Painting: Games of Art

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.”

The 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 panel mounted with dozens of magnetized vinyl and metal cutouts, including a head of Sylvie Vartan (the French pop singer), a headless female nude (with movable arms and legs), a Negro head, Clark Kent’s shirt being ripped open (by Clark Kent’s hands), four tibias, twelve zeros, a vortex, a circular saw-blade, a fire, a splash of water, an esophagus, a stomach, an American eagle’s head with a Russian babushka wrapped around it, and an unmade bed.

Mr. and Mrs. 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. It took Fahlstrom three years to dream it up. And for the present show, where it occupies most of a room, the artist needed two helpers and three days to install it.