Robert Crumb and Öyvind Fahlström

In 1969, the Brazilian-born, Scandinavian artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976) created one of his most ambitious and important works, Meatball Curtain for R. Crumb, commissioned for Maurice Tuchman’s famous “Art and Technology” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A large installation, it consists of an ensemble of flat, silhouetted figures composed of Plexiglas, magnets, plastic and metal cut-outs, spread across the gallery floor, yet standing upright. Its title derives from a story by Crumb first published in Zap Comix #0 (1967) about meatballs that mythically rain down from the sky and give everyone they hit into a sense of ecstatic, bliss. Fahlström described the work as his “homage to Robert Crumb, to a great American artist.” In this chapter, Clarence Burton Sheffield, Jr. analyzes how Robert Crumb was a touchstone for Öyvind Fahlström, and how Crumb provides a key critical lens by which to understand Fahlström’s enigmatic art and the broader relationship between Crumb’s comics and the discourses of contemporary art. Fahlström’s works resist pigeonholing and straightforward categorization in much the same way that Crumb has continuously worked across the borders of different media, celebrating hybridity, experimentation, and subversion.