"The Trumpet in the Bottom" : The Uncanny in Öyvind Fahlström’s Work

• Öyvind Fahlström (1928–76) commenced as a surrealist author in the late 40s, writing several large and unpublished manuscripts as e.g. ”The Trumpet in the Bottom”, but soon turned to avant-garde art becoming a driving force in the Swedish neo-avant-garde. In 1953 he wrote the world’s first manifesto for concrete poetry, inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète. In the late 50s he became a visual artist and later wrote radio plays, directed movies and arranged performances. During his lifetime one of the main sources for inspiration was the debris of everyday life, and consequently he thematizes the uncanny in his political art of the 60s and 70s. Fahlström uses the uncanny to display the return of the repressed in everyday life: scatology, pornography, the monstrous, the body, the materiality of the artwork, media and popular culture etc, according to Schelling’s comment: “Unheimlich sei alles, was ein Geheimnis, im Verborgenen bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist”. His later work therefore previsions Nicholas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics as a (political) uncovering of everyday life. In my paper I will discuss Fahlström’s oeuvre from the early texts, via his radioplays and films, to the visual art of the 70s.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Comparative literature

Litteraturvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)