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 30

16.6.2022, Performance Philosophy Problems: How does performance philosophy collaborate? Conference, Theatre Academy, Unversity of the Arts Helsinki.

Receptivities

Uniarts Helsinki hosted the fifth biennial Performance Philosophy Conference in 2022 and I participated with a presentation titled Receptivities. In the abstract, I wrote:

“Action, agency and performativity (situated on a concrete or a conceptual stage) are highly valued and much studied registers in the present age of political art. My proposal is that the medium of theatre (maybe also of performing arts in general) is not limited to performativity but could be instead seen as a kind of a polar structure, where the performative, agential or active register is only half of the story, i.e. one of the poles. The phenomenon of the audience introduces the other pole, another kind of sensibility: a receptive mode or register.”

The presentation took place in one of the black box studios of the Theatre Academy. I stretched a yarn across the studio, composing a labyrinth of sorts. On the yarn I hung scores, printed on a semitransparent paper. When the participants arrived, I gave them an Internet link on paper and asked them to enter it with their mobile phones. In the link I had prepared a prologue, which oriented them to the theme of the presentation and gave instructions on how to use the score installation. After reading the prologue, they had approximately 15 minutes to spend in the room, reading and trying out the scores.

I used the presentation to develop the format of scores, which would in the final Audience Body be staged as a deck of cards.

M O T I F S

T o w a r d s r e s o n a n c e

In this draft I tried to further process the theme of receptivity. I was looking for the right way to conceptualize it, receptivity in itself did not seem sufficiently appropriate and I tried out receptivities, as a counterpart to agencies, which was a plural term that I encountered a lot in the research discourse. The work would pave way towards coming up with resonance while composing the commentary.

To the motif of resonance in Chapter 2.1. —>

W e a v i n g

Yarn and rope—extended across a space, woven into a complex network and tied around bodies—have been a recurring element in my artistic work (see also Draft 16). It has functioned both as an embodied and a metaphoric practice. It has enabled thought patterns that are tight and directional, but with time form complex systems, the parts of which cling to each other and the unravelling of which has to be done in the right order. Such is also the fabric of this commentary with its motif lines and geometric concepts.

The motif of a theoretical proposal continues here —>

<— Audience Body—work-in-progress 2

Timeline

Audience Body—work-in-progress 3 —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025