Sketch for Kidnapping Kissinger 1974

Oyvind Fahlstrom made this work called ‘Sketch for Kidnapping Kissinger’ sometime in the mid-20th century using pen and ink on paper. You can see it’s full of energetic mark-making. All these tiny, frantic scribbles kind of remind you that artmaking is often about working through a problem. Look closely, and you see the surface teeming with textual and figurative fragments. The paper looks like a site of intense mental activity. The lines are thin, almost like a nervous system stretched across the page. The red and blue squares give the work a sense of rhythm, like musical notations on a score. They are floating and scattered, as are the various figures, like an information overload that feels very contemporary. Fahlstrom's work is often associated with Pop Art, but to me, it also brings to mind the obsessive drawings of someone like Adolf Wölfli. Both invite us to consider art not as a window onto a single truth, but as a space of endless possibilities.