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 29

2.12.2021-30.1.2022, Ebb & Flow exhibition, Kuva/Tila Gallery, Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki.

Time to Audience, act 2

Time to Audience, Act 2 took place in the exhibition Ebb and flow, which opened the Kuva/Tila gallery at the brand new Fine Art Academy building in December 2021. I was invited to take part in the exhibition by curator Riikka Thitz, who made her MA thesis on dramaturgy as a tool of curation (Thitz 2021) and was interested in the relationship of the media of performance and exhibition.

Like Act 1, also Act 2 was composed of 40 rolls. This time these rolls were distributed across time, along the 40 days the exhibition was open. Each day, there was one roll available for the audience to read. I prepared two pedestals with an acryllic cube on each of them. The higher cube was holding the unread rolls, one each day. Reading the roll required unwinding it; the lower cube was for the unwound rolls. The time of the exhibition was visible as the paper strips accumulated in the larger cube.

M O T I F S

I n t e r t w i n i n g m o t i f s

Continuing from the Purity and Danger (Draft 25), I was working on making the course of time during an esitys/beforemance and the related transformation visible and tangible. The phrase “this paper is time”, used already in the first act of Time to Audience, was even clearer than before. This was also my contribution to the temporal structure of the exhibition format which typically seemed to let artworks stay untouched and unchanging. Curator Thitz’s agenda invited these kinds of gestures. My aim was to make the impact of the audience both a necessary and an aesthetic part of the work, rendering it suitable for the genre of esitystaide/beforemance art, even if it was presented in the format of an exhibited artwork with no performers and utilizing the format of opening hours.

I returned to the asynchronous audience body of the gallery environment, previously experimented with in Draft 14 in Venice. The link between the gallery context and performing arts was made by merging time and space via the transformation taking place through the complicity of the audience body. Inviting the visitors to act as agents of the work, without compromising their resonant position as readers, was my way of intertwining the central concepts-in-progress of my work (time, space, complicity and resonance) into a compelling dramaturgical structure that also was irreversible in the sense performing arts and liminoid experiences are: there was no turning back when the roll was unwound.

The motif of time continues here --->

The motif of space continues here --->

<— Draft 28

Timeline

Audience Body—work-in-progress 1 —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025