Visual heteronym and animation as process in Frank Geßner’s Alias Yederbeck

Alias Yederbeck is a self-reflexive media investigation by the artist Frank Geßner through a fictional, multimedia (auto-) biography of Paul Yederbeck, a figure with many referents, including Paul Valéry, Stan VanDerBeek and Geßner himself. The multimedia installation raises a number of complex questions. Who is the artist here? What is “identity”? How is the line blurred between artistic hubris and self-focused creativity? Is Yederbeck a real historical figure? What insights, if any, do the video-performance inserts provide about Yederbeck, or do they reveal more about Geßner and his (and our) own arts culture, philosophy and politics? Who is Paul Yederbeck, and why do we care? How are we to understand the art-historical range of the paintings and the heterogeneous media used, and how do these relate to famous personalities and artworks from others? In answering a few of the many questions about the installation Alias Yederbeck, as a conceptual exploration of self and other, this contribution attempts to unpack and contextualise Geßner’s multimedia artwork through a set of themes and motifs from specific structural techniques of film, literature and painting. I then conclude with a discussion of an expanded notion of animation.

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Bilingual German/English edition. Includes DVD. Other authors: Ursula Frohne, Christian Katti, Yvonne Spielmann.