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.

1.1 An artist with no audience

In June 2016 I am working at the Poriginal Gallery, in the town of Pori on the west coast of Finland. I have some objects and a ball of yarn and I am using them to organize my thoughts into a network, a labyrinth, into power lines and crossings, aiming at making the space resonate with a conceptual and a metaphoric structure. I feel like a creative, clever and versatile artist.

The regional performance artist Maire Karuvirta has invited me to work in the gallery for the weekend. It functions as an open studio—I have not prepared an exhibition but brought with me some materials, with which I work during the opening hours.

On the first day nobody enters the gallery. Not one visitor. I am disappointed and frustrated. I feel like I have hit rock bottom. I feel the weight of past ten years of practice and the total meaninglessness of it in the moment at hand. My career as a performance artist seems redundant. Why do I bother?

In the evening I write an email to 27 colleagues. It says:

Hi friends

I have since yesterday been working in the spirit of work-in-progress at the Gallery Poriginal, next to the Pori Art Museum. It is nice to work in a beautiful space, even so nice that at first I hardly noticed that there were no visitors at all. By the end of the opening hours I started to think, whether I should find a new profession.

This thought is not underlined so much by a frustration or some other emotional reaction but rather a practical observation. It is not the first time, when the attention that my works get is merely symbolic, even though I have been very active both in different areas of performing arts and in the field of journalism and nonfiction, as well as in the supporting organisations and thus have gathered both expertise and social capital. The work is often educative for myself and I get a good reception among colleagues. And yet it is possible to work within an established institution and stay unnoticed by anyone.

I started the abstract of this exhibition with the sentence “What would one still need to create into such a crowded world?” So do I need to create? Is this work necessary, when the supply does not answer any demand, except that of processing my own thoughts? I could process my thoughts also without being an artist by profession. Of what does the lack of interest tell?

Well, I have discussed art-related issues with all of you, so I decided to ask your opinion. I am good in learning new things, so I could do something else as well. What do you think, should I?

A) No.

B) Yes. What?

C) Neither, by which you mean what?

Artistically,

Tuomas

The most popular option was C. This was understandable knowing both the preference of many artists to choose an odd option and their precarious and fragmented workflow, escaping clear binaries. Still I was more touched by the A's and the lone B, showing courage to advise me bluntly when they knew their opinion mattered.

The option C however was what three months later sprouted an application to the doctoral programme at the Theatre Academy of the Uniarts Helsinki. Academic artistic research was a way both to continue and discontinue my artistic practice. The journey that has followed, disclosed in this commentary, was thus fuelled by the failure of an artist to summon an audience body and the subsequent loss of belief in art. I wanted a body that would consent to become complicit in the emergence of my performance; a body that would allow my work to resonate in their inner organs. In the absence of that body, art itself seemed to disappear.

It was a banal artistic dilemma, but it seemed to cast a shadow on me of a much larger mystery concerning the existence and nature of the phenomenon of audience. What is an audience? I addressed this shadow with a research practice, one which led me to consider audiences as collective bodies and to ask further questions.

If audiences are defined as collective bodies, what does that mean and how do these bodies form? How to address the phenomenon of the audience body in the contexts of esitystaide¹ and artistic research? The commentary contains an exposition of the research practice, in which these questions are contemplated, as well as the claims that have unfolded concerning the emergence of audience bodies, their necessary preconditions, conditions, potential variations and further implications.

1 Esitystaide is a Finnish term referring to a genre of contemporary performing arts, which has emerged during the last 30 years. It is typically translated either as performance art or Live Art, but I am proposing an new translation beforemance art as well as a definition for the term. This will be elaborated in Chapters 2.3 and 2.4.

Table of contents

1.2. How to read this commentary —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025