Öyvind Fahlström: An Evolving Artistic Style
New book by Ludovic Bernhardt, published by Naima
Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) was a major Swedish artist of the second half of the 20th century. He engaged with the major avant-garde artistic movements of his time—in Sweden, the United States, and France— with a rare creativity that established him as a pioneer of contemporary artistic, technological, and textual upheavals. This essay explores the dynamics of change in writing, drawing on this artist and looking beyond: the aim is to understand how writing acquires, in his work, a fundamentally radiant identity. Spanning poetry, painting, installation, performance, theater, film, radical play, interactive art, critical cartography, and new media, the reticular mobility of Fahlströmian writing confers upon it a truly mutant character.
This writing draws upon the philosophies of Nietzsche, Mauthner, Deleuze, Guattari, and Flusser; the literature of Kafka; the thinkers of the Nordic avant-garde; art and media theorists; as well as the works of numerous contemporary artists. It allows us to rethink the upheavals in art in light of the technological and political challenges of our time. With Fahlström, a true form of “writing in resistance” is thus invented—an artistic and theoretical process that is indispensable for understanding today’s aesthetic revolutions.
