www.sturejohannesson.com — © Aryan Kaganof, The Times

Sture Johannesson’s radical art has made him an outcast in Sweden. Can his comeback exhibition rehabilitate him?

Sture Johannesson grips his cigarette tightly and draws from it as if it’s his last drag. The cigarette is tiny in his massive hand; smoke curls up and spirals into the end of his snow-white, pig-tailed hair, drawn back tightly from a forehead deeply creased with lines of concentration.
  My camera is running; I’ve got a tight frame that has tilted from the cigarette up to his face and back again for over four minutes of painful silence. I’ve asked him about his years in a Swedish state orphanage — years that fuelled his passionately anti-establishmentarian approach to art, but also years that taught him to rock the boat with great subtlety and humour.
  Suddenly Johannesson looks up at me, directly into the camera lens. “I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about those days now. There’s too much. It’s impossible to find a place to start.”
  Let’s start right now. It’s summer 2008 and Johannesson has been invited by the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, to participate in a group show called Autostop, which will take place all over the country throughout the holiday season. Works of art will travel across Sweden, carried by hitchhikers, the idea being to break open the sanctity of the gallery, of the museum as mausoleum, and inject some fun into the sterile Swedish art world.
  Johannesson’s contribution is a ruthlessly scathing re-enactment of the Brillo Box scandal that rocked the Malmö Konsthall in the late-’90s, when it was discovered that the gallery was manufacturing fake Warhols. But, instead of producing the replicas of the Brillo Boxes himself, Johannesson has arranged for a classroom full of 10-year-olds at a primary school in the seaside town of Skanör to handpaint the “fakes” as part of their official art assignment.
  The 73-year-old artist explains his tactics: “Violence doesn’t pay in resistance; but playfulness can work — that is something I learnt and experienced in the orphanage. And now, as an old man, I still practice this technique.”
  Johannesson opens up about the orphanage in our second interview, held in the university town of Lund.
  Working in the kitchen of the orphanage, he discovered that sedatives were mixed in with the butter in order to keep the kids docile and easy to control, he claims. Of course, butter was immediately removed from his list of dietary necessities.
  Johannesson’s orphanage years forged an attitude of resistance to state control that, a decade later in the ’60s, saw him and his wife, Ann-Charlotte, start the legendary Cannabis Gallery in Malmö. Here his situationist and Dada influences fused with his reading of the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, to produce the radical psychedelic poster series that made him a counter-culture icon — as well as public enemy number one of the conservative Social Democrat state.

The poster he designed for the planned February 1969 exhibition at the prestigious Lund Konsthall created a furore. Entitled “Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness!”, the poster foregrounds a naked woman smoking an elongated hash pipe; next to her is a marijuana leaf symbol.
  It’s an image that would have made perfect sense in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury or swinging London’s Soho, but it wasn’t time for the Summer of Love in Sweden yet. The gallery was closed down, the board fired the director and Johannesson was ordered by the police to destroy all 1000 copies of the poster. It was a scandal the likes of which the Swedish art world had not yet seen.
  In another country the event may have rocketed Johannesson into the A-league. In conformist Sweden, the galleries closed ranks and Johannesson found it impossible to have his colourful and socially relevant work exhibited.

  When I interview the director of the Malmö Konsthall, Jacob Fabricius, he is at a loss to explain Johannesson’s peculiar history. “I’m Danish, and think Sture is a really great artist. If he had been in any other country but Sweden, he would have exhibited a lot more; made a lot more money. He is much better known outside Sweden.”
  During our third interview, Johannesson pulls out an archived box of letters dating back to the orphanage years. He’s kept in contact with other survivors of this harsh period; says he has all the documentation necessary to back up his grim tale of how the ostensibly nurturing social state treated those who were dependent on her.
  He talks about beatings that were commonplace; about psychological torture; medical experiments. It’s creepy information and, as I walk through the radically segregated ghettoes of Malmö, it seems ironic that Sweden profiled itself as an anti-apartheid voice in the United Nations in the ’60s and ’70s and still claims for itself a position on the cutting-edge of progressive politics.
  In 1976, the police close down an exhibition at the Stockholm KulturHuset, where Johannesson has made an installation in homage to Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the anti-capitalist resistance movement, Rote Armee Fraktion. A dark cloud hangs over Johannesson for decades. He becomes an untouchable.
  But, after decades of neglect by the official Swedish art circuit, Johannesson is finally considered worthy of rehabilitation in 2004 — after all, times have apparently changed and psychedelia hardly seems as threatening as it did in 1968.
  In May 2004, the re-opened Lund Konsthall presents a complete retrospective of Johannesson’s career; and then, inexplicably, maddeningly, the police raid the premises the day before the opening and confiscate one of the show’s central exhibits — a display of (legal) hemp plants. Johannesson is devastated: After all, he had, he says, worked with the police to make sure everything was strictly legal. The police give no explanation for their actions.
  Now, as Autostop begins, it seems for a moment that Johannesson is going to break out of the peculiar exile that has been his lot for 40 years. But then the recurring pattern of authoritarian intervention in this iconoclastic artist’s career manifests itself again.
  At the end of June 2008, Johannesson is ordered into hospital for acute surgery on the arteries of both legs. “And, just after I left the hospital, I took a tour through the Malmö Konsthall to check how my project description was published. And yes, as usual, it was completely washed out; only four silly meaningless questions and my answer were left. Everything else about the project was censored,” he says.
  There’s a bitter tinge to his voice as Johannesson recounts how he’s had enough of Sweden, how he doesn’t want to die holding a Swedish passport, doesn’t want to be claimed by posterity as a “great Swedish artist”: “I’d rather change nationality, become Danish.”
  My last meeting with Sture Johannesson is in a harbourside coffee bar in Malmö. We discuss his love of the Sex Pistols.
  “I interviewed Johnny Rotten when the Sex Pistols toured Sweden in 1977. He sang, ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.’ My own take on that is, ‘Don’t know where I’m going, but I know how to get there.’”
  The interview lasts two hours. My final question is about the “medical experiments” in the orphanage. Johannesson describes how a swimming pool was filled up and allowed to go bracken; how the children were forced to swim in it — their resulting ailments monitored by the orphanage staff. My camera zooms in to a close-up of his face: “Were you forced to swim in that pool?” He stares back at me. He doesn’t flinch.
  “We all were.”
  When we shake hands goodbye, his grip like steel, his eyes steady, with just the slightest hint of a smile, he gives me a final piece of advice: “It’s important not to give up.”

¹ DEFIANT DOYEN: The iconic Sture Johannesson, 73, features in Autostop, an irreverent exhibition set to travel across Sweden.

² NUDE AWAKENING: The poster that rocked the Swedish art world in the ’60s.