Fabrice Hybert

Fabrice Hybert's exhibition 'Testoo®' at the Kunstraum (a project that evolved from a course at the University of Lüneburg) was preceded by a corresponding show, 'Hybertmarché 1+1=2', at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. There, Hybert asked the students to chose a selection of consumer goods and commodities based on 500 drawings from his work Story-board and to display them on large tables, as if at a sale. The drawings also illustrate the script of an imaginary film by Hybert whose star, rather like the film gangster Phantomas, constantly changes appearance and occupation. In Paris, a section of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and a muzak version of a Florian Mulschler composition provided a quasi-soundtrack and students at the entrance handed questionnaires to visitors for subsequent analysis.

Having replaced his drawings with real commodities in Paris, Hybert's next step was to transform the Lüneburg Kunstraum into a testing ground for prototypes of products that could be developed from the Story-board. Visitors were asked to test the objects so as to improve their construction. The project was curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist in the guise of market researcher and mediator 'extraordinaire'. Obrist recently remarked that he values constructive misunderstandings highly, and Hybert's show is best seen in this way. If, as its title and much of the labelling assert, the show really is concerned with testing prototypes for future products, then it leaves a fairly dubious impression. It is more interesting as a meditation on the boundaries of communication or as a collection of constantly changing perspectives on the ultimately futile desire for self-externalisation.

The initial effect of the space, hung with pale green ink drawings, is of airiness, but soon an oppressive atmosphere sets in - like visiting a self-obsessed fantasist. Dangling in the centre of the space are four 'genital swings' which Hybert's company 'OR SARL (unlimited responsibility)' plans to mass-produce. Two uninviting dildos stick up out of each seat, their parallel positions more or less defying anatomical facts and promising the user more pain than pleasure. Equally, the imitation sperm discharged over some swings leaves the impression of an aggressive male fantasy. It seems unlikely that the swings will sell in the 'real economy' outside the art market. Hanging over two garden chairs beside the swings are a pair of floor length robes, one white, the other brown like a monk's habit, for swing-testers to wrap themselves in. Leaving aside the instruction to 'test' the swings allows them to be read as fetishes. Among his thoughts on fetishism Gilles Deleuze wrote that the artificial phallus, as used by women, is often of a purely theatrical nature - it does not have to be employed for actual penetration but can be understood as a symbolic opposition to factual reality. Hybert's product, on which he has had himself photographed wrapped in one of the robes, can be seen as a masculine counterpart to this. The two dildos can only be used anally and vaginally, and, in a symbolic act, Hybert playfully sidesteps the natural handicap of not being a woman by enacting a kind of vagina-envy.

Similarly erotic in nature, several cotton buds and ear plugs lie on a table in front of an electric fan. Joined together to make loose forms, the pieces of pink wax sprouting cotton wool exude eroticism - despite the sober effect of the packaging stacked beside them. The table installation is completed by a polystyrene head wearing a pathetic double-peaked cap (which Hybert's company is already producing as an edition). Like almost all these prototypes, it places the user in an embarrassing position: the table installation seems to deal with the eroticisation of the commodity, in which the nature of the eroticism is less one of exchange than of a concern with the self. Equally, it is not the objects and actions of the 'tests' which appear to be the main consideration, but rather their imaginative loading. Thus, the table with its commodities prompts memories of childhood, of games in which banal objects take on a succession of new significances. In this way the viewer's grasp of the artistic strategy adopted is constantly disrupted.

This impression is heightened by the juxtaposition of the table with the latest model of that classic Surrealist icon, the Singer sewing machine, which is accompanied by a request to test it. This almost obsessive jumping between artistic strategies seems superficial and offers a glimpse of latent panic. A similarly Surreal image crops up at the other end of the space: set on supports is a six-sided perspex box with two pipes hanging to the ground from its sides. Hybert had earlier installed this box - with vacuum cleaners at both ends - over a hairdresser's, sucking up a great tangle of hair. Behind this, projected onto the entire wall, is the video Traduction (Translation) (1995) which shows the 'world's biggest bar of soap', commissioned by Hybert, on tour through France. A lorry transports the soap from one branch of the supermarket chain L'Clerc to the next, where the soluble block, which Hybert calls a self-portrait, is put on display as a travelling 'sensation'. The superimposition of tangled hair onto the giant soap produces a fantastic inflation of the mundane, intimate experience of hair sticking to the soap in the shower.

Overall, the impression remains of an externalised inner world of great imaginative power that is exciting in its contradictory nature. The attempts to relinquish authorship, which sometimes simply seem to be imposed from the outside, almost turn into their opposite - a permanent mystification of Hybert's artistic personality.