A practice with two arms
When starting my doctoral studies in September 2017, I had only a vague idea of a research methodology. Instead I had questions about the audience. What is an audience? What is it that happens when a performance is about to begin and an audience arrives? Can we research the phenomenon of audience through artistic means?
In my research plan, I had articulated a division into two methodological branches: a practice of spectatorship and a practice of making spectator-oriented performances. This two-pronged methodology (as it was named by Adam Alston in his examination report of the second artistic part) was reflecting one of the thematics of my original research plan, the asymmetric polarity of a stage and an auditorium. I claimed this polarity was present in different modalities of spectatorship as well as many theoretical accounts of it, like those from Marco de Marinis (1987), Erika Fishcer-Lichte (2008) or Jacques Rancière (2009). The bipolar division of a theatre into a stage and an auditorium was reflected in my division of methodology into a practice of spectating and a practice of making.
As I was now in the academy and started to put this plan into action, it did not seem that simple anymore. I realized it led me into an encounter with two elemental problems. These problems were fascinating, but I had the feeling they might also be too philosophical, impossible to solve in practice.
The first dilemma
If I wanted to research the audience, I would need access to the position of the audience. I assumed the orientation of an audience is by default receptive. How could I then produce something? How could I stay in the audience position and still make artistic research? Would I not then become an author and exit the receptive position of an audience member?
I realized that making art does not allow the artist to also take the position of an audience member of their own work—or at least their position as a member of the audience is highly different from all the other audience members due to the maker’s familiarity with the work from the maker’s perspective. So, if I would do my research through my own artistic work, which is the general ethos in the context of artistic research, I would either research the maker’s perspective on their audience or how the maker experiences their own work as an audience member. Or I could interview audience members of my work.
I was also concerned with the distribution of my own attention. I had the feeling that the moment I start to put bodies, actions and things on stage, my focus would be there, as this structure suggests. I needed a way to do theatre without focusing on the stage.
I thought of other possibilities. I could defer from making and would instead just take the position of an audience member in artworks made by others. This would be the default position of a researcher in the academic tradition (e.g. within the disciplines of aesthetics or theatre studies)—they would experience artworks, or interview people who have experienced artworks, derive thinking from those experiences and formulate this thinking into writing. But I was doing my doctorate in the field of artistic research; this approach would not fit the context, or as was visible in my choice of context, it would not satisfy my interest.
So there were two traditions. The academic tradition of research on the arts, where the researcher is an audience member and does not make art. Then the much younger tradition of artistic research, where the researcher is an artist who researches (through) their own art and the making of it. I was an artist trying to do research as an artist while not focusing on my own art making. Caught in an uncomfortable liminal space between the stage and the auditorium.
The second dilemma
When entering the academic context, I became aware of how it was dominated by the medium of writing. While artistic research is questioning and expanding this convention, the academic canon is mainly in the form of text and doing research in the context of that academic canon inevitably requires reading, and to some extent, also writing.
I found my practice in performing arts incompatible with the literary academic tradition. I experienced these genres, performance events and academic writing, as very different in many respects. I would attend a performance event as a member of an audience, return to my studio, take a solitary position in front of a table and a computer and write about the event. This transition started to feel disturbing and insufficiently justified. There was a gap.
Performances are almost exclusively time- and space-specific: the works take place in a specific place and time and are later accessible only as memories or through their documentations in other media. Also, performances refer to each other almost exclusively in an implicit way. They are multisensory by default, approaching their audiences through visual, auditive, spatial, and other ways. Academic research literature by contrast can be re-accessed infinitely, is based on a practice of explicit referencing and does rarely address its audiences in multimodal fashion on purpose.
By articulating these different qualities of genres I do not intend a qualitative evaluation: in my reading performance is in no way “better” than writing or vice versa. I am not questioning the academic system or its conventions as such, rather I am explicating how I tried to find ways to access that system with my practice, without compromising either of them.
The choice of my original line of work had reasons, I thought. There was beauty and value in performing arts that did not exist elsewhere. The ephemerality, the mode of collectivity, the element of risk and the importance of bodies had motivated me into entering the field. These features also connected the genre to spiritual and embodied practices, social experiments, phenomenological philosophy and anti capitalist activism, all of which had been my interests before professionally committing to performing arts.
That said, theatre is a genre already engaged with the problematics and tensions between a text and its embodied performance. In parallel, the genre of performance art also has a strong literary strand of tradition in the form of scores, especially via the influence of the Fluxus movement. Realizing these already existing aesthetics of performing text or writing performance did not erase the tension I felt between artistic events and academic writings, but they did open me ways to unravel this problematic.
So here was another kind of a fascinating and disturbing liminal space. I could not take conventional academic writing as the unquestioned medium of research. Instead I wanted to linger on the problem, caught between a performance event and the text.
To rephrase the dilemmas:
1) How to research the audience artistically, while making art and receiving it seemed to be positions that excluded each other? How to access the experiential, collective and corporeal affordances of the audience position while making artistic research?
2) How to carry out artistic research of events in a context that required and prioritized writing? How to access the temporal/spatial/relational/dramaturgical/sensuous affordances of a live performance while remaining in the sphere of academic writing?
The parapractice of audience membership
In December 2017, I introduced the idea of a “parapractice”. One feature of spectatorship which I was concerned with at that point was the substantial difference in preparation that distinguished the makers of art from its recipients. The makers would enter a performance situation often with months, even years, of work behind them, regarding almost all aspects of the work: for example thematics, dramaturgy, methods used or roles given to the attendees. Audience members on the other hand, while usually having some experience of performing arts and their conventions, were uninformed for example of the specific nature of their role or of how the situation would develop. I was trying to find ways to verbalize this difference and especially the practice-like repetition of entering the performance situation unprepared, which seemed to characterize audiences. I started to call the techniques used by spectators (who were mostly unaware of using them) non-practices and later on parapractices.
My personal parapractice of audience membership had been going on throughout my career. This was also something I made a note of: being an audience to other artists was an important part of the work of virtually every artist I knew and yet it seemed to me it was very rarely considered a part of their practice. If an artist would count their working hours, would they count the time they were audiencing someone else’s work? I have the impression that they rarely do. So I thought there is something worth articulating about it. To account for the meaning of performance attendance for myself as an artist-researcher I have made this part of the work visible as a list of attended performances. It is worth noting that there are specialized occupational groups to whom audience membership is openly part of their practice, such as journalists, art critics and curators. When I was involved with Esitys magazine and Esitysradio-podcast, I would often engage in notemaking during the performances I attended in order to be able to speak or write about them better afterwards. This could be seen as a practice.
My parapractice of audience membership continued uninterrupted and I was trying to find the right way to formalize or articulate it. I also felt that my personal experience was just a narrow perspective, which would need other voices to account for the collectivity of the phenomenon. When creating the research plan I had envisioned a research-oriented audience group, which I would gather and which would attend a series of performances and reflect upon them collectively. I felt I needed to widen my limited perspective with research informants. During the first year of research, this plan started to feel too heavy—the act of gathering the group led to several new problems, which would distract me, for example the choice of it's members. My project was not about facilitating and directing a group, but about the experience of being a temporary, collective and receptive entity and I decided that I would need to stay with the fragile and random nature of collectivity that was present in audiences. So I let go of the idea of a committed group. Instead I continued to attend performances on my own and in some cases, with temporary informants. While I did not form a collective, I moved towards collectivity in my choice of terminology: I started to talk about audiences instead of spectators.
The practice of making
In the meantime, I started to develop a practice of making. While I was aware that some artistic researchers could just continue their ongoing practice while framing it as research, I needed to start from my questions. I think this was due to the two dilemmas explicated above. I thought I needed to solve them through inventing new practices instead of trying to fit the way of working I already had, into them.
My solution emerged through an iterative practice. At the beginning it was informed by the structure of the seminar weeks at the Performing Arts Research Center Tutke. The seminar week system is the recommended spine of the first two years of doctoral studies at Tutke, it suggests and enables specific forms of artistic research, while omitting others. As I followed the suggested schedule to enter the discourse of academic artistic research, my research practices were moulded accordingly: I started to invent expositional forms that would function in the spaces provided by the Theatre Academy, in office hours between 9am and 6.30pm, in durations between 30-60 minutes and for an audience composed of doctoral candidates, post-doctoral researchers, professors and lecturers. These expositions led me towards a specific research method, which then developed further through a series of iterations in different contexts, which again guided their format.
In this iterative series, presented in Chapter 4, I composed text-based performances, which proposed the audience a self-reflective position of contemplating their own condition as an audience. They invited the audience to appear to themselves as an audience.
The iterations have been realized using different textual interfaces, in most cases printed on different paper or paper-like materials: for example programme notes, letters, booklets, postcards and rolls of paper. I have varied whether I address the audience as a collective or as individuals and played with the quality of agency they are offered. Within the texts I have used different stylistic conventions, for example those of academic text, theatre play and personal messages. The readings have taken place in different art- and/or research-oriented contexts. I have engaged in different kinds of extra-artistic dialogue with audience members: discussions, interviews and writing assignments.
Through this practice of making audience-oriented performances I have created environments in which my research is both done and disseminated and in which the artistic could meet the academic on an original terrain.
Methodological reference points
My research methodology is, in a way articulated above and in the following chapters, based on and taking place through my artistic practice and the related parapractice of audience membership. While the way I developed this methodology was strongly influenced by the artistic work I had done previously and by the seminars organized by Tutke, I did not look for methods from research literature. The development of my methodology is an example of practitioner’s knowledge and it is important to point out that artistic practice is also the source of the research methods used. The methods have genuinely developed through artistic research experimentation and not through application of methods developed by someone else or available in an academic toolbox.
That said, there are relevant considerations on artistic research methodologies available and mine can be parallelled with them. These sources can be categorized based on the proximity of their context to my work—those that are closer can be seen as more relevant. The close environment of my work are the dissertations published by Tutke and the Fine Arts Academy in Helsinki, each of which articulate an artistic research methodology of their own (e.g. Arlander 1998; Porkola 2014; Giovanzana 2015; Lehtonen 2015; Bredenberg 2017; Kokkonen 2017; Huopaniemi 2018; Kellokumpu 2019; Roumagnac 2020; Ruuska 2024). On the next level of proximity are more generalizing accounts on artistic research methodology written by artist-researchers (Arlander 2013; Östersjö 2022; Gröndahl 2023). Also relevant, but written from a different perspective, are theoretical accounts written by non-artistic researchers who are still part of the local discourse (Hannula et al. 2014; Varto 2018). Then there are perspectives, which come from outside the context of artistic research, but consider artistic practices as research methods, like those from the UK context of practice research (Nelson 2022) and the parallel context in the US (Jarvis 1999). And even further are the non-artistic traditions of qualitative research and humanities, which have some similarities with artistic research, but do not normally include artistic practice as one of the research methods (Eskola et al. 1998).
These sources offer different ways of explicating how (artistic) practice can become research and what is the relationship of practice and discourse. Hannula et al. compress it into a formula: “artistic research = artistic process (acts inside the practice) + arguing for a point of view (contextual, interpretive, conceptual, narrative work)” (Hannula et al. 2014, 15). The formula is useful and its simplicity tempting, but in the 2020s context it calls for expansion: artistic researchers increasingly complicate it by deferring from separating these two ingredients while holding on to a rigorous research ethos to the best of their ability. During the time I have been involved with the academia, since 2017, there has been a growing interest in expanded forms of research writing that intertwine artistic practice with discursive and reflective materials (see for example Huopaniemi 2018; Kellokumpu 2019; Roumagnac 2020; Condit & Kellokumpu 2021). This kind of orientation demands complex criteria when evaluating a specific work. It requires an ongoing process of developing ways to uphold academic standards while staying loyal to each idiosyncratic type of artistic practice. While the style of this commentary is fairly conventional, my practice can be placed in this genre of research and I believe that the study at hand argues in depth for its own position in this respect.
The forms of my research are inseparable from the contents: experimentation overlaps with presentation and practice is impregnated with arguments for it. Based on their work with quantum theory, Karen Barad writes that “concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement” and that “theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements” (Barad 2007, 109). The first quote describes well my disposition (though I would replace measure with think), the second my methodology. My methods of experimentation and presentation are intertwined in the iterative series of events of reading disclosed in detail in this publication. These events are composed of different textual styles, ranging from epistolary intimacy and poetic descriptions to discursive references and theoretical proposals. In addition they superimpose genres of literature and performing arts and are haunted with the problem of translation between different media and the subsequent reduction or misinterpretation of phenomena. The reading events form a series of experimental iterations predisposed to the condition of a live audience.
The readings fit well with the model of a practitioner of art practicing their practice in the research context and arguing for a point of view. However, as explained above, my methodological approach has also been troubled by the notion of practice due to the quality of the phenomenon of audience, which has been the thematic focus of my research.