Becks: The Road to Ruin?
London’s beer sponsored art prize Beck's Futures exhibition opened this week at the ICA with a presentation of work by the thirteen short-listed artists. Olivia Plender’s 'The Road to Ruin (for Oyvind Fahlstrom)' particularly struck a cord for its material and ideological homage to the comic-strip, object installations of one of Swewden’s most respected twentieth century artists. In his own reverential work ‘Meatball Curtain (For R. Crumb)’ made in 1969 Fahlstrom used flat cut out figures to depict an episode in one of Robert Crumb's comics in which meatballs falling from the sky cause a revelation of intense happiness in anyone they hit. Plender has been making her own comic book explorations into ideas of artistic genius, also in reference to Fahlstrom’s illustrational, pop style that he used to communicate his belief that art could be both playful and dramatize social and political concerns. Plender's installation nicely situates the sponsors product in a Victorian cautionary tale of the parallel paths of temperance or ruin.