How Audience Bodies Form

Tuomas H Laitinen

This artistic doctoral research approaches art, not as a variety of artworks or performances, but as a variety of collective bodies that are summoned. It addresses the subordinate and complicit way collective audience bodies form in relation to artistic performances. The commentary introduces the concept of an “audience body”, emerging when individual bodies gather to become an audience. Audience bodies are described through preconditions that are needed for one to appear, conditions that contribute to its subsistence and variables that determine the primary qualities and the degree of actuality of that audience body. More specifically, the commentary addresses the local genre of “esitystaide”, developed especially in the Helsinki-area during the last 30 years. Neologism “beforemance art” is introduced due to a lack of an English equivalent. Esitystaide/beforemance art is the artistic context of this study and is presented as a genre of art, in which the complicity of audience bodies is a fundamental material of artistic creation. The Finnish word “esitys”, being the medium of the genre of esitystaide, is defined as the sum of a performance and an audience body. The theoretical approach towards audience bodies is presented as impartial with regard to different genres of art, but the practice of research favours esitystaide/beforemance art. This leads to political conclusions that defend the exposed complicity of and the experimental relation to audience bodies which are characteristic for this specific genre. This theoretical argumentation has been developed through an iterative series of 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts, made by the author, as well as through a parapractice of audience membership. The drafts and examined parts are works of esitystaide/beforemance art, in which printed or digital texts are staged in different ways for audiences to read. The works and the thinking developed in them have been significantly affected by dialogues with audience members and their feedback. The commentary discloses how the process of thinking, resulting in the main arguments of the work, has evolved through this artistic research practice and how temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events has been developed to address more adequately the phenomenon of an audience body. The parapractice of audience membership is introduced as a term describing the attendance of artworks made by others—a way of accumulating knowledge parallel to and yet different from practicing art. The arguments made in the commentary aim to provide conceptual tools for artists, scholars and pedagogues who attend the phenomenon of audience in their work. They can also serve as a basis for further research on the political significance of esitystaide/beforemance art and related art forms. Methodologically, the research offers an example of an iterative and dialogical artistic research practice and its presentation; the relationship between art and theory unfolds as both fruitful and troubled. Through the introduction of the parapractice of audience membership, it argues for using art, equally to the use of bibliographical materials, as reference material of artistic research. Through the use of a Finnish term and its local context as part of concept-creation in English, the work defends the importance of local thinking, which links artistic research to the land upon which it takes form.

1.3 On languages

My mother tongue is Finnish. I have grown into languaging through it—within its linguistic terrain I have learned to listen, to speak, to read, to write, to think. English is my second language and through it I have learned to think in a foreign linguistic terrain. The latter is the case for most of my colleagues close and far.

Within a diversity of mother tongues and marginal cultures a few languages dominate academic, artistic, technological and entertainment discourses, English being the foremost in the contemporary Euro-American context. 94% of the European population are native speakers of Indo-European languages, including English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Finnish is a non-Indo-European language spoken by 5,8 million people. Thinking in Finnish is thus quite marginal and potentially distinctive, be it in the context of the globe, of Europe or of the international discourses of art and research.

I have conducted my research bilingually, using Finnish and English as parallel tools. I have prepared most of the artistic research experiments which form my research practice using both languages—writing the same text in both and printing copies for the event according to the expected turn-out. As an exception are the experiments conducted abroad, in which Finnish has not been used, as well as a couple of experiments executed only in Finnish, due to a Finnish-speaking audience.

My motivations for the choice of bilingualism relate to quality, politics, accessibility and the context of the research project. The most important criterion is the context and the related origins of my research. The problematics of my practice have emerged in a bilingual environment: during my artistic career I have often worked in diverse groups where we switch between the two or more languages; attended local performances in Finnish and international visiting shows in English side by side; read theoretical texts in English and thought about their content in Finnish; co-published a Finnish-language performance magazine and written articles in Finnish to fuel the local discourse; collaborated and performed internationally with English as the working language. This has motivated me to use both languages in my research.

I think in a more nuanced, intuitive and complex way in my mother tongue. In English, it has to be simpler, rough around the edges, and shallow. This does not necessarily mean that I think and write better in Finnish, but it is likely.

As an international community, a diversity of thinking results in a richer intellectual terrain. Since each language limits the scope of thinking in a different way, the larger the number of languages used, the wider array of thoughts that can be thought. This argument especially defends smaller languages and language groups, such as the Fenno-Ugrian languages, to which the Finnish language belongs. The dominant direction of cultural change does not support this—English is replacing Finnish in local universities and academic environments at great speed. Also the doctoral programme where this research has been produced functions mostly in English.

On the other hand, both the artistic and the academic contexts, within which I work, are international and multilingual—with English as their lingua franca. To be on top of my issue and the relevant discourse, I need to read a lot in English and attend performances that use English as their main language. To collaborate with my non-Finnish-speaking colleagues, I need to articulate my thinking in English or other languages. To take part in the dialogue taking place with a wider range of thinkers, I need to write in English. And finally, to access the expertise of non-Finnish-speaking supervisors and examiners (in this case, Gareth White and Adam Alston respectively), I need to use English as (one of) the language(s) of my research.

As a result, I have not let go of either of the languages until now. The consequence of writing my research experiments in both languages has been that the thinking process has taken place in an oscillation between them. I have been forced to consider the terminology and its contextuality more closely than I would otherwise. It has made me aware of how I am making language as part of my research process.

This commentary is not bilingual, but is written only in English. I made the choice to situate the work in the international context of professional discourse. While most of my work takes place within the local performing arts field, I consider that this doctorate has a meaning beyond that. For this reason, I have invited a supervisor and an examiner from the English-speaking world, which fixes the choice of language institutionally. While the work is not bilingual, it does try to discuss the specificities of the Finnish performing arts scene. To help that effort, I address some key Finnish terms, such as esitystaide.

This placement of the work in two language spheres is visible also in the bibliography, which contains sources in English as well as in Finnish.

On media

In addition to being situated in between two languages, the work takes also place in an intermedial space with regard to different genres of art. Dick Higgins defines intermedia as media residing in-between existing or traditional media, resisting fixed aesthetic categories, and therefore not (yet) available for classification (Higgins 1966, 2-3). Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, building on Higgins’ work, views the intermedial not as a space falling between already established medial identities (writing, performance, theatre, dance etc.) but as “their condition of possibility” (Brillenburg Wurth 2006). Framed like this, intermedial practices renew the field of art by extending across and disregarding historically developed genres. Following Brillenburg Wurth, I regard my research as intermedial, inhabiting a terrain where genres of art and their media are in a fluid state, blending into each other and opening new channels for the flow of artistic practice. As a condensation of this processual thinking, my model describing the variety of audience bodies (in Chapter 2.2) proposes a way to approach the differences between media and genres of art as gradients in a three-dimensional conceptual system.

In my interpretation, when certain performative arrangements solidify into artistic genres, these genres adopt specific formations of audience bodies as the convention. At any historical moment, these conventions are genre-specific, tacitly learned and implicitly followed by the audiences of those genres. For example, currently and in the context of Northern European culture, there is a conventional way of attending a theatre play and a conventional way of attending a fine art exhibition. People in general inhabiting this culture know how to act in a theatre or in an exhibition, how to receive the genre-specific artworks laid out before them. Intermedial practices disturb these conventions and invite their audiences to conditions that are relatively unfamiliar to them through not complying to be limited by the division into different genres.

The sunlight on the floor. Photo by Venla Helenius.

Examples of these kinds of works can be found in the commented list of attended performances in Chapter 5.1. For instance, Masi Tiitta’s Sunlight on the floor was a minimalist composition of spatial and costume design, music and dance. Morton Feldman’s piano composition Triadic Memories formed a backround on which the performers composed slow movements and static postures. Neither of the components (music, dance, design) dominated the others—instead they formed a kind of living impressionist painting composed around the sunlight falling on the floor through the window (more about the show in the list of attended performances: Sunlight on the floor 19.6.2024).

As a member of the audience of A Great Mess, watching the excavator choreography.

A Great Mess by the artist collective Wauhaus in turn was composed of parts, each of which seemed to utilize the aesthetics of a different genre. We walked outdoors in a landscape of urban nature, on top of an old garbage dump covered with earth. On our way, we witnessed or participated in several acts: a choreography of two large-scale mechanical excavators, a musical concert while walking in a procession, a ritualistic performance art action of manipulating a birch tree, a butoh dance piece, an ice cream with herbs from the site and a letter from a researcher to be read in private (A Great Mess 1.9.2021).

In Vincent Roumagnac’s and Nina Liebenberg’s tokonama series 2. SLOW BLUE LOVE the sole audience member encountered a laptop with a power point presentation, an ikebana flower composition and a blue drink, with which to spend 30 minutes. While the components of the work could be easily situated in the genre of fine arts, the temporal arrangement of an appointment time, limited duration as well as discursive contents disturbed this kind of conventional classification (tokonoma series 2. SLOW BLUE LOVE 16.5.2024).

The set-up of tokonama series 2. SLOW BLUE LOVE.

In more exact terms, my work intersects performance and live art, theatre, literature and visual arts; performing arts and academic writing; analog and digital media. I have chosen to apply an interpretation of the term performance, in which I on one hand follow the inclusive definition typically used in the field of performance studies and on the other exclude the resonant function of the audience from it. In the context of this work, performance is defined as the activity of making of all art—also for example the act of painting a painting, sculpting a sculpture, writing a book or editing a video work. While all art forms thus require a performance, in some of them performances are staged before and put in contact with audience bodies, hence the terms like performing arts and performance art. In performing arts performative action coincides with the audience attendance of the work. The ways these coincidences may take place are further elaborated in this study; performance or performing arts are thus not understood as ontologically different from other genres of art, a view advocated by Philip Auslander (Auslander 2023). Instead they appear as genres of art where collective audience bodies are most actual and available for perception.

My practice originates in the genre of esitystaide, which is the local genre of audience-sensitive performance/live art in my home environment, the Helsinki-area. In my reading, esitystaide is in itself an intermedial genre, extending the possibilities of contemporary theatre, dance and other live arts especially with regard to the phenomenon of audience bodies. When I entered the academic environment of artistic research, I experienced a problematic gap between my esitystaide-practice and the literary academic tradition. I was showered by a waterfall of text—for our seminars, we read hundreds and thousands of pages of text by continental philosophers, postcolonial theorists, neo materialist thinkers and such. The academic world is built on writing and speech, while the medium of performance that I had worked with was only in a minor way language-based. This gap, as well as the gap between the position of a reader and a performance attendee, bothered me more and more. I started to look for a way to bridge the gap—this process is documented in Chapter 4 describing the research practice. At a later stage of my research practice, the performative and textual aspects of the work expanded towards materialities as well as practices of fine art.

At first I was interested in the event of reading, then the contents and poetics of the text and then the material on which that text was printed on and how that material afforded the bodily experiences of the readers. When viewed from the above introduced intermedial perspective, these approaches compose a practice that takes place in a condition of possibility beyond the metaphor of a gap (between media and genres). To appropriate another metaphor from John Dewey, if a medium is a mountain and the so-called gap between media a valley, these intermedial practices take place in the varieties of soil extending across the mountain range.

Another question parallel to the one of artistic media is that of the media of research. I already mentioned the need to arbitrate the relation between text and performance events. To be more exact, I was especially concerned with academic text used in the research environment. It was a medium of its own, I noticed, one which the discipline of artistic research was challenging and extending. Artistic research can be seen as an intermedial zone of research, which realizes the conditions of possibility between the contexts of art and research, as well as between institutionalized and trivialized artistic genres.

My research practice is composed of performance events in theatres, galleries, classrooms, conferences and other contexts; it mixes personal notes, epistolary exchanges, poetics, playwriting and academic text; it moves between performing arts, literature and fine art; its language is printed on paper, echoed from speakers, immersed in water, ripped and burned, eaten, digested and spread in a garden as fertilizer. It is intermedial.

On style

While writing the commentary, I have thought about styles of research. I have considered myself a representative of a style of intertwining art and discourse, instead of separating them as is typical in the academic research tradition. The research environment of Uniarts Helsinki has during the past years evolved towards allowing and supporting more obscure fusions of these two realms and thus towards practices which challenge the way research is traditionally presented. For example the commentaries by Otso Huopaniemi (Huopaniemi 2018), Simo Kellokumpu (Kellokumpu 2019) and Vincent Roumagnac (Roumagnac 2020) are examples of this ‘school’, whereas for example Pilvi Porkola (Porkola 2014), Tuija Kokkonen (Kokkonen 2017), Mikko Bredenberg (Bredenberg 2017) and Riku Saastamoinen (Saastamoinen 2024) have presented their doctoral research through a more traditional division into artistic parts and a discursive part.¹

So throughout my research, I have identified with the previous school experimenting with academic conventions. The whole of the draft series as well as the examined artistic parts entangle discursivity with art and attempt to render their differentiation impossible. I have also been one of the candidates who have argued that these kinds of practices should be recognized by degree requirements; the faculty has been receptive and supportive to suggestions made by doctoral candidates and has modified the requirements accordingly. The degree requirements for those who have started their studies in 2021 or later are composed of 1-4 research elements, which can be artistic, written commentary or combinations of these two.

However, when composing this commentary I have been surprised by the fact that it has not in the end emerged so much as experimentation regarding or a challenge towards academic conventions. This shift has appeared through the process of making and while the result is not so experimental in comparison to the tradition, it is process-sensitive. The making of the commentary has led me to let go of the original plan to make a specifically unconventional commentary. The current style in my assessment is fairly straight-forward, unobscured and prosaic, even if it applies some structures that suggest hyperreading. One reason for this development has been my desire to make the commentary accessible, a quality of writing that I have tried to develop during the research process. I hope that the work is easy to approach, does not require an academic education or specialized artistic experience from the reader, but is still also rewarding for those readers who have scholarly or artistic expertise in the fields of art and research in question.

1 Yelena Gluzman has proposed that we would consider research as theatre, “that theatre performance is central to the performativity of scholarship, allowing scholars to engage not with fact of ongoing performativity but rather with the concrete, situated processes by which scholarship is materialized” (Gluzman 2017, 106). And if research is theatre, then this style of research mentioned above first is in Gluzman’s terms “experimental theatre”, which “can actively incorporate these theatrical arrangements as part and parcel of its objects of research” (op.sit. 125).

<— 1.2 How to read this commentary

Table of contents

2.1 Audience as a body —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025