“The Trumpet in the Bottom”

Abstract

Abstract Öyvind Fahlström (1928–76) began as a surrealist at the end of the 1940s, and among others wrote the unpublished poetry collection “The Trumpet in the Bottom”. In 1953, he wrote the world’s first manifesto for concrete poetry, inspired by Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, and soon became a driving force in the Swedish and international neo-avant-garde. In the mid-1950s he turned to the visual arts, and later he also wrote radio plays, directed movies and arranged performances and happenings. He showed an extraordinary sensibility for the uncanny in his selection of “life material” for his art, thus uncovering the return of the repressed in everyday life and popular culture, in the form of scatology, pornography, the monstrous, the body, the materiality of the artwork and media, and so on. In his art, this uncanny life material was turned into political statements. In my article the discussion is exemplified from different genres of Fahlström’s œuvre, from his early texts and radio plays, to his visual art.

Keywords

• Öyvind Fahlström
• The Uncanny
• Avant-Garde
• Concrete Poetry
• Surrealism
• det kusliga