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 23

14.11.2021, the publication of the essay collection Jokin meissä valvoo

A prisoner of performance

In January 2021 Reality Research Center published an essay collection called Jokin meissä valvoo—Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskuksen esseitä hallinnasta ja hallitsemattomuudesta (Eng. Something in Us Stays Awake—Essays on Control and Uncontrollability by the Reality Research Center). It was a result of a long collective writing process. The eight writers (Heidi Backström, Titta Halinen, Lea Kalenius, Johanna Matruka, Pilvi Porkola, Janne Saarakkala, Jonna Wikström and myself) had been meeting for two years for writing sessions. It was a methodical process: each participant wrote their own text individually, but we were only allowed to write together. At first, we gathered in the same place to write (experimenting with different sites), when Covid-19 disabled gatherings, we met via conference calls. Each time we would first write for some hours, then discuss, possibly read aloud what we had produced.

My text, only available in Finnish, is called Esityksen vanki (Eng. A Prisoner of Performance¹). It is something between an auto fictive essay and a theatre play with five acts: The Cell, Warden's Room, The Crime, (Intermission), The Shower, The Passion. The text parallels the way performances colonize everyday experiences with the history of colonial violence exercised by European states on the Global South—the immersive tendency of esitystaide/beforemance art is expanded in the text until there is no escape from this artificial experiential realm. The text stages the privileged circumstances that enable the writing of the essay as a crime against life. It is a desperate cry for help, moaned by a remorseful colonist, or as the prologue of the first act reads:

The dramatic tension of the situation is based on the protagonist’s defiance in the face of an inevitable avalanche; his desire to step out of the performance, which spreads everywhere, colonizes every shred of reality, eats it all. I fear it means: all of us. He strives towards freedom, to a world with no performance. Like the antiheros of the tragedies of the Antique, he is doomed to fail.

M O T I F S

T h e p h e n o m e n o n o f a u d i e n c e

In theatres of the modernist era the audience sat opposite the stage, separated from the emergence of art. The stage was elsewhere—there several layers of reality settled magically on top of each other, one could move into another place and time in the blink of an eye or transform from male to female, human to animal, one to many. From the auditorium the modern human being could witness the events on stage like a physicist witnessed the play of particles in an electron microscope or a colonial governor witnessed the life of aboriginals from the porch.

In 2020 those times are gone. The European human cannot sincerely situate anything at a safe distance anymore. Old-school proscenia, porches and objective research arrangements have been dismantled and the audiences of contemporary theatre are placed repeatedly to view themselves as a part of the stage: opposite, in angles, in circles, in squares, in parallelograms, in mirrors, as herds, mobile, on screens, in cages and #mobileservices.

And now, in April 2020, those times are gone as well. Theatres and art museums are closed, rehearsal studios echo their emptiness. The audience, as we know it, is gone.

The motif of audience continues here —>

U n l i m i t e d t i m e a n d s p a c e

And now, at this very moment, in the fleeting present, in which esitys always happens...

When writing this entry, I first used a past tense. “The text was...” “It paralleled...” Then I walked downstairs from my office to the library of the Theatre Academy, took the book in my hand and realized, that the text still is. At first, I also excluded the essay from the draft series, but decided to include it, since it is again one way of outlining the territory of esitystaide/beforemance art. It is far out—even further down the literary path than a score. It is disguised as an essay but is a performance—or the opposite, disguised as a performance but is a piece of literature.

Concerning the audience body, this work is typically not read collectively, but instead borrowed from a library, brought home, read in bed or at the kitchen table. Or forgotten in an attic for centuries and discovered by our descendants in an apocalyptic world. Or packed into a suitcase and transported to the other side of the planet. It is not defined by a specific time or place and it does not summon perceptible, collective audience bodies. But by being included in my process of thinking it does take part in surrounding, in closing the phenomenon of an audience body.

Furthermore, an audience is always live, regardless of the form of art. The parapractice of audience membership takes always place at a specific moment and has a contingent quality. No-one knows how an audience will take it or what will happen in the audience body. The audience can anticipate the quality of their own resonance only vaguely, as can the makers of a specific work.

When writing the essay, I became suddenly aware of how easy it is to give a performance longevity, how easy it is to stretch its duration almost infinitely. Just print it and publish it as a book!

The motif of time continues here —>

The motif of space continues here —>

1 The text is not translated into English and if it would, I would probably like to use the word performance as a translation for esitys, since beforemance would not be familiar to its readers and would require lengthy explanations.

<— A Reading of Audience

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Draft 24 —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025