audiens

AUDIENCE

In Aron Skoog’s reworking of Bosse Gustafson’s 1962 radio play Audiens, we find ourselves inside the office of the Minister of Culture. The teacher and writer Bloom has requested an audience with his old friend from their radical youth, who is now Minister of Culture. [1]

The two writers—Bloom and the Minister—were once part of the same revolutionary avant-garde, before the revolution became history. Since then, the Minister has become a representative of the ruling power, while Bloom has spent several years taking part in a writers’ strike in protest against the regime. It soon becomes clear, however, that Bloom’s loyalty to the strike is a vain political gesture. Now, he wants to publish a new book of poetry, thereby breaking the strike. But he needs to make sure he is not used as a tool for the regime’s propaganda. In other words, he wants to save his cake and wolf it down too (The Great Brexit Bake Off).

The conversation between the friends is marked by a kind of spiritual exhaustion, dragging itself through a nostalgic desert of self-reproach and sly accusations. As social climbers, they are intimately familiar, and mirror themselves in each other’s mirages. Perhaps their very friendship is rooted in this streber mentality and false antagonism. The crux lies rather in the question of one's own voice. As an artist, Bloom wants to remain neutral. But the Minister reminds him that neutrality does not exist. One cannot even leave in a neutral way. Whoever believes themselves to be neutral is, in fact, siding with the stronger. [2]

The Minister has lured Bloom into the daylight, where he now writhes like a worm on the proverbial hook. “I know you’re an old egocentric,” says the Minister. “I write better than ever, but just as egocentrically,” replies Bloom. All around us spreads a petrified world, a world of things where we play the part of ourselves, with our ego, our gestures and perhaps even our emotions, like things. [3] The Minister is well aware that Bloom’s greatest weakness is the high value he places on his self-perceived integrity—a false persona. Bloom’s only chance at liberation, both as artist and human being, is to admit that the identity he’s fighting to preserve is, in truth, a Jedermann.

When the dust settles, the Minister’s secretary, Jung, steps forward and reads a few lines from Bloom’s poetry. In these lines, the poet has left behind his persona. The poem—which is actually by Michaux—comes down to us as a transcribed, stripped-down voice from Voice Land, a foreign frequency beyond the boundaries of the self. [4] Even the title Audience—from the Latin audire, “to hear,” with the meaning of gaining access to someone of high rank, but also of listening, being heard, being attentive—underscores listening as an experience and human activity. The title points to the central role of listening in Gustafson’s original production, particularly in relation to the radio as medium and the radio play as form.

The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin experimented early on with radio plays written especially for children, broadcast during the youth hour on Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. In The Cold Heart (Das kalte Herz) from 1932, there is a mysterious narrator called Announcer (Sprecher). With his voice, he invites both the characters and the listeners into Voice Land (Stimmland). To enter, there is one requirement—a condition specific to the medium of radio:

“Alright, listen closely: whoever wishes to enter Voice Land must be very modest. He must surrender all finery and relinquish all external beauty, so that nothing is left but his voice. [...] Well, I’m afraid that is the condition from which I cannot stray. Think it over for a moment if you like.” [5]

The chamber play Audience is a primal scene with an archetypal choreography: the subject presenting himself before the Sovereign (Leviathan); the artist appealing to the Prince (Daddy). It is a tangled and often painful situationship that every cultural worker recognizes from their economic-erotic entanglements with collectors, gallerists, curators, and other benefactors.

The attentive listener might sense a few unanswered questions lingering in the room after the voices have fallen silent. Where does the money actually come from? And who is it that enables the spread and influence of one’s Name?

Text by Erik Lavesson
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Notes

‍[1] Bosse Gustafson (1924–1984) was a Swedish painter, printmaker, and writer. His debut novel Parasit was published in 1959. He also wrote plays for radio and television. The radio play Audiens was first broadcast by Swedish Radio Theatre in 1962. In Skoog’s version, the protagonist — originally bearing the anonymous name Felix Grosch — has been renamed Bloom. Bloom is a term for the isolated subject of the modern era, adopted by the French post-Marxist collective Tiqqun from the character Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In The Theory of Bloom (2000), the concept is used to define a state of being: “‘Bloom’ designates a Stimmung, a fundamental tonality of being. /…/ The Bloom is the Stimmung inside which and beginning with which, in the present moment, we understand each other /…/ The Bloom therefore also names the spectral humanity, stray, unpleasantly vacant, that will never again obtain any content other than the Stimmung in which it ex-ists; the crepuscular being for which there is no longer either reality nor the self, but only the Stimmung.”
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[2] Paraphrase of a few lines from Margaret Stenström’s review of Bosse Gustafson’s Audiens, Can One Be Neutral?, published in Svenska Dagbladet, February 6, 1962.

[3] The Theory of Bloom, Tiqqun, 2000.

[4] Clown, Henri Michaux, Peintures, 1939.

[5] Walter Benjamin – Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7, Part 1: Rundfunkarbeiten: Rundfunkgeschichten für Kinder. English translation: Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal, 2014.

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During the opening, a new interpretation of Bosse Gustafson’s 1962 radio play Audiens was performed live by Eugene Sundelius von Rosen, Balder Ljunggren, and Aron Skoog. A recording of the performance was later broadcast on Radio Sydväst 88.9 MHz from Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus on May 28 at 7 PM. That same audio recording is now presented here on the website.

Documentation

‍Archival photography: Martin Kull (Contextphoto.com)

‍Opening reception photography: Andreas Bertman