Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Fabrice Hybert: C’Hybert Tokyo Rally

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Fabrice Hybert: C’Hybert Tokyo Rally 

by John McGee

Fabrice Hybert, POF no. 65, Square Ball, 2001
(Images courtesy Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art)

What do you do with a square soccer ball (POF No.65, Square Ball)? French artist Fabrice Hybert wants you to find out for yourself. Performance, pratfalls and parody—Hybert uses all of them to graph a world of disjointed, shifting connections within what he calls “the enormous realm of the possible.” 

Hybert is a life-of-the-party kind of guy, someone who always has an idea for a game or gag, even if it sometimes borders on the lampshade variety. His installation in the French Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale—a working TV studio for visitors to use and broadcast over local airwaves—won the Golden Lion Award for the Best National Pavilion. But one of his main ongoing projects and the main work in this show is POF (Prototypes of Functionality). POF are simple props that set up unpredictable actions for enthusiastic but often hapless viewers. 

All the POF, including the square soccer ball, are free for visitors to play with, manipulate or otherwise animate. To prod viewers into engaging the initially intimidating POF, Hybert has made instructive videos. A ring of 25 TV monitors show Hybert’s transvestite friend Eliane Pine Carrington demonstrating at least one possible “use” for the POF in his fictive realms of kitschy flamboyance. In one, he’s a well-dressed socialite performing the most extreme pruning techniques on an unsuspecting indoor plant—all the leaves are systematically but ceremoniously cut off, leaving a naked stalk (POF No. 58, One Leaf Tree). In others, he swirls around in a variety of wedding dresses (POF No. 20, Hysteric Waltz), prances on stilts (POF No. 29, Stilts), or arranges and rearranges, stacks and unstacks multicolored glass bowls (POF No. 73, Bowl Nest). 

Fabrice Hybert, Water in Head, 2001 

Hybert crafts physical and social brain teasers with indefinite, multiple answers. How (or why) do you sit on a swing with short rubber prongs sticking up from the seat (POF No. 3, Swing)? How do you walk on rocking stairs—four steps cut into a crescent of wood (POF No. 100, Endless Stairs)? Why does seeing your own blurry, cyclopean reflection in the mirrored inside of a diving mask (POF No. 2, Deep Narcissus) make you giddy? 

Not all works are dependent on viewer participation. Some are conceptual jokes that give quick, if haphazard, satisfaction. For example, in another attempt at flower deranging, Carrington has sliced a small, traditional Japanese pine bonsai square on the edges, making a pathetic French topiary/bonsai (POF No. 130, French Cut Bonsai). 

Two non-POF pieces are more elaborate constructions. C’Hybert Tokyo Rally is an “art game” that includes a cell phone-based quiz and treasure hunt to find POF around town. Three winners receive one of the original paintings on view on the top floor as prizes. In Water in Head, hundreds of different types of mineral water have been collected from Japan and around the world. Because mineral water stays underground for thousands of years, Hybert notes that this database retains memories of its place of origin. (For a refreshing break, taste various French, German, Turkish and Japanese waters at the interactive Water Bar.) 

Hybert is a bundle of energy, an idea explosion. And he throws all he’s got at you. Not everything the R&D Department makes, however, stands up to public scrutiny. Nonetheless, there’s little chance of being bored in this playground.

This exhibition was held Sep-Nov 2001 at Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan. 

©2006 John McGee

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