Art to Make Socrates Grin—Fabrice Hybert - Brief Article

ART THAT ASKS ALL THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Artist Fabrice Hybert is fixing the wand--and we should all be glad. A Parisian for the past five years (he called the city of Nantes home for the past 10 years), his work scrambles history, technology and social engineering with a sensibility at once frivolous and profound. Since 1986 Hybert has been engaged in a process he characterizes as "the opposite of design." As he puts it "in design they start with a problem, and make the creation fit the problem. I invent the thing first, and then find out what I can do with it." Hybert's inventions can take any form, from mock video news reports to full-fledged figures made of sponge or fish skin. Many of his exhibitions show these inventions in use-one of his most recent shows looked like a warped trade fair with the objects displayed around the room and videotape presentations in which a glamorous transvestite named Eliane Pine Carringhton demonstrated their various uses.

For Hybert, the important thing is to ask the right questions, an attitude that has lead him to one of his most ambitious projects to date: a new website, inconnu.net. For the site Hybert assembled teams of thinkers and innovators from a bewildering array of fields to answer whatever questions visitors should choose to pose, "no matter how far-fetched." The twist is that each question is answered with another question-an expansion of the Socratic method that makes explicit the playful and expansive nature of Hybert's mind. It's a style of thinking that's founded in philosophy (at 15 his beach reading was A Thousand Plateaus by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze), but one which is not afraid to embrace optimism and absurdity at the same time.

When asked about Paris, Hybert says that he deplores its pollution, the city's sense of age, and the difficulty one experiences disseminating new ideas there. But he loves the chance the city offers "to see lots of friends. I like to go out there at night and have fun," he reveals. It's that combination of playfulness with consciousness that gives Hybert's work its characteristic charge.

Nayland Blake is an artist and writer based in New York. Left: Fabrice Hybert.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group