MEDIA INTERVENTION.

ART & SOCIETY: THE WORK OF FRED FOREST 

SLOUGHT FOUNDATION 

PHILADELPHIA

FEBRUARY 3-MARCH 23, 2007

Hailed as a pioneering new media artist and theorist, Fred Forest has worked at the forefront of interactive art, sociology, and institutional critique for the past forty years. As a French sociological artist, Forest's work questions the notion of the viewer as a passive consumer. The audience is an integral component in the carefully orchestrated "events" that comprise the artist's practice. Through these events, Forest examines the aesthetics of communication, using media as the site of intervention.

For viewers who are expecting a gallery full of art objects, Forest's work provides a challenge. How can one experience the art when it is entirely process-based and intangible? Billed as a retrospective, the exhibition "Art & Society: The Work of Fred Forest" at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia documents Forest's projects over the past three decades. The documentation is low-tech--sixty-nine laminated color photocopies feature a still image and an accompanying blurb that represent each project. In addition, various monitors playing video documentation of some of the projects are scattered throughout the gallery. Because the images do not fully contextualize the work, the text is ultimately more essential and interesting than the visual documentation. While this can prove frustrating to the diehard modernist or formalist, it ties in perfectly with Forest's critique of the institutionalization of art: "There are aesthetics of behavior, aesthetics of gesture, as well as aesthetics of an object." (1)

Unlike other new media artists, Forest does not simply use technology as his medium or material. Instead, the media functions as the locus for his intercessions with society and information technology. In one of his early works, Snapshot of the Television Viewer (1976), Forest uses humor to repudiate the perception that the media is an instrument of truth. The artist makes a guest appearance at the end of a television program, informing the audience that recent advances in technology will allow him to take their photograph across the airwaves, while they are in front of their TV at home. After giving the audience a series of instructions on how to pose for their photograph, Forest points his camera into the monitor and "clicks." The television station received over 300 letters from viewers who wanted to get copies of their pictures. (2)

As technology continued to progress, Forest adapted his practices to analyze the shifts in society's relationship with the evolving technological developments. A midcareer work, "The Electronic Bible and the Persian Gulf War" (1991), critically reveals the power of the media as the biased arbitrator of news. The installation was located in a pit and viewed from above. Fifteen light-emitting diode (LED) message boards of varying sizes, planted in six tons of sand flown in from Kuwait, displayed a steady stream of quotations from the Bible juxtaposed with news dispatches from the war zone. Full-length mirrors lined the walls of the installation creating a myriad of reflections from the moving red LED lights. Surrounded by these modern-day electronic tablets of the law stood a totem: a single video monitor playing television news clips from the war at accelerated speed. (3) The totem spectacle represented the monolithic voice of power, barraging the viewers with images of destruction, resulting in desensitization and the simulacra equivalent to a virtual video game.

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Disparaging the notion of the Internet as a site of utopic possibilities, Forest's 2002 work MEAT: Territory of the Body/Networked Body ironically asserts the Web as the ultimate commodified marketplace. In this online piece, the artist's body is for sale piece-by-piece--like cuts of meat in a butcher's display case or lots in a real estate promoter's subdivision. Each parcel of flesh purchased or rented was in reality a small section of a larger interactive image onto which the new occupant planted a small flag. The project implicitly compares the territorial nature of the body to that of the Internet. (4) While the work has a humorous component, underlying the humor are references to prostitution or selling the body as a means of survival. Perhaps Forest is suggesting that our physical bodies will someday become outmoded, replaced by technology and the virtual body.

Forest's work asks us to question and analyze the roles technology and the media play in socio-political power struggles and governmental control. His interventions create a space for dialogue and involvement with the community. He condemns the contemporary art world stating, "... it is now simply manipulating symbolic and aesthetic values with commerce and speculation as the sole goal." (5) Thus, he challenges artists to adopt new strategies, to break free from the confining bubble of the contemporary art world: "If artists wish to generate meaning, then they must break new ground--their works shall be informational, their field of choice shall be the information sector with the Internet as the prime example." (6)

NOTES (1.) Artist quote from artist statement/press release, January 15, 2007. (2.) Project description excerpted from exhibition labels. (3.) Ibid. (4.) Ibid. (5.) From an interview with the artist on the Slought Foundation Web site: www.slought.org (6.) Ibid.

COLETTE COPELAND is a multimedia artist residing near Philadelphia, who teaches, writes, and curates on photography, video, and new media.