Word: fahlstroms
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...grotesque nude on a sewing machine inhabits a macabre room furnished like a brothel. New York's Paul Thek shows a roomful of chunks of dead flesh sculpted in wax. Italy's Michelangelo Pistoletto presents sarcophagi and chest-high chamber pots. Sweden's Oyvind Fahlstrom is represented by Firing Squad, a plastic snowbank filled with cryptic symbols including L.B.J. on a cross, bugs and butterflies...
Modern society has become so complex and automated that generals, businessmen, and even matchmakers use computers to plot the effects of variable factors on projected campaigns. Now to join such "war games," "management games" and "love games," Sweden's intense and cerebral Oyvind Fahlstrom, 38, has come along to invent something that could be called the "art game...
...problem, as Fahlstrom sees it, is that the world has so many facets and variables that no given picture really adds up to an image of reality. His answer is a series of cutouts that can be moved at will since they are all attached to a field background by magnets. Sitting . . . Blocks, on display in Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery last week, is composed of large blocks, painted with splashily ambiguous hieroglyphs, that can be piled one atop the other or lined up to please the whim of the collector. Sylvie, on the other hand, is a giant...
...Franklin Konigsberg of New York City, who own Sylvie, are supposed to take Fahlstrom's original arrangement of these items on the panel and rearrange them to suit their personality or mood. Explains Fahlstrom: "I want them to participate in it, to interpret it. In the present situation, people want to discover themselves. They live less and less by a set of dogmas, political or religious. They probe the experience and standards to which they are exposed and take only what is useful to them...
...Fahlstrom sees a similarity between his techniques and the blank scores of Composer John Cage, who likes to give his performers a chance to improvise, and to the plays of Dramatist Peter Weiss, who allows theatrical directors to stage his dramas in widely varying versions and lengths. Still, it would take more talent than the average collector possesses to "participate" in one of Fahlstrom's masterpieces, Dr. Schweitzer's Last Mission. It consists of eight painted metal boxes, ten cutout boards and 50 magnetic cutouts, many of them hung by nylon threads from the walls and ceiling...