’s pioneering achievements in video, media, and telecom art (although it ostensibly left out his experiments in Net Art after 1995). It also highlighted the subtle beauty of the content and artefacts associated with many of Forest’s actions—the result of a refined esthetic sensibility often overlooked by critics, but not lost on Pierre Restany, who considered Forest a worthy successor to Yves Klein’s poetic treatment of voids. Finally, it justly focused on the notion of Territory as the unifying principle of much of Forest’s work, as is evident in the retrospective’s title, Fred Forest: Les Territoires. Indeed, Forest has been thinking in terms of utopian territories ever since he started inserting small blank spaces in the media in the early 1970s. The exhibition did a particularly good job of charting the genesis of the Territory of the Square Meter from its conceptual origins in 1977 to the creation of a simulated independent state based at Forest’s home in Anserville (50 km from Paris, in the Oise department) in 1979-80. This long-running playful experiment in DOI sovereignty/imagined community falls into the category of “intimate bureaucracy” (Craig Saper), a recurring practice in modern and contemporary art, from Surrealism to Fluxus: an artistic, parodic, and utopian détournement of the bureaucratic structures of modern society. One could become a citizen of the Territory by purchasing a subscription to a square meter section of the grounds. Forest served as the Artist-President for Life and transformed the rooms on the ground floor of his renovated eighteenth-century manorial outbuilding into a most unusual seat of government. While the retrospective did not adequately examine the subsequent virtualization of the Territory leading up to its transposition in Second Life (e.g., The Experimental Research Center of the Territory, 2008), it did offer visitors an opportunity to visit and explore the Anserville site through a VR interface.
Its redeeming qualities notwithstanding, the retrospective was also problematic in a number of ways. The artist explains his grievances against the Pompidou Center on this website and throughout this counter-exhibition. They are worthy of consideration and are not trivial since they include allegations of discriminatory treatment and broken promises as well as the broader issue of who ultimately controls the message in such events, the artist or the institution (cf. Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968). For me, there was also a more basic problem: the retrospective betrayed the rebel spirit of Territory—and could not do otherwise given its institutional logic, no matter how “successful” it was according to other (institutional) criteria. Forest’s Territory, which is synonymous with his notion of a “realistic utopia” and extends far beyond Anserville to include virtually everything he has done as an activist artist, is not something that can be pinned down, put on display on walls and under glass, catalogued, and reconfigured so as to conform neatly to the academic categories of art history (Nathalie Heinich’s concept of the “tradition of transgression” included). It is a living and unstable entity that only exists fleetingly and episodically via the way that participants in Forest’s various projects interact with and through the temporary utopian interfaces he sets up. Above all, it is a rebel enclave, open to all nomads, forever insoumis (i.e., unsubdued and refractory). Forest sensed rightly that the retrospective represented an attempt to colonize the Territory, to make it part of the Empire of Art. So he resisted. He resisted first by staging two unruly and eccentric participatory events in the exhibition space at the Pompidou Center. He continued to resist by criticizing the Center relentlessly in social media both before and after the exhibition’s closure. And he resists today through this counter-exhibition at The White Box. There is no bitterness or ingratitude in this resistance. His act of resistance is performed joyfully and can be considered his ironic way of thanking the institution by giving it and its public a true taste of the Territory. For anyone who knows Fred Forest, this unceasing resistance was the only outcome possible.
Fred, may the Force be with you!Michael Leruth