In the early 1970s, pictures of the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom started jumping out of art books at me. A lot of exciting pictures of art were jumping out of books at me– Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Cliff Westermann, Claes Oldenburg, Martial Rayesse, Eduardo Paolozzi, Frank Stella, Eduard Kienholz, Larry Poons, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha–a lot of exciting art was coming into view.
Forty year later, Fahlstrom’s work continues to fascinate me in the beauty of conception, strange intensity and the many forms it takes. If you look for Fahlstrom in a POP ART book, you will probably notice, first, his paintings that use the devices of KRAZY KAT, a conceptually advanced newspaper comic from the 1920s, which was already abstract. Making it even more abstract made George Herriman’s KRAZY KAT even stranger, yet it was not diminished or defaced by the reinvestigation of the strip by the younger artist. One suspects kindred sprites inhabiting Herriman and Fahlstrom.
Fahlstrom made all kinds of work: paintings that had magnetic elements that could be reconfigured, image elements floating on water, board games, vacuum-formed signs, happenings, radio plays, labyrinthine drawings tracing the flow of money and power around the globe in comic book hieroglyph, exploded comic environments, three dimensional porcupine-like wall pieces bearing poetic fragments.
Later in the 70s, I discovered and purchased the catalog for a project and art show called E.A.T.– Experiments in Art and Technology . The idea of the project was to partner artists with corporations to enable artists to utilize advanced manufacturing techniques and information technology, such as it was. Many artists were involved– Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Kitaj, Lichtenstein, Warhol to name a few. (Another topic would be Warhol’s wonderful shower-stall sculpture and Rauschenburg’s robotic mudpit produced with E.A.T.) The catalog recounted the course of the project’ varied attempts, successes, failures and near-misses. Fahlstrom was paired with an outdoor sign manufacturing company and produced a series of plexiglass and sign mounts inspired by the work of ROBERT CRUMB in ZAP comics, which really got my attention.
“Oyvind Fashlstrom, The Art of Writing”, is delivered in dense academic prose, yet not impossible for mortals to read. Bessa explores Oyviind’s early work with concrete poetry and radio plays, contrasting Fahlstrom’s procedural and strategic approach to an architecture of poetry, resonations between words, sounds, meanings, associations, usage, overlay and multilingualism– as opposed to the more typical graphic, schematic, concrete poem, which is often primarily visual and typographic. Relations between his textural experiments and early magnetically mobile paintings are demonstrated and that is helpful in trying to visualize the complexity of play in Oyvind’s work and mind. This is an informative well-crafted study of Fahlstrom’s varied approaches medium to medium. Clues are clues, the research is extensive and welcome.