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.

Audience Body

work in progress 1

at Saari Residency, April 2022

In March-April 2022 I worked in Mynämäki, at Kone Foundation’s Saari Residency. During the residency I laid the groundwork for Audience Body, the second examined artistic part. My idea was that I would make a composition that would contain several works developed from different parts of the Draft series. To achieve this, I went through the materials from the drafts (the upper left image below), listed the performances I had attended as an audience member during the process (the three long strips of paper hanging from the wall) and started to configure the three-dimensional theoretical space for the audience bodies (the acrylic cube and the coordinate system drawing). Then I started a process of developing the drafts into components for the work Audience Body (e.g. the collection of “body positions” in the mid-right image). It was a very productive period for my research.

I shared the residency with Karolina Kucia, Siiri Viljakka, Elie Halonen, Satu Hakamäki, Pia Palme, Carlos Zerpa and María Alejandra Rojas (who took part remotely). Each Tuesday one of us would present their work and we would discuss it. For my presentation on the 5th of April, I prepared the first version of what would evolve into Audience Body. It was an installation composed of a letter, a paper roll, a large book and a set of scores—almost the same basic structure that was present in the final piece:

- What if Audience Is a Tension between Being In and Being Out—a script based on the second act of A Reading of Audience (the first examined artistic part). The script was available in Finnish (A4-sized, on a plywood tray) and in English (A3-sized, on a table)

- Time and Space—a roll of paper based on Drafts 26-27 (Time to Audience)

- Burn after Reading—a letter based on Drafts 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 23.

- Receptivities—a set of scores, each on a folded A5-sized brown paper, based on Drafts 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13 and 16.

- Reference List—a long strip of paper upon which I printed the list of performances attended by me since I started my doctoral studies.

In terms of motifs and methods, gathering different formats into a larger composition developed my tendency further to relate the experience of reading to the content of the text. For example, the temporal modality of performing arts was present in the roll, which dealt with the flow of time, as well as in the Burn after Reading-letter with its ephemeral, self-destructive quality. By addressing different aspects of audience membership through different experiential components I began to aim at creating a space in which these experiential aspects could be accessed simultaneously by the collective body of an audience.

5th of April, 2022

I arranged the components into an installation in the dance studio of Saari Residency. The participants had 45 minutes to attend the work in any order and any temporal structure within that frame. The letter contained a proposal to burn it outdoors next to the studio entrance.

Pia Palme (Kucia et al. 5 April 2022)

Carlos Zerpa (Kucia et al. 5 April 2022)

Satu Hakamäki (Kucia et al. 5 April 2022)

Siiri Viljakka (Kucia et al. 5 April 2022)

M O T I F S

R e s o n a n c e

Receptivity was an attribute of audience bodies, which I wanted to incorporate somehow into my thought system. It was related to subordination (a term that I also did not have yet), but I preferred a word that would describe the phenomenon on its own right. Pia Palme, with her perceptive musicianship, articulated the acoustic implications of the term audience and directed me towards utilizing resonance to conceptualize the function of audience bodies. Two years later, after my supervisor Gareth White pointed out that reception implied a message which was delivered from a sender to a receiver, I replaced it with resonance.

The motif of resonance continues here —>

<— Draft 29

Timeline

Audience Body—work-in-progress 2 —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025