www.sturejohannesson.com — © Karl Erickson

“Psychedelia keeps going; its resistance never becomes rationalized in static conditions or concepts.”
— Lars Bang Larsen, “Struggles and Vibes”

Sture Johannesson was an active ‘cultural producer’ (as he prefers to be titled) in the Swedish underground culture in the 1960s and ‘70s. Through his psychedelic poster making, gallery and event organization, he proved to be as difficult for proper leftists as for the establishment. Johannesson and his cohorts merged a wilful blend of anarchism, whimsy, and the hippie ethos, their goal being “to change consciousness in order to change reality,” as Lars Bang Larsen writes in his recent monograph on the artist. This became particularly political as Johannesson sought to bring this spirit up from the underground and to the mainstream.

  Conversely, psychedelia’s current return to fashion in the art world seems to be content only with splashes of color and an overabundance of media imagery. These accumulations don’t add up to a greater experience, and much of it lacks the burst of energy and hysterical blend of messages that accompanied psychedelia in its original incarnation. Instead, the result is a dispersal of energies and messages, an irony-laden flattening out of experience and numbness. It seems the desire to expand the range of human sensory realms has passed, and all that is left is a faded rainbow of historic novelty. This situation could be remedied if Sture Johannesson’s work received greater recognition in the canon of psychedelic art. Larsen’s essays, coupled with plates of Johannesson’s work are an excellent start toward this goal.

  Johannesson’s early psychedelic posters differed from the more mainstream work of his American and English contemporaries of the 1960s. Artists such as Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and Hapshash And The Coloured Coat obscured language, prioritizing its pictorial qualities and making it a secret code to the initiated. Johannesson, however, brought words and language to the foreground, emphasizing the messages he presented. His influences included Constructivism and propaganda posters, in comparison to the more decorative influence of Art Nouveau on other psychedelic poster artists. Instead of trying to maintain a separate counter culture, Johannesson’s goal was to enlighten and radically alter the minds of the general populace.

  Johannesson was an instigator, advocating action and change. Larsen writes that Johannesson’s brand of “Radical psychedelia is hallucination technology that aims to make a lack of rationality in the world productive.” His posters and exhibitions frequently confronted the establishment head on, in one case nearly causing the ruin of Lund’s Konsthall as he mobilized the Swedish art community against the institute’s censorship of his commissioned exhibition poster, Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness!

  Lars Bang Larsen’s essays in this volume are extraordinary and insightful views on the roles psychedelia and counter culture can play in society. In examining Johannesson’s production in the past and his transmogrification via computer imaging technology, he re-opens the opportunity for artists with psychedelic inclinations to move far beyond kitsch and teenage bubblegum graphics. Contemporary psychedelia doesn’t necessarily need to take on overt political themes, but it must act as if something is at stake. It is time to look through the psychotomimetic surface of the psychedelic past. This way, we can learn from the lessons of Johannesson and his ilk who acted on their belief that there were realms of experience beyond what we know, and that rubbing up against them could alter us all.