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.

Draft 26

26.8.2021, CARPA7 — The 7th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts, Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, remote

When the act of reading is not trivial

CARPA—the Colloquium of Artistic Research in Performing Arts has been organized since 2009 biannually by the Performing Arts Research Center at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Due to the pandemic, CARPA7 in 2021 was arranged fully online. The 26th draft was a part of the programme of conference presentations and it was realized as a conference call via the digital communications platform Zoom.

I had prepared a pdf-file consisting of one very long page. During the presentation I was sharing a view of this document to the participants. As in several previous drafts, I had divided the text into two major modalities: the body of text, which I read aloud, in black and stage instructions, which I did not read aloud, in red. During the presentation I proceeded through the file by scrolling it on the screen and simultaneously reciting the body of text.

At the beginning, I had the title and the first parenthesis on the screen for a while and I was waiting in silence.

Then I began to scroll down and read the first lines and as the script demanded, waited for someone to reply before continuing.

In addition to parentheses and theatrical lines, the script contained bullet points and images of words that I had constructed from my daughter’s wooden letter blocks and Scrabble pieces. The latter were a way to bring some materiality to the text, since I could not use materials that the attendees would take in their hands (using whatever materials were at hand was also an effect of a lockdown). Bullet points were a work-in-progress aesthetic, emphasizing the unfinishedness of my thinking.

I listed books that I had read during the summer break and contemplated on the role of the reader in literature and compared it to the role of the audience member in performing arts—trying to fathom what participation meant and how it appeared in different genres.

After having read the above parenthesis, the audience (or some of them) interpreted the “as if” creatively and started to whisper the parenthesis aloud from here on.

M O T I F S

A u d i e n c e i s a n e v e n t - b a s e d p h e n o m e n o n

A train of thought within the presentation:

— reception of art is always an event, a unique and momentary happening, even if the artwork itself would be permanent and stable

—> in performing arts eventness is enhanced, even though also in vast majority of them the event of receiving is also trivial

—> in performing arts eventness is enhanced by bringing the act of making art (and the makers) and the event of receiving art (and the recipients) into each other’s proximity in a way or another, disturbing the protective zones surrounding both of them
—> also participation enhances eventness, since it draws attention to the event of receiving, at the expense of the object of reception

—> does participatory art (= artworks, the reception of which requires nontrivial effort from the audience) then always lean towards performing arts?

= is that kind of art, in which the way of reception is unconventional, always also (at least to some extent) a performative event or even better, an esitys?

The motif of audience continues here —>

N o n - t r i v i a l e f f o r t a s c o m p l i c i t y

I had noticed that books that I read did not require any effort from my side to figure out how to read them. They expected me to know already, they expected any reader to know already—so strong had the conventions around literature grown. The same could of course be said of most of the theatre shown. Norwegian researcher Espen J. Aarseth had introduced the term ergodig literature and explained it sharply: in ergodic literature “non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth 1997, 1).

This wording fit perfectly also to how I had begun to understand participatory performance. Here I phrased it like this:

This non-trivial effort is a consequence of experimental and intermedial practices and it especially fits my definition of esitystaide/beformance art. In esitystaide/beforemance art the audience is complicit through the non-triviality of the form of their attendance.

The motif of complicity continues here —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025