It was with mixed feelings that I visited Jan Håfström’s “Heart of Darkness” exhibition at Liljevalchs art museum, since I never have managed to take the slightest interest in that artist. The pop-art he did in the late 1960s may have been controversial at the time. I bet other artists truly hated him for not using his art for political reasons, helping the revolution and all that.

But today? The museum was virtually empty one hour after the opening. There was a gloomy feeling in the rooms, which were filled with large paintings and installations inspired by the Phantom, an American comic book hero who became extremely popular (as Fantomen) in Sweden.

There is one painting featuring Phantom’s dog Devil. It really sucks; its paws are neatly curled in, the easiest way to paint. An artist who does that probably has great difficulties with hands and toes too, so avoiding them is a great strategy. If fingers end up looking like carrots, hide them. But dog paws, they’re simple. This reminds me of a previous exhibition of the Swedish artist Bror Hjorth and Alberto Giacometti, who were supposedly friends in Paris of the 1920s. Come on, Hjorth didn’t speak French and was half-deaf. He painted in a naive style. Talk about carrot-fingers! What if Giacometti’s words about Hjorth having a sense of volume was simply a polite way of saying he was lazy and unskilled? We sure do see what we want to see.

I never quite understood what was so fascinating about the Phantom; perhaps the fact that he couldn’t die made him less interesting. A super-hero needs some vulnerability, a weak side or Kryptonite to create excitement. There is also a figure in the comic (and in Håfström’s paintings) called Mr Walker, the alter ego of the Phantom, and perhaps of the artist, too. A dull guy with a big dog.

Much of Håfström’s art creates a feeling of doomsday, of death and violence in mysterious surroundings. These are things that little boys are often obsessed by– perhaps a way for the artist to try to reach a new audience? Something for the men and little boys, or the little boys in men.

Middle-aged women, the ones who keep our cultural world spinning, don’t take much interest in these boy nostalgia things. By taking “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad as the exhibition title, we understand that this exhibition is supposed to reveal the darker sides of human nature, like the monstrous acts we Westerners did in order to conquer the primitive natives, as we saw it, in Africa. But for some reason this doesn’t work for me. I don’t have a relation to the comics Håfström read and never had an obsession with violence and death.

Maybe we are supposed to think about what men are supposed to be, the non-vulnerable heroes, with Håfström as the alter ego, Mr Walker, the good guy, trying to escape into his own art, running? Possibly, but I don’t buy it. It lacks the touch of a skilled artist who is capable of communicating any meaning, at least to me. I mean, I sat down and really thought this over, most people won’t even bother to visit the Liljevachs exhibition. To show this exhibition is a waste of tax money on an uninteresting artist– that’s my conclusion.

Where is the controversial art of today, the art that deals with contemporary issues? Street-art does that on every street, every day, illegally. At the same time we are drowning in commercial images. At Tate Modern in London they dare to do new things, not here.

After Liljevalchs I visited the Bukowski auction house. It was very crowded. Among the works for sale is poster art by Johan De Geer that got him arrested in the sixties. That’s a contrast.

Hasn’t the art-world gone wrong when the museums are working in a field that now has become so purely commercial? Maybe Gertrude Stein was right, it is silly to have a Modern Museum, since the fact that it is a museum makes it non-modern. When art reaches a museum it isn’t modern. Jan Håfström’s art isn’t modern; it has lost its meaning and has not survived the test of time .
Text: Åsa Backman