Le champ du Monde

Le champ du Monde

The exhibition is taking place at the Z Editions offices on rue Bavastro in Nice.

The illuminated newspapers installed on the specially designed picture rails showed a continuous scrolling of the names of the towns from all over the world invited to take part in the operation. The telephone's indicator light flashes from time to time, but no-one ever picks up - the participation is purely illuminated. This means that somewhere in the world someone is calling. The visual manifestation of the flashing is enough for the artist to validate his action without the need for a verbal exchange. A fortnight earlier, a postal communication campaign had been launched for universities in France and abroad, giving the telephone numbers and the starting date of the operation, and pointing out that, given the nature of this action, there would be no additional telephone costs. Message for students, of course...

Préface de Pierre Restany pour l'exposition Fred Forest, " Le champ du monde ", Galerie Z Editions Nice, Nice 17 février au 19 mars 1995

DE YVES KLEIN A… FRED FOREST. LE CHANT DU MONDE, OU (ET) LE CHAMP DU MONDE ! PAR PIERRE RESTANY
 Fred Forest, adventurer, poet, artist, socio-video, mass media, cyberspace and digital media. We are used to thinking of others through the convenient grids of categorical understanding. Fred Forest is no exception to the rule. This theorist and practitioner of sociological art, and co-founder of the aesthetics of communication, is a multimedia artist whose work has been practised on a variety of media, in keeping with the perfect logic of his method and the direct perspective of his approach, which is an investigation into the global field of communication.

If we focus on his use of video as an agent of language, we have to admit that Fred Forest's activities in this field since 1968 have been considerable, placing him at the very forefront of French video artists as a pioneer. In any case, he is the first Frenchman to have sensed the logic and internal coherence of the medium, and to have taken the step that separates the nostalgia of the aesthetic or aestheticising shot from the openness of the language of the mass media, the direct grasp of information conceived as a whole, as the raw material of a possible individual expressivity. It has avoided the technical pitfall that would have condemned it to a totally disembodied form of para-scientific research. He has given life, sensitivity and a poetic flavour to multimedia devices. This personal contribution is reflected in an abundant artistic output in which the human element is privileged at every stage of communication. I know a thing or two about this, having worked with him on several occasions. Fred Forest's sense of the human, over and above the pleasures of intuition, is a soul that comes through in sound and image.

It's poetry again!

In the midst of galloping technologies, at a time when the technical process is reaching areas of immateriality that are fascinating, but also so dangerous for the balance of consciousness, it is essential that man remains at the heart of all this evolution and of science in general. Fred Forest's mass humanism gives us this great hope.
Yves Klein had foreseen the great adventure of the immaterial and had himself ventured into the void. Yves Klein's emptiness is the emptiness of an alchemical truth that is also a little truer than life itself. At the heart of the void, of this full void, which is that of the cosmos and interstellar space, that of the foundation of the universe, in this void, Yves Klein used to say, "there is a fire that shines and a fire that burns". This metaphor could also be applied to the great adventurer of communication: there is a fire that shines, that of the present time of intervention, and there is a fire that burns, that of oblivion. Personally, I have great hope in Fred Forest's approach, insofar as I believe that the second phase of his work and thought, his aesthetics of communication, leads to a fundamental mass humanism, which is the integral key to our own earthly and cosmic salvation.

Pierre Restany,
Nice, février 1995

• Les espaces multiples de Fred Forest par Jean Deveze
  https://www.persee.fr/doc/sciso_1168-1446_1992_num_26_1_1023