Sven-Åke Johansson
Osram
Exhibition February 7 – March 8, 2025
© Christina Marx
Let’s imagine, without any apparent reason, the brand name OSRAM in human-sized
letters, formed from powdery, vaporous metallic fluorescent tubes – tubes that play
a central role in this exhibition. Picturing this, our gaze shifts away from the product
“light source” and its long history, instead becoming all the more attuned to the
physical presence of the five letters in space:
O S R A M
The front part of the word cuts through the air and winds along the wall, embracing
its curvature with opulent, lavish sweeps that set the tone. The rear part, by contrast,
takes shape as a staccato – sharp, chiseled, and rigid, with edges and angles where
organic form once prevailed. It’s a composition well suited to an artist whose very
name is shaped by accents, pauses, compressions, and stretches – a name with
refined rhythm, a composition in real time.
Sven-Åke Johansson
Whenever one speaks of light, they must inevitably speak about fire. And to speak of
fire is to acknowledge its creator. The myth of the Titan Prometheus, who shaped
mankind from ashes and defended it against the jealous wrath of the gods, is
perhaps one of the most well-known of antiquity. Prometheus, the outcast, chained
to the Caucasus for having created human beings as “adapted incompetents,” while
Zeus and the rest of his divine brood seek to drown them in a great flood.
Prometheus reveals to humankind the secret of fire, having long understood the
fundamental equation: “No fire, no light, no sustenance, no culture.” Prometheus
risks himself for humanity.
Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad, …
(Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Prometheus, 1774)
Another Promethean figure is Sven-Åke Johansson, who has always remained a near
god-like architect of the world around him. Before Johansson—born in 1943 in
Mariestad, Sweden—could and would become a defining figure in Free or (New) New
Music, Free Jazz, and improvisation, the world itself first had to develop in a certain
direction.
In the wake of the horrors that the Nazis had brought upon the world, an urgent
desire to rekindle the revolutions of modernity arose—this time better, more radical.
Schönberg became Stockhausen. Eisenstein gave way to the jump cut. Pre-war Dada
evolved into Fluxus and performance art—a fertile ground in which a deep aversion
to the bourgeois traditional behavior of stagnating artists could thrive. It brewed and
boiled; the happening became a new art form, bringing with it an idiomatic sound
found only where believers in the new, true art gathered. The beats of the time
clashed, each vying with the other, leading to yet another parallel development:
Swing, detouring through Bebop, became Free Jazz again. Dance music became
Johansson, Brötzmann (whose last major exhibition also took place at JUBG in 2021),
and the “Machine Gun”—roaring and rattling, wanting everything but peace with the
status quo. Of this sonic menace, the Cologne-based author Felix Klopotek wrote:
“Hardly anyone has taken the ‘classical’ free jazz drumming—with its pulsating
[…] rhythms—to such perfection, and pushed improvisation to the very limits
of expression through theatrical gestures, the use of accordion, voice, and
cardboard percussion [like Sven-Åke Johansson].”
It was never about the linear writing of history—something was always happening
somewhere, and not happening elsewhere. Arriving in West Berlin, Johansson helped
shape the German avant-garde e.g. as part of the Zodiac Art Lab. He never adorned
himself with academic credentials but remained steadfastly self-taught: “With an
almost childlike joy in appropriation.” That pioneering spirit, that sense of adventure,
has remained to this day, as he captures objects and machines in graphite
(occasionally enriched with charcoal)—surely earning Faber-Castell a small fortune,
he says with a grin.
A figure just as Prometheus envisioned: capable of learning, curious, always in
motion. For one thing has been certain for more than half a century: wherever
Johansson appears, things move—more so than anywhere else. He carries electric
energy as he ponders technology, objects, and the machines of modernity. Weren’t
the helicopters and tractors he sketched in earlier series closely related to the war
machines of the two world wars? Johansson sought the inner sound of things—often
far louder than what was audible from the outside.
And even OSRAM’s fluorescent tubes have an inner sound. “Some say,” Johansson
notes, “that the tubes sing.” To demonstrate this, Johansson—perhaps even following
in the footsteps of Bruce Nauman—takes the fluorescent tubes down from the
ceilings of open-plan offices and gallery spaces, focusing his gaze on anchor points,
capacitors, cathode-anode connections, on the electricity that makes these things
glow so beautifully – or, to the dismay of their owners, sometimes flicker. He expands
on details, zooms in, then sets the tubes and their apparatus in motion, making them
almost dance, bend, and arch.
There he is again—Johansson, the straight yet unstraight pulse-giver of the past sixty
years. Once more, he sets the rhythm. Once more, he brings the light. One almost
wants to say: Prometheus, break free from the Caucasus and join this exhibition, put
the record on, listen, watch the glowing tubes which shine without electricity, and
you will see: it was all worth it.
Lars Fleischmann, January 2025