The main chapters of the commentary are the 2nd, the 3rd and the 4th. Chapter 2 contains the main arguments of the commentary; Chapter 3 gives an outline of how these arguments have come about and bridges between theory and practice; Chapter 4 discloses the chronology of practice in detail. They are surrounded by this introductory chapter and the 5th one with concluding remarks. These five chapters will give you a clear understanding of the (theoretical) thesis of the commentary and how I have reached it.
A word to problematize clarity and argumentation is needed here. While this artistic research project has attempted for the most of its scope to intertwine, even amalgamate art and research, these two components stay also in dynamic tension and, in the end, seem to even repel each other. The academic canon landed on my art at first with heavy weight; slowly art recovered and retaliated. The theoretical quality of the work weaves thoughts together into a fabric, while the artistic quality flourishes more when unwinding the same materials. The theoretical gravitates towards generalizations; the artistic towards idiosyncrasies.
The commentary travels through a long series of experiments and several accompanying interviews with audience informants, ending in the last interview (namely the Audience Body, Work-in-Progress Part 2 in Chapter 4) and after it, the final examined artistic part Audience Body. The insightful interviewees of the last interview detect in my work the tension between theory and art and address it without mercy. They accuse me of the “sin of theory”, of letting theory colonize the space reserved for the non-sense of esitystaide, of violating their audience body with overflowing textuality and even of demanding them to revenge this unwanted theorization on my behalf. Are they correct? Is theory harmful for art in this research project? The reader of the commentary may find their own way through this durational erotic—sometimes potentially violent—encounter of art and research, decide for themselves if one dominates the other excessively and how these lovers turn their weary bodies towards different sides of the bed as dreams enter. The thesis is not the same in theoretical and artistic terms, even if these two grow from the same seed and share organs.
On a more prosaic note, to help the potentially diverse readership, I will explain the logic that is built into the structure of the commentary and offer five different ways to approach it.
Short discursive reading: the arguments
If audiences are defined as collective bodies, what does that mean and how do these bodies form? If you are an impatient reader and want to attend to the main discursive arguments of the work, you can read only the second chapter. It is composed of a contextualisation of this research and my theoretical proposals: it introduces the concept of an audience body, describes the way these form and situates esitystaide, the local genre of performing arts and the artistic context of my research, in relation to the conceptual model.
The concluding remarks in Chapter 5 give an even shorter peek into the main methodological and theoretical proposals made by in the commentary.
Short artistic reading: A Reading of Audience and the Audience Body
How to address the phenomenon of the audience body in the contexts of artistic research and esitystaide? If you want relatively briefly to attend the main artistic content of the work, you can check out the documentation of the examined artistic parts, A Reading of Audience and Audience Body. They can be found on the timeline in Chapter 4. These works embody the ways I have artistically—through the temporal, spatial, textual and material design of the events—approached the phenomenon of the audience body by producing actual audience bodies while inviting them to become conscious of their production as such.
Mid-sized reading: how the arguments have developed in practice
In Chapter 3 I outline my methodological starting points. It contains a reading of audience membership as a parapractice, including an explanation of why I do not consider it a practice and a more utopian perspective on how it can become a practice.
Chapter 3 also opens a thematic gateway to my artistic research practice. The theoretical arguments presented in Chapter 2 are broken down into nine research motifs. I have traced the way each motif has developed in practice and built pathways for the reader to tread. These pathways are like filaments that are woven into a thread of practice-based thinking, accumulating into a theoretical model. Research methods are also to an extent itemized here.
You can find the indexical system of motifs in Chapter 3.3, choose a motif and follow the path of its development in my practice. Each path starts from Chapter 3.3, travels through the practice situated in Chapter 4, looping in the end back to Chapter 2, where the description of each motif can be found as a component of the theoretical proposal.
Long reading: the chronology of the artistic research practice in total
If you are patient and have a lot of time on your hands, you can go through the chronology of practice presented in Chapter 4. This is the most extensive of the chapters, since it discloses the line of practice over a time span of more than five years between 2018-2023. During this time I realized 30 more or less public performances, which I have named drafts, and two larger scale artworks, which have been examined as artistic parts of the thesis.
During a chronological reading you will encounter the same entries that are woven into the motif pathways introduced in Chapter 3.
Appendixes: the sources as the context of my research practice
If you want to delve even further into the landscape in which this practice has developed, you can also enter the appendixes and check out the commented list of performances I have attended during this research project (i.e. the parapractice conducted in this research). The appendixes also contain the bibliography as well as a list of interviews and other sources of the commentary. The prints of all the research works are situated in the end as pdf-files.
Creative reading
The four strategies of reading proposed above—the short theoretical or artistic, the mid-sized thematic and the long chronological—can be also mixed creatively. You can start from Draft 1 in the beginning of the timeline and drift away for example with the motif of liminoid dramaturgy, check its description in Chapter 2.2 and then return to chronological reading and Draft 2.
Or you can read about the variables of audience bodies in Chapter 2.2, then find the corresponding motif threads in Chapter 3.3 and follow through practice their developmental process.
Or swim through the history of esitystaide in Chapter 2.4 and then immerse yourself in the commented list of attended performances in Chapter 5.1.
The commentary thus aims to be open for multiple reading strategies.
Technical aspects
The commentary is composed of text, images, videos, audio recordings and a 3-D model. Most of the chapters are laid out in a responsive format, adjusting according to the devise of the reader. Some sections (namely Chapter 3.3: Motifs, the timeline in Chapter 4 and the entry on Audience Body, the second examined artistic part) are laid out in a non-responsive format due to some attributes needed for their presentation.
While my artistic research practice is where the arguments of the thesis have explicitly been developed, the parapractice of audience membership is included in the same process more implicitly. To account for the indirect effect characteristic to a parapractice, I have included the commented list of attended performances as an appendix. The body of text contains references to some of these works, accompanied by links to the appendix. The body of text should be enough to convey the meaning of each reference, but the link is provided in case the reader wants more information regarding a specific work.
The photographs are, if not mentioned otherwise, by me.