Fundamental Feedback: Öyvind Fahlström's Kisses Sweeter than Wine

Abstract

The article analyzes Öyvind Fahlström's (1928–1976) performance Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which took place as part of the festival 9 Evenings: art&engineering in New York (1966). It situates the performance's use of multimedia material as continuations of earlier investigations into manipulating language that played a central part in the artist's practice of both visual art and concrete poetry. It further argues that in Kisses Sweeter Than Wine such manipulations form a series of ruptures into the wider circulation of mass-media images, ruptures that locate Fahlström's use of media images in relation to both Pop Art and the beginning media activism under the Vietnam War.