Sture Johannesson: The untouchable

by Aryan on September 8th, 2008

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

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.