Utopian
Art in Reverse
Michael Leruth, Associate Professor at the College of
William and Mary, Virginia, U.S.A.
Fred
Forest is one artist who still believes in the utopian function
of art. It’s a belief that he has affirmed in no uncertain
terms from one end of his career to the other, from the
sociological art of the 70s, dedicated to translating the
“real” (i.e., sociological actuality) into “reality” (i.e.,
epistemological meaning) through “utopian action”
[1] in the form of inter-subjective events created
using non-artistic media of communication (video, print
media, TV); to the “art of the present,” in which the artist
acts as the “initiator of new forms of utopia”
[2] by installing “instruments of anthropological
prospection” in the heart of our “hyper-technological environment”
(e.g., the Internet). Moreover, only an incorrigible utopian
could lead a procession of protesters brandishing blank
signs through the streets of Sao Paulo under the watchful
eyes of the political police in 1973, invite friends and
strangers to become citizens of his sovereign “Territory
of the Square Meter” in 1980, appear on Bulgarian national
television literally in rose-colored glasses in 1991 in
order to campaign for the presidency of the national network
of this not yet entirely post-Stalinist country on the basis
of a platform calling for a “more utopian and nervous” form
of TV, and openly challenge the right-wing mayor of Nice
in 2005 with digital “Stations of the Cross,” created online
by the public, publicizing the city’s suffering under his
administration. However, Forest is an atypical utopian
for reasons that go well beyond the nerve he displays in
his willingness to defy authority. His originality resides
in the fact that he shows us the way to a utopian form of
art that escapes the “postmodern condition.” It resides
above all in the fact that the utopian stance deployed in
his most powerful works actually puts utopia in reverse.
Forest
understands that the only truly utopian stance still possible
today is one that works in reverse because the space normally
reserved for utopia has become inaccessible to us. The
dictionary informs us that utopia literally means “not a
place.” This non-place is, we know, the imaginary setting
for our fantasies of the perfect society. It originated
in the Italian Renaissance alongside perspective and the
capacity to project oneself from a supposedly fixed vantage
point within contingent reality into an ideal dimension
of space, where the imperfections of the real world could
be corrected and society’s most rational, just, and progressive
projects could be realized … in principle. The “Ideal Town”
formerly attributed to Piero Della Francesca ranks as the
“first” modern utopia in the history of art. According
to Zaki Laïdi, the “perspective turn” of European culture
is the ultimate source of the modern idea of progress, which
results from the “temporalization of perspective,” i.e.,
from a double projection into virtual realms of both space
(utopia) and time (heterochrony): the ideal society “takes
place” in a quasi-mythical future at the end of History.
[3] It is unfortunately part of the so-called “postmodern
condition” to make this type of utopian projection inconceivable.
Several explanations for this development have been offered.
According to Lyotard, the problem is that we can no longer
bring ourselves to believe in the master-narratives of modernity
(Enlightenment, Progress, Revolution, etc.); whereas for
Virilio, Laïdi, and Maffessoli, it is because we live under
the sway of a hegemonic and perhaps tyrannical present.
In other words, we lack both the faith and the time it takes
for utopia. However, if one is to really grasp what Forest
is doing, one must pause to consider the thesis formulated
by Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, the true
cause of our postmodern dysfunction resides in the fact
that the “perspectival space” into which we formerly projected
the social ideal of the utopian project has been turned
into a “space of simulation,” a space of networks and screens,
where we display a different social ideal, based on anonymous
connection, and the only notion still vaguely resembling
utopia involves “total dissemination and maintaining maximum
information flow to individuals as if they were so many
computer terminals.”
[4] This is the “cybernetic” utopia of a virtual
space that is simultaneously everywhere (globalization,
ubiquity) and nowhere in particular (deterritorialization,
cyberspace), where any piece of information—which is essentially
equal to any other piece of information given that meaning
has been dissolved in a pool of floating signifiers—is both
instantly and economically circulated far and wide. This
“utopia” has nothing to do with projects for it is already
an established fact—the fully realized utopia of ecstatic
communication—that is now an integral part of our world.
So
what exactly does it mean to create a utopia in reverse
in this kind of context? Whereas in the framework of the
traditional idea of utopia it was a question of projection
beyond the real world into a virtual space that provided
the utopian setting for the ideal society, it is now
a question of operating from within the virtual, pseudo-utopian
social space of communication in order to project a new
sense of the real world itself. This does not mean
perfecting the real-world illusion of virtual reality, nor
does it mean nostalgically fleeing the virtual for the mythical
real world that used to be. It is a question recreating
a real world out of the virtual one that now envelops us.
One is dealing with a genuinely utopian form of action because
the virtual space of communication is as inextricable as
the space of contingent reality out of which our former
utopias were made and it therefore takes as great a leap
of the imagination to project a real world from within the
latter as it did to project the virtual world of utopia
from within the former. In any event, there is no true
opposition between the real and the virtual in the utopian
gesture, in either its old or its new form, because, in
each case, one is always the projection of the other.
In
concrete terms, Forest tropes the virtual space of communication
in various ways that have the reverse utopian effect of
transforming that space into something real, if only for
but a fleeting moment. Let us evoke here four of the most
important of Forest’s reverse utopian tropes. In actions
like “150cm2 of newspaper” in 1972 and “The City
Invaded by Blank Space” in 1973, he sidesteps the trap of
the dissolution of meaning in mass communication by evacuating
content altogether in favor of exhibiting the pure possibility
of the existence of a public space open to dialog—a utopian
gesture in the case of the small blank “interactive” box
he had published in the pages of Le Monde, and downright
subversive in the case of his mock street demonstration
in Sao Paulo. In actions like “Celebration of the Present”
in 1985 (a motorcycle ride through the streets of Naples
taken in order to answer a ringing phone seen on television)
and “The Telephonic Faucet” of 1992 (the use of long distance
telephone lines to fill a bucket of water from remote locations),
Forest both humorously and poetically demonstrates that
physical space is not so much abolished—in fact, it is still
indispensable—as it is rendered more sublime in the age
of telecommunications. In other words, Forest’s utopian
art in reverse shows us how its very “commonplaceness” is
potentially “transfigured” by the passage of electronic
signals through it. [5] In actions like “The Press Conference of Babel”
in 1983 or “Learn How to Watch Television by Listening to
Your Radio” in 1984, he offers the public alternative interfaces
that allow them to momentarily reclaim the “territory” occupied
by those who control the media. This territory becomes
real through their unique presence to one another in it
as a utopian community established in a collective act of
electronic squatting. Finally, in actions on the Web like
“Time Out” in 1998 (an around-the-world tour via webcam
in which the noon hour repeated itself over and over again
during the course of a 24-hour period) and “The Center of
the World” (an installation centering on a digital relic
of the bygone center of the world to which one could make
a pilgrimage either on foot or online), Forest takes up
position in ritual time to “consecrate” a form of space
that is neither real nor virtual, but the threshold between
the two, passing through which plunges one into a state
of liminality, the “subjunctive mood” of collective performance
in which all utopias are possible. [6]
Put
in reverse in the works of Fred Forest, utopia once again
becomes real to us and art covers an ethical sense of purpose
in society.
