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OYVIND FAHLSTROM MODELS OF SHATTERED REALITY
Torsten Ekbom
Oyvind Fahlstrom's art has undergone a slow but continuous development from the nonfigurative to the figurative. This change in style expresses more than an aesthetic reorientation; it is primarily psychological and expresses a new attitude to life. The first phase, in the 1950's, was meditative, introspective, uncommunicative: an abstract art using signs as characters, inspired in part by Capogrossi. The most recent phase, in the 1960's, is open, responsive to life, involved: a political, social pictorial art related to American pop art. There is a simple explanation for this radical change: the first phase occurred in Europe, the other in America, in close contact with painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg. But this change does not involve any radical break with what he produced earlier. In what he has produced in America, Fahlstrom follows up tendencies that can be traced back to the earliest of his works, both where subjects and technique are concerned.
Fahlstrom has never completely abandoned his earliest sign-shapes: in his picturescroll Opera (1952) there is, for example, a sign that can be read as the beak of an eagle; the same beak occurs twelve years later in the variable painting Sylvie (1964). In Opera there is a section in which a number of shapes are gradually transformed within squares; from this it is not a long step to the strip cartoon form used in Krazy Kat (1964). Fahlstrom's way of using comic strip cartoon squares is only superficially reminiscent of such an artist as Roy Lichtenstein; instead this form emphasizes the continuity of his own production, the logical development of a personal conception of art.
Before his first visit to America, he produced two works that show this relationship
with the past and which anticipated his work in America: Forsta och andra kalaset pa Mad (Gorging on Mad, nos. 1 and 2 - the second is also called Dr. Livingstone, I presume). Previously Fahlstrom had either invented his signs or character-forms himself or taken them from esoteric sources, Mexican picture scrolls, enlargements of clinical microscopic preparations, etc. In the two Kalas pa Mad paintings, the forms are taken from popular culture, comic strips. But Fahlstrom is still not interested in the figurative aspect of the cartoons; the pictures are built up of hundreds of fragments which insulate the shape from meaning and create a completely new form-world, at the same time teeming, chaotic, impossible to take in at one glance and yet exact in detail. (His method of working can make one think of John Cage's way of combining things in Fontana Mix, in which tape with recorded sound is cut up into millimetre-long fragments and then stuck together again at random to form new sound-structures.) But the shapes can never be completely cut off; behind each fragment one can divine the meaning, the context, and in some places it suddenly becomes clear, almost like when one suddenly recognizes a face in a crowd of anonymous people. The effect is surprising and mysterious: the teeming mass of apparently abstract shapes is suddenly transformed into a fantastic, undulating world of shadows in which contorted shapes struggle to escape from the labyrinth into the light, into reality.
The first big painting from his time in America is Sitting ... (1962). This work still has the teeming profusion of forms from the two Kalas pa Mad paintings but the forms are no longer divorced from their meaning. The abstract, ambiguous signs have been transformed into unambiguous, figurative forms whose meaning gives the picture a new element of drama, development, coherence. (A circular shape is "interpreted" as the range of vision of the periscope of a submarine.) Sitting ... is built up in squares like a page of comic strips and can consequently be "read" in a certain sequence, the squares indicating different levels of time and space. The repetition of a sign in another square can thus be interpreted as a movement of the original sign. The sign has become a role in a dramatic sequence of events and the new position, in conjunction with new signs, indicates a new context and a new meaning, like a character in a comic strip that occurs in every square looking the same but changed by the development of the story. Roy Lichtenstein achieves an ironic effect by isolating one individual square of a comic strip, divorcing it from the story so that it becomes absurd, without context. Fahlstrom is more literary, more philosophic. The strip-cartoon technique provides a unique opportunity to present the action in a combination of picture and text, an open form that is not tied to the fixed time-space structure of literary presentation or the "closed, figure-like" compositions of conventional realism. If one can further imagine that the forms are movable and may be placed in new positions (like actors on a stage) instead of being mechanically repeated on the canvas in, for example, nine different combinations, a complicated "game structure" arises that cannot be described by means of any conventional or established approach, a game structure that in Fahlstrom words "does not involve either the one-sidedness of realism, nor the formalism of abstract art, nor the symbolic relationships in surrealistic pictures, nor the balanced unrelationship in 'neodadaist' works." Fahlstrom achieved this aim in his first "variable game painting," Sitting ... Six months later (11962). In it, the signs and the figurative shapes are cut out of vinyl plastic and can be fastened anywhere on the picture by means of magnets.
It is this literary and dramatic technique of presentation that distinguishes Fahistrom from neo-dadaists and pop artists. Anyone who wants to trace what has influenced him had better look outside pictorial art. Fahlstrom's most recent pictures, these strange, lyric visions that resemble science-fiction landscapes with elements of "Mad" humour, obscenities and hallucinations in them, recall most of all the novels of William Burroughs (The Ticket that Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express). In both artists, the same lyrical, ecstatic high-tension is to be found, the same combination of the pleasurable and the nauseating, the cold light from neon strips and instrument panels, the horrified fascination induced by science and the insane terror-balance of the armaments race. And in both of them, the same mysteriousness, the sudden vacant spaces that open towards dark, unfamiliar rooms. In Sitting ... Sir months later, someone has leapt right through a wall; only the silhouette is outlined in the brickwork, the opening is black, a hole into the night. (The detail is taken, for that matter, from Bill Elder's strip about Frank N. Stein. When the monster became conscious, it hurled itself right through the wall.)
One advantage of using the "game structure" is that it compels the artist to penetrate past the formal conventions. If a form is movable, it is a matter of indifference whether one position is better or worse than another. Interest is concentrated on the meaning, the interaction, the combinations. The difficulty in making an analysis is that the forms are capable of being interpreted in so many ways (they are non-symbolic) that all attempts to find an intrigue (an unambiguous causal connection) fail. Nor has Fahlstrom any such intentions. His method is more lyrical and visionary. He speaks of the "electric arc" or the spark that can occur between two forms that come in contact with each other.
A cloud crosses the silhouette of the two lovers, in another version they are sitting high up on the spool-shaped form of the (French) atom bomb. Thus Fahlstrom's pictures are not games in the real sense of the word. The rules of the game are generally so vague that no conflict situations as defined by the theory of the game ever arise. (An exception is Checklist for Dr Schweitzer's Last Mission which is in the form of a regular parlour game.) One can say rather that the paintings are "pseudo games," puzzles that can never be solved because in theory the possible combinations are infinite. Fahlstrom himself emphasizes the hybrid character of his creations: "The finished paintings are somewhere at the point of intersection between paintings, games (of the same type as Monopoly and war games) and puppet shows."
In The Planetarium (1964), the game element is very obvious. Like all of Fahlstrom's big compositions, it is a complicated picture whose effect is perhaps achieved more through its intellectual content than through its visual effect. His starting point was some sentences from Nathalie Sarraute's novel The Planetarium. Thus, once again, the background is a literary one. The Planetarium is an attempt to give pictorial form to the conception of man that is to be found in the new French novel. The result is best described with Fahlstrom's own term: puppet theatre psycho-drama.
Nathalie Sarraute takes as the starting point for her novel a special psychological concept, "tropisms," which can best be described as the Joycean inner monologue seen through a microscope. The Planetarium is a kind of sociological model of the relationships between people; like fixed stars, encompassed in their isolation, people move round each other, seeking a contact that remains an illusion, while space echoes with phrases, fragments of conversations, dead words: a meaningless, empty attempt at communication. Fahlstrom's Planetarium is a quite faithful transposition of this pessimistic conception. Forty-rwo silhouette-like figures stand out against a background of empty space. At the bottom stands a smaller figure and the rest of the painting is contained in a speech-bubble coming out of its mouth. In this way the figures are part of an inner monologue, a projection of all the roles and relationships that give identity to the socially adapted person. The role aspect is emphasized by the procedure of dressing the figures. This is done by the spectator. There are ninety-four magnetized costumes (taken from the comic strips) that can be put on the figures, who thus change identity and even sex as the "conversation" proceeds. On a smaller picture at the side of the big one, every figure is represented by words from the conversation, words that change in accordance with what clothes are put on. It is our role that determines what we say but in the long run the differences cancel each other out. The conversation remains just as fragmentary and meaningless however one moves the figures in the "game." The figures are puppets, hanging on invisible strings.
Nevertheless the picture of the world presented in Fahistrom's Planetarium is not so consistently pessimistic as the one Sarraute presents. Fahlstrom's picture is a "model" of reality and as such, it is morally neutral. The valuations, the conflicts do not exist until the spectator takes part in the game. American neo-dadism has developed this approach so far that the boundary between art and life is in the process of disappearing. Fahlstrom does not go so far, at least not in his paintings. He, too, is trying to "step over into life" and is working with what he calls "the material of life": comic strips, photographs from newspapers and magazines, complete objects that are used ready-made. But his personal vision is always in the foreground. The choice of the pieces in the puzzle is never accidental as it is, for example, with John Cage; the pieces are meticulously selected, "difficult, rare finds, they are more than anything else what Koestler in his new book calls 'bisociations' - when one has a piece of A and finds a piece of B and a terrific conflagration occurs when A is rubbed against B! In other words, the result is quite different and much bigger than the sum of the two."
The most magnificent result of this open-game method is the variable painting The Cold War (1964-65). If The Planetarium was a model of a sociological reality, The Cold War is a political model, a visionary projection of the terror balance. The picture is divided into two outer fields, East and West, that are balanced by a neutral zone in between. East and West contain figurative shapes, the neutral zone has signs (unambiguity versus ambiguity). Of the twenty or more pieces of which the painting is built up, only a few can be unambiguously associated with actual political reality. (Fahlstrom is never banal, there are no easily recognizable politicians, launching ramps, missiles that can be moved in intercontinental courses, in the painting.) But there is a banquet table that can be folded up like a measuring stick . . . "with different kinds of food, bottles of wine, red and white, champagne in silver goblets, joints of meat, fish, salmon, salads, cakes, fruit ... everyone is to unite in the cold war and sit down at a great banquet table and carouse and stuff themselves and bicker in the United Nations. . . ." There are also a dozen experimental mice and a giant tidal wave (the result of an atomic test detonation?), and a yes-and-no shape, an indicator that can be moved on a board and which makes one think of a military, s trategic manoeuvre board. The other elements are independent, disconnected, absurd - a gorilla on a shining tiled floor, big red footballs, a growing "tree" of trousers (human mutations?), tableaux on hinges that can be unfolded: a little man standing in front of a hole in the earth in a desolate, moon-lit landscape with shadows on the ground. The intensity of this painting is largely achieved by the way in which the pieces are combined: "the individual pieces are not pictures, they are the machinery of which to make pictures - a picture organ." Tension arises when the spectator constantly experiences a symbolic function in the isolated elements, a function that at the same time feels very strong and yet is illusive, uncertain, ambiguous. The spectator gazes into a strange theatre-machinery in which everything seems familiar but all the functions are put out of action. The scenery (a broken gate on hinges) is suspended in a vacuum like the figures in The Planetarium. Reality is shattered, reduced to fragments. All the same, it does not feel right to interpret the picture as an apocalyptic bogey-picture. The Cold War is also a world in itself, a work of art with its own laws and rules of play, that first and foremost function within the work of art (as a political analysis The Cold War is all too vague to be able to function as a concrete model). The pieces on a chess-board can also seem to lack connection with each other to the uninitiated, but he who has penetrated the secrets of the game sees invisible links between the pieces. The same invisible "electric arc" unites the elements in The Cold War into a coherent vi sion, perhaps frightening and mysterious, but also filled with poetry and a strange combination of warmth and coldness, humour and melancholy.
For me, The Cold War is one of the most important works in Fahlstrom's production. Other game-paintings - Young Dr. Benway, Sylvie, Eddy (Sylvie's brother) in the Desert are a further development along this line, but perhaps they lack the visual striking-power and the complicated structure and pattern of relations of The Cold War.
A development of the game technique, yet another step away from art, nearer to life, can already be discerned in Fahlstrom's production. In Dr. Schweitzer 's Last Mission (which is not yet completed) the pieces are enlarged (the largest piece is a six-metre-long puppet representing a Swedish film star) and the work will be an exhibition in itself, will fill a whole gallery. Fahlstrom has published a "check-list" to go with this painting in the form of a game in which four players represent the USA, Soviet Russia, the neutral states and China. Dr. Schweitzer's Last Mission is without doubt Fahlstrom's biggest undertaking so far, a "word picture" that, with its intellectual and artistically creative intentions, puts most contemporary painting in the shade.
That Oyvind Fahistrom has not been recognized earlier is perhaps due to the fact that we find it more difficult to accept an artist who does not keep to his own genre - who is at one and the same time dramatist, poet, philosopher and pictorial artist - than we do to accept an artist who is only concerned with problems connected with painting. But just this crossing of the boundaries, this nullifying of traditional genres, is one of the most important things an artist can do today, when a constantly increasing specialization threatens definitely and irretrievably to isolate art from the community. Oyvind Fahlstrom's paintings can help to break this isolation. What he has to say concerns us all because his art is not specialized, nor is it "art for art's sake," nor does it aim to please. His paintings are rather commentaries on life than "art" and it is for just this reason that they have an effect.
Art International, Summer 1966: 49-52
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