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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 unbearably painful silence. I’ve asked him to talk about his years in the 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 and shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about those days right 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 new Director of the Malmo Konsthall to participate in a group show called AUTO STOP which will take place all over Sweden throughout the holiday season. Works of art will travel across the country, 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 Malmo Konsthall in the late nineties when it was discovered that the Gallery was manufacturing fake Warhols. But instead of producing the replicas of the Brillo Boxes himself, Sture has arranged for a classroom full of ten year olds at a primary school in the seaside town of Skanor to hand paint the “fakes” as part of their official art assignment.

The 73 year old’s face suddenly breaks into an impish and utterly charming grin, “It’s the best art work of mine that I never made.” He is excited about this new chapter in his heavily censored career. When I interview the Director of the Malmo 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.”

Johannesson continues his story about the orphanage in our second interview session that takes place in the university town of Lund. I’ve brought extra blank tapes with me, alerted to the silence-filled speaking patterns of this extraordinary man whose every word seems to cost him pain. Working in the kitchen of the orphanage Johannesson discovered that sedatives were mixed in with the butter in order to keep the kids docile and easy to control. Of course butter was immediately removed from his list of dietary neccessities. A decade later, in the early sixties, Sture and his wife Ann-Charlotte started the legendary Cannabis Gallery in Malmo, the third largest city of Sweden, where Johannesson’s Situationist and Dada influences fused with his reading of 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 Underground Art 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 board of the gallery fired the director, the gallery was closed down 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 never seen. In any other country the event would have rocketed Johannesson into the A-league. In conformist Sweden the galleries closed ranks and Sture found it impossible to have his colourful and socially relevant work exhibited.

Our third interview session is once again in Johannesson’s house in Skanor. He 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, has all the documentation necessary to back up his grim tale of how the ostensibly nurturing social state in fact treated those who were dependent on her. He talks about beatings that were commonplace, about psychological torture, and most horrific, about medical experiments that closely resemble what we associate with the Nazi period. His voice is level and measured and his eyes gaze directly into my camera while he speaks, “The Worlds first Race-Biological Institute was founded 1922 at Uppsala University. The German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Race Biology came later and the whole project culminated in the Holocaust! ”

It’s creepy information and as I walk through the radically segregated ghettoes of Malmo that remind me of the apartheid South Africa I grew up in it’s ironic to remember how Sweden profiled itself as an anti-apartheid voice in the United Nations in the sixties and seventies and still claims for itself a position on the cutting edge of progressive politics.

But the story of Sture Johannesson is evidence of a very different Sweden, a country that has more in common with the Jackboot dictatorships of Communist Eastern Europe. 1976 sees the Police closing down a group exhibition at the Stockholm KulturHuset where Johannesson has made an installation in homage to Ulrike Meinhof, a co-founder member of the anti-capitalist resistance movement Rote Armee Fraktion. Despite the Swedish state’s rhetoric of democracy, when it comes to the crunch, real dissidence is not tolerated at all. A dark cloud hangs over Johannesson for decades. He becomes an untouchable.

But after decades of neglect from the official Swedish art circuit, Johannesson is considered worthy of rehabilitation - after all times have apparently changed and psychedelia hardly seems as threatening to the state as it did in 1968. The re-opened Lund Konsthall presents a complete retrospective of Johannesson’s career in May 2004, and then, inexplicably, maddeningly, the police raid the premises the day before the opening and confiscate one of the central exhibits of the show, a display of (legal) hemp plants. Johannesson is devastated, he had after all phoned the police with his intentions and cleared the event with them, had made sure that everything in the exhibit was strictly legal. The police give no explanation for their actions, nobody is called to order, no apology is made.

There is 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 would rather change nationality, become Danish!”.

Johannesson explains his tactics, “Violence doesn’t pay in resistance and attacks on the authorities in power, but humour and
playfulness can work - that is something I learnt and experienced in the orphanage. And now, grown up and as an old man, I still practice this technique.”

As the AUTO STOP show begins it seems for a moment that Johannesson is going to break out of the peculiar exile within Sweden that his been his lot for forty years. But then the recurring pattern of authoritarian intervention with 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. Sture takes up the story, “and just after I left the hospital I took a tour through the 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.”

My final meeting with Sture Johannesson is in a harbourside coffee bar in Malmo. 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 orphanage. What kind of experiments were performed on the kids? 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 unflinchingly, “We all were.”

Sture Johannesson’s orphanage years forged an attitude of resistance to state authority and control that is unbroken to this day. When we shake hands goodbye, his grip as firm as 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.”

aryan kaganof

(an abridged version of this article first appeared in the sunday times lifestyle of 7 september 2008

more detailed information about sture johannesson on his website