Word: fahlstroms
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...deplore my incapacity to find out what is going on, what life and the world are about, through the confusion of propaganda, communications, language, time . . ." Thus Oyvind Fahlstrom, whose subject is that very confusion. Now 42, Fahlstrom migrated to New York from Sweden ten years ago. His images draw on the flood of underground comic strips, random violence, hot news and crisis in which America has saturated him. But he is an original, independent of schools and styles...
Cockroach and Crucifix. Typically, a Fahlstrom work is made of units: tiny cutout images of anything from a banana to Richard Nixon's head, from a bamboo stockade to a pile of feces, drawn with tightly focused and quite deliberate clumsiness and fixed to the base by magnets. The profusion and inventiveness of these units is dazzling. To scan Firing Squad (1968), is like spinning the selector of a TV set past images that suggest disaster but can barely be read in time-cockroaches, a panther, a G.I. doll on skis, a Bobby Kennedy headline, a crucified Lyndon Johnson...
...Fahlstrom's work has always been pervaded by a cold, lurid sense of breakdown-pleasure and nausea, fragmentation, calamity. Underneath it, the artist's political stance has firmed and grown more explicit. No matter how one may shove around the toy images of rockets, dollar signs and hardhats in Pentagon Diptych (1970), they still propose a visual indictment of bigotry and militarism...
...Fahlstrom's most recent productions are brightly colored Monopoly boards on which players can practice CIA takeovers and World Bank manipulations. In their way, they are as dour and simplistic as any Weatherman communiqué, and they lack the verve and pullulating fantasy of earlier Fahlstroms. They are participatory posters, meant as ironic distress signals. Granted their bald look, it can still be said that no painter has approached the radical dissatisfactions of the times with a blacker or edgier...
Strictly speaking, the option in most of these cases is to enter into the fun-or leave it alone. But several of the objects have been so intricately put together that they offer the viewers some real variants to work with. Oyvind Fahlstrom sets up panels dotted with comic-strip and newsclip images mounted on magnetized blocks; these can be moved around at will. The result, Fahlstrom suggests, is to produce the "elusive-mysterious quality of a never-fixed work of art." Gerald Oster's Instant Self-Skiagraphy permits the viewer-participant to make shadow pictures with his hand...