Oyvind Fahlstrom's Eddie In The Desert

Oyvind Fahlstrom’s 1965 Eddie (Sylvie’s Brother) in the Desert is just one of many different artworks that are on display in the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. This piece of artwork is part of a gallery on display titled The New Contemporary. It features an extraordinary amount of art works ranging from the years of 1945 to today. Fahlstrom’s piece features ink and tempera on wood along with twenty cutouts on vinyl. In the early 1960’s he began to make what he called “variable” paintings, in which a figure’s limbs or other discrete objects were segmented and jointed. This made them into art that could be moved and helped to implicate the viewer. In Fahlstrom’s Eddie (Sylvie’s Brother) in the Desert, the artist uses this variable collage in which different components can be arranged by the viewer to create different compositions and narratives, with all the components eluding to war and conformity. Fahlstrom’s piece contains many simple colors. He uses almost a pale yellow as his background and I begin to wonder if it is to depict the desert from the name of the piece. There are pale blues, reds, browns, greens, and tans. There is black and white and the black almost seems to stand out the …show more content…
In the one that is depicted at the Art Institute in Chicago, these pictures are placed together to tell that story of war and conformity. The artwork that was featured around this one also told similar stories. Each picture in Fahlstrom’s work tells its own little story that all tie back together to the message that war and conformity is a negative thing. The way he utilizes cutouts that are segmented and jointed only help to strengthen the message of his work. Even though viewers are able to change the artwork and move it to however they would like it the themes of war and conformity will always