© Sture Johannesson 1967, 2008

«…Swedish         Sture Johannesson © 1967

‘One can demand that a cultural product fulfils one or more of these criteria; that it intensifies sensory experience, creates knowledge of mankind’s situation, eases human relations and inherits a certain general validity.’
(Nordal Åkerman/Olle Svenning: A Socialist View on Culture)

  Today, four cultural products exist that have these four characteristics; the psychedelic drugs LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and hashish. The cultural worker’s most important task in the future is to spread information about these matters. Psychedelic drugs mean freedom, equality and brotherhood.

  ‘Joy of life! He saw it clearly. One should sell joy of life, not kitchen hardware or brown envelopes. Joy of life demanded love as its partner, and this marriage gave birth to ethics, the good and the right acts.’
(Sven Fagerberg: The costume ball)

  Freedom is not an imperishable phraseological wash-wear costume one puts on in elementary school, freedom is a lump of hashish in tinfoil, the freedom you cannot hide in your boots or underwear without the police finding it, freedom is a ball of tinfoil one squeezes in one’s hand and is ready to throw away when power intervenes, the abused knowledge in society, knowing that power owns truth and that truth is something a group of people can agree upon through democratic working methods and majority principles. The cultural worker must be an artist with no claim to be taken seriously, reliability comes in the form of a cop’s badge. One should sell hashish, not oil paintings or theatre tickets.

  ‘Communication is everything that brings people together. The communicative field is the in-between space. The in-between space between people. With this we can bid the beholder farewell.’
(Jens Jørgen Thorsen, Paletten 3/66)

  So, truth is something upon which a group of people can agree. But truth’s field lies between legislatures. In the interstice. With this we can bid the prophets farewell. Artists who appear in the galleries as conformist and disciplined members of a parliament for aesthetic theories and ideologies, not dead, but self-amputated. A struggle about gimmicks, rivalry about reviews of critics in watchmen’s uniforms, intellectual hair-splitting and a folksy roll in the hay. Culture distribution? Society’s interest is to administer art and culture, to portion out what is considered safe or useless. The manifestation of consciousness is a kind of creation, all such things are truth that has the same value no matter how it is articulated, academically or colloquially. A human being with psychedelic experience recognises his or her karma, an original universal truth and human authenticity, in art, poetry, music, theatre and literature, in situations between person and person, between person and thing, between person and divinity. ‘Everything is holy’. (Allen Ginsberg)

  Escapism? Not to accept that inner reality is just as real as the outer is a serious mistake made by people who have never tried or failed to achieve this. Dont’t talk about it — take it! Imagination is just a deeper reality. Drug addiction? William Burroughs refers to the Naked Lunch — a frozen moment when everybody sees what is sitting at the fork’s point:
  ‘Hashish works like a guide to areas in the psyche that one later can return to without taking the drug, that is one can stop smoking hashish when one has become familiar with those landscapes which the drug has opened up the road to — just as it is the case with other psychedelic drugs.’
  Alienation? As an artist with an income below the breadline I have been sized up on estimation and penally taxed so that it is impossible for me to work for my living as employed in any company because of sequestered income. This while the military and economic powers that be need not to account for or even stick down the service envelope with the big bribes.

‘How many dark hours / I’ve been thinking of this
that Jesus Christ was / betrayed by a kiss
but I can’t think for you / you have to decide
whether Judas Iscariot had / GOD on his side’. (Bob Dylan)

  Communication? Wave your hands! Not only sound and light but all matter manifests itself in waves. Communication is waves. We can wave to each other. Wave your hands!