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 24

2.2.2021, Treasury-project, Die Fabrikanten, remote

A Ritual by Post

During 2020-21 I took part in a project called Treasury hosted by Die Fabrikanten, a company based in Linz, Austria. Together with Wolfgang Preisinger from Die Fabrikanten, Vida Cerkvenik Bren from Kud Ljud (Slovenia) and Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy from Triage Live Art Collective (Australia) we formed a working group, which planned a structure through which we could employ artists to collaborate internationally in pandemic times when traveling was impossible.

As a part of this structure we engaged in artistic epistolary exchanges. On the second of February, I sent the Slovenian artist Grega Mocivnic a package containing a score for a ritual performance with some objects needed for its execution.

The score was shaped like a clock-face and contained 12 segments or hours, which I had named. Each name had a corresponding object which was included (except for two which would be added by the reader) in the package: a piece of the body of the writer (corresponded by a lock of my hair), a smell (incense), a taste, something live (a sunflower seed), something useless (a key), [add your own] (which was empty), a piece of the body of the reader [add your own] (also empty), a sound (a CD-issue of Esitys magazine (Esitys 2015)), an image (a page from the book Manual of Everlasting Life (Laitinen 2013)), something dead (a dried flower), something forbidden (an envelope with the text Do not open this) and a map (the score itself).

M O T I F S

T h e p h e n o m e n o n o f a u d i e n c e a n d i t s l i m i t a t i o n s

My aim was to design an experience that was structured but that lacked meaning, which in turn would be inserted by the recipient. I used symbolic elements that could have significance to the recipient regardless of their personal background (I thought that qualities like dead and alive, smell and taste, forbidden and useless would have meaning to almost anyone). If the recipient would try to realize the score, it could result either in a private ritual experience or a public performance, or something in between.

While the score was composed by me and it offered orientations for the recipient, it left a lot of choices to their responsibility. There was no temporal structure, no suggestions on what to do with the elements that it contained and no guidance on whether it was prepared to function as a private ritual experience or as a public performance. Also, I was absent as a maker from any realizations of the score and there was no request of feedback of any sort.

It could be seen as an artwork, but did it summon an audience body? Did a performance take place before an audience? I have no knowledge of this and due to that I would say that the way this experiment was structured was not sufficient for providing any information on the nature of the phenomenon. But what if I would hear from Grega that he realized the score and that the event contained a liminal dramaturgy and was subordinated by the score? Would that suffice? My feeling is that the score distributed so much agency to him that he could not be defined as an audience body, even as an exceptionally non-collective one. As in Draft 12, audience was rendered absent. Through the level of emancipation needed for its execution, the potential audience member would eventually become a performer, either of a private ritual or a public event, and a potential audience body would disappear (although if Grega would perform it publicly, it would enable a secondary audience body).

The motif of audience continues here —>

The motif of subordination continues here —>

N o g a t h e r i n g

This draft was the exception confirming the rule of plurality. As mentioned in Draft 12, performances that would actually have just one audience member in total are very rare in the context of art and would render those artworks non-public. This does not mean that they do not exist at all since in most cases there are exceptions to every rule and artists especially are keen to imagine and realize things that are almost never done. This draft would be an example of an artwork that has to my knowledge no other audience members than Grega. I however think that it is not a reason for me to generally stop considering audiences plural.

The motif of gathering continues here —>

E p i s t o l a r y t i m e

This draft introduced another kind of temporal feature—the delay caused by post traveling across the continent. Artistic gestures delivered by post were one of the strategies used in Treasury. Also I received several of them. As artist Shawn Chua articulated it when I interviewed him about his experience as an audience member of A Reading of Audience: “Writing letters is quintessentially asynchronous” (Chua 10.2.2020). As letters, performed and delivered in different ways across the draft series, were one of the most used methods in my practice, this delay, which is typical for epistolary practices, was meaningful.

The motif of time continues here —>

M E T H O D S

From paper to other materials surrounding it

The work continued my experiments with performing through things on paper, as well as the covid-inspired genre of performances by post. The main significance of the work for my practice was related to materials, as it was part of the process of opening up my material imagination and sensitivity (begun in Draft 7). I was trying to teach myself to understand that textual works are not immaterial and that the choices made in their materiality hold several levels of meaning: sensuous, symbolic and temporal, at least.

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025