ARTICLES

The resistance of Fred Forest

by ferdinand(corte)™

Fred Forest has been well known in Europe and South America as a pioneer of video art since 1967, two years after his friend communications artist Nam June Paik, by co-founding the Sociological Art Collective in 1974, then the Communication Aesthetics in 1983 by using the press, radio, television, telephone, Minitel terminals, computers and finally the Internet. He is especially well known for his more-than-disruptive and publicized position against people in power, notably pressing charges against the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris for lack of transparency, Fred Forest still resists––permanently dissatisfied.

The driving force behind his practice seems to be the notion of Territory, developed at the start of the 1970s with Space Media, free-expression territories offered to readers of the press, such as the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, to television viewers and to radio listeners, leading to the artistic M2 in 1977, parcels of land on the French-Swiss border put up for sale by a property company with the help of various media such as Le Monde. He pursued this in 1980 by creating the M2 Territory in Anserville, a Paris suburb, and a self-proclaimed territory independent of France, he subsequently moved to the Internet in 1996 with the Networks Territory, then on to Second Life in 2008 with the Experimental Center of the Territory––an interactive tool of reflection and response to the dysfunctions in our society.

When I met Fred Forest in 2000, his unsurpassed energy and indefatigable spirit made me think that he would be better understood in the United States than in France, and that he would be able to grasp the specific way in which Americans operate. I am proud of this because he quickly started his conquest of the West with a planetary Internet event orchestrated from 2005 Art Basel Beach Miami, next to the Bass Museum, then a 2007 retrospective at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and a masterful conference at New York University (NYU), which then led to two recent events at the mythical Andy Warhol Gershwin Hotel and at the New York White Box on June 18th and 24th, 2009 respectively. I had the great honour of presenting these events along with the Groupe Charlois, Ramassia and AIR (1), Art International Radio, ex-radio of PS1 Contemporary Art Center, and especially Vinton Cerf, who is a ‘founding father’ of the Internet for having created IP protocol. Today, Cerf, considered as an evangelist for the Internet, is the vice-president of Google, and was also a witness at the 1999 wedding of Fred Forest and Sophie Lavaud.

ferdinand(corte)™ and Fred Forest at The Gershwin Hotel, New York.
Courtesy Martin Lenclos.

Considering the current crisis to be a crisis of values, meaning, and ethics rather than simply a financial crisis, Fred had the idea of moving his Experimental Center of the Territory to the heart of the epidemic, the island of Manhattan, in order to reflect with the citizens of New York, on concrete solutions to the crisis. This interactive Internet environment, launched in 2008 in Nice, France with the Galerie Depardieu, moved to Naples with the Entropya/Art in progress Gallery to solve the problem of refuse, consists in various modules, including a debate room complete with Plato’s shadows to remind us that the idea that we have of reality is not the truth. This space is updated according to the actions for which it is used. Obviously, for the Gershwin Hotel and the White Box, a Wall Street sign was added next to the Territoire du M2 panel, as on many New York apartment buildings, and a few American flags.

An initial discussion and reflection period will be proposed by Fred Forest in New York, and will be followed in 2010 by 45 Minutes to Save the World. A public press conference will reveal his aims and objectives.

Although Fred Forest fights the system, he is also recognised by the same system that he so opposes. He represented France at the 12th Biennial in Sao Paulo, where he was awarded the Grand Prix of Communication, at the 37th Biennial of Venice in 1976, at the Dokumenta 6 of Kassel in 1977. He is Docteur d’Etat at the Sorbonne and his video œuvre is part of French Heritage, having been archived at the National Audiovisual Institute in 2004.

Fred Forest is 76, yet timeless. He will not stop, but will take us even further. As I said in the catalogue I published for his first two events in New York, in the words of my friend Tony Guerrero, “I believe in the future.”

La Charité sur Loire, 30 August 2009

Translated from French to English by Tania Jacobsz

1 You can listen to the action at the Gershwin Hotel at www.artonair.org, under Living History, or at www.artonair.org/archives/j/content/view/2676/147.

ferdinand(corte)™ at The White Box, New York, and Fred Forest on The Experimental Center of The Territory on Second Life from Paris, on June 24th. Courtesy Martin Lenclos

Pensons Ensemble (Let’s think together), is the cognitive approach that the French thinker in act(s) ferdinand(corte)™, born in 1981, has been initiating since 2000 with a system of the same name. In order to link energies, knowledge, cultures, psychologies, subjectivities, talents and skills, he uses examples from botany such as rhizome and pollination, or mathematics such as vector. The actors of this synergy are committed to a shared ideal: a society based on complimentarity, sharing, and unity. ferdinand(corte)™ has since 2000 been represented by the Galerie Patricia Dorfmann in Paris, since 2008 by the Galerie Art & Rapy in Monaco, and since 2009 by the Effigies Agency in Paris.
www.ferdinandcorte.com

Tranlasted from French to English by Tania Jacobsz