Early on in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1972 radio play “Inklusive,” Bavarian vacationers Anna and Karl find themselves exhausted after a long car ride to the Italian coast. It’s day one of a two week all-inclusive holiday, their newborn is at home under the watchful gaze of a grandparent, and it’s the first time they’re truly alone since the birth. After settling in, Anna remarks on the similarities between Italy to Bavaria: the clouds look the same, they lead the same lives, and even “when we wake up tomorrow, we won’t even know where we are, that’s how lovely it is.” Scenes of non-recognition and the false promise of respite pepper the radio play, the central set piece in the latest show at the Neubauer Collegium, “Christopher Williams: Radio/Rauhauser/Television.”
For the exhibition, the Los Angeles-born Williams fixates on the lesser known neo-realistic radio plays of Kroetz, a writer, banana-cutter, hospital orderly and fledging actor for the German working class in the late 20th century –– and one of the most popular 20th century playwrights in Germany. Curator Dieter Roelstraete divided the show across two rooms: two German-language video works encroach into the entry foyer, while the majority of the art is displayed in the main gallery space.
Rather than solely original works, Roelstraete has crafted a setting of Williams and Kroetz’ archives, surrounding the censorship of “Inklusive,” which is being sporadically broadcast on 105.5 FM (Chicago’s Lumpen Radio). The brief play, rewritten for distinct East and West Berlin audiences and censors, trades on the logic of obscure characters: readers are never quite sure how healthy, loving, or engaged our central couple is. Across the play’s seven scenes, the banalities of holiday travel –– Did we leave anything at home? How much does everything cost? –– gas prices and the exploitation of German workers come to the fore. Strewn across the inane babble of dialogue lays the humdrum fetish of the everyday, which displaces the emotional and material abuses of life. As the couple astutely bemoans the inescapable fact of their final day in Italy: “Fourteen days is fourteen days.”
While the text of the play is available online in Williams’ new English translation, it is noticeably absent from the Neubauer; only a page of contextless English-language dialogue from the end of the play is visible. The exhibition text notes that “radio plays should be played, ideally, on radio alone –– much like films, ideally should be screened in movie theaters alone.” That the central focus, the ostensible motivation behind the exhibition, is physically absent suggests the absence at the heart of the exhibition, which is itself about a minor instance of censorship in German labor history. An event, which itself was censored and difficult to witness, and now is laid bare, if in dormant form, to the audience at the Neubauer.
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