Continuing from Draft 11, I took part in the research cell Through Phenomena Themselves at the Research Pavilion, hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki in Venice. The research cell was organized by Alex Arteaga and the group was composed of doctoral candidates and artist-researchers from Helsinki, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and elsewhere.
I arrived at the Pavilion on May 5th, it was officially opened on May 8th and on the 12th we organized a seminar where I performed, after which I travelled back to Helsinki and left my works at the Pavilion for the rest of its season, until August 28th.
During my time in Venice,
- I conducted a practical experiment for the first six days of my stay . I approached the Pavilion from the position of an audience member: the construction of the exhibition, its opening and first days of public attendance. This part of the work was experimenting on audiencing as a practice, instead of a parapractice. I documented my experiences in a public journal, Notes of an Audience Member.
- I prepared altogether 13 different versions of a letter performance, titled Phenomenological Etudes. The 13 etudes were ways of formulating experiences of audiencing (which appeared during the six-day experiment) for the use of others.
The first etude, which worked as a blueprint for the rest, presented the idea of a phenomenological etude. The second was created in collaboration with choreographer and doctoral candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Charlotta Ruth. The third was respectively a collaboration with lighting designer and doctoral candidate at the Fine Arts Academy in Helsinki, Tülay Schakir. Working with Schakir developed my relationship to the material of paper, introduced as one aspect of the medium of print in Draft 7. Schakir wrinkled up the paper, then re-opened it and guided my attention to the play of light on the wrinkles.
Each of these three letters aimed at offering the reader a phenomenological practice for observing the environment of the pavilion. The last ten etudes formed a series of different perspectives into the pavilion, presented at a seminar day of the research cell on the 12th of May.
The series of ten letters presented on the 12th of May brought into focus the multiplicity of possible perspectives available in any situation of audiencing, continuing on the themes of gathering and plurality. In the event, I asked each participant to pick one of the letters, based on its theme, which was written on the envelope: floor, air, people, writing, touch, sound, light, rules, destruction and the unknown. Each perspective offered a specific way of engaging with the environment at the pavilion, of actively sensing the surroundings. The perspectivist approach was similar to the one used in Draft 4, in which there were multiple theoretical perspectives to choose from. In these phenomenological etudes, the perspectives were more concrete, related in a straight-forward manner to the material environment of the pavilion.
C h a l l e n g i n g s u b o r d i n a t i o n
While the theme of practice had been there since the beginning of my research project, this was the first draft to explicitly articulate a proposal, in which the audience would actively practice something when attending the work. This notion challenged the precondition of subordination and was conceptualized with the term etude.
For me, the term originated from my childhood practice of playing the violin. Etudes were an important part of that practice. They were aimed at developing my technique, but were not mere exercises—also the aesthetic aspect, the beauty of the etudes, was important, making their repetition more meaningful. I had used the term in my artistic work already in 2010, when realizing a methodical 12-month series of works combining practice and performance, titled 12 Etudes on Everlasting Life.
The framework of phenomenological practice, which was at the center of attention of the research cell, inspired me to return to the format of the etude. The etude felt like an elegant way of combining practice and art when attending the phenomenon of audience. I had been hesitant to break to protective bubble, which enabled audiences to remain in a non-active position. The phenomenological perspective let me put aside my hesitation: the suspension of the natural attitude (see Draft 11) was an active operation, but one that did not require any visible action, instead it enabled a shift of attention.
With regard to my personal six-day experiment, the construction and opening of the pavilion was not announced as a performance by anyone. No-one summoned an audience body to attend it. No-one subordinated me. Instead, I made an active gesture of creating a framework for the act of audiencing, choosing the pavilion-in-the-making as its object—in effect I was protyping a practice of audiencing.
With regard to the etudes, I invited their audience to adopt a double role—both as resonant audience members in relation to my work and active practitioners of audiencing in relation to the environment. It was a way to render a deferral of action into a practice. An audience member could stay seemingly resonant and passive, while actually being engaged in a very active practice.
S p a t i a l s u b o r d i n a t i o n
I had become interested in chairs, since they often defined the spatial positioning of the collective body of the audience and thus had great influence on how the experience was structured. I had also started to use them as a component of spatial design in Draft 13. In the first of the etudes in Draft 14 I asked for the reader to sit in a chair and wrote:
The spatiality of the event is structured by the existence and placement of the chair.
The temporality of the event is structured by the dramaturgy of the letter.
I had observed that the usage of chairs was genre-specific and resulted in considerable effects on audience bodies and their orientation. In theatres, chairs and other seatings are trivial. To attend a performance labelled theatre and not sit is highly rare, excluding some specific genres like street theatre or immersive theatre. When chairs are placed deliberately in a fixed formation (especially in larger auditoriums often even bolted to the floor), the perspective of the audience members is also relatively fixed. They can turn their heads to get more scope, but if someone performs behind the chair, it may be difficult to spectate it. Their gazes are thus already directed through the seating. Also, a chair offers comfort for a durational spectation and is linked to the conventions of theatre, dance, circus and classical music at least, where the audience is expected to follow a performance from beginning to end. The feminist experimental theatre group Blaue Frau experimented with this tradition in their work Rave, in which audience members consented (when booking a ticket) to sitting for either 1, 3 or 4 hours without break, watching slow movement in a dimly lit space (Rave 28.11.2016). This aesthetic choice exposed the strong authority implicitly used on the audience body in the context of theatre through an imposing spatial design and duration.
Conversely, in fine-arts based performance, following the traditions of the gallery context, seats are uncommon, at least as a fixed formation, and audiences usually gather around the performers freely. Comfort is not a priority and the absence of seats suggests that either that the performance is not very long or that it is so long that audience members are not expected to follow the whole work.
In the second etude Charlotta Ruth and I focused on the chair by creating a kind of parody of the mysticism related to phenomenological practice. How can the phenomenologist access the world of phenomena residing at the hidden core of our everyday experiences? Like this:
It continued:
Find or steel a chair. Turn it into a [research] station: make it uninviting to use for its normal use so its not mistaken as a chair. Make eye contact with an artist-researcher of your choice. Ask with your eyes “how does it feel?” Allow the situation to develop [...]
Demystification through humour was a central aspect of Charlotta’s input to my research. There had been tacit humour in the Draft series before as well, but the second phenomenological etude made me aware of the importance of it. The chair as the carrier of demystification was also appropriate. There was something funny about the triviality of the object in the context of audiencing, its silent authority. The chair thematics would return in Draft 17 and A Reading of Audience, the first examined artistic part.
A s y n c h r o n o u s t i m e
This draft introduced an altogether different modality of time: the exhibition time, composed of daily opening hours and a duration of three and half months. The temporal arc of the draft scattered the audience body over a long stretch of porous, loose and asynchronous time.
This change was radical also regarding the position of the maker, since in the exhibition format I would not be there to experience how audience members would behave. I was there only for a little more than a week, and I did not build any dialogical feedback structures to the work so I basically have no knowledge of how most of the time played out.
