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.

TIME

2 —> 7 —> 9 —>

14 —> 16 —> 21 —>

A Reading of Audience —>

23 —> 24 —> 28 —> 29 —>

Audience Body

SUBORDINATION TO A PERFORMANCE

2 —> 4 —> 5 —> 7 —> 11 —> 14 —> 15 —>

16 —> 17 —> 21 —> A Reading of Audience —>

24 —> 25 —> Audience Body

RESONANCE

3 —> 8 —> 16 —> 20 —> 22 —> A Reading of Audience

—> Audience Body

(work-in-progress 1)

—> 30

3.3 M O T I F S

The draft series was an iterative research practice, which had an emergent nature in relation to my topic and to the practice itself. The series of artistic research experiments, available in the next chapter in chronological order, contains 30 drafts and two examined artistic parts: A Reading of Audience and Audience Body.

While realizing the drafts I forwarded my thinking on the subject of audience, by introducing and re-iterating a set of perspectives, which I have retrospectively organized into a theoretical model and named research motifs. These motifs form a system, which I have formulated to account for the concepts of audience body and beforemance, coined through this research.

Parallel to the appearance of the motifs, the draft series also introduced an accumulating set of research methods, resulting in the emergent and process-based methodology used in the research. The motifs deal more with the "content" of my research (= what is an audience), the methods with the ways I have devised for thinking about and experimenting with the content (= how the phenomenon of the audience can be studied). I have separated them from each other here for the sake of clarity, even if they have been intertwined in the practice of research.

The basic concept of the audience has been the thread running throughout the research project. In the indexical chart above I have discerned that thread into several interconnected filaments that travel through the chronology of the practice. This weaving of practice-based motifs into a conceptual fabric ends up with the cloth of theory back in Chapter 2. Also the theoretical system itself has been prototyped and re-iterated several times within the practice.

The basic concepts used in this research have appeared through these artistic research experiments, for example the concept of the audience body appears in Draft 8 for the first time. The preconditions, conditions and variables of an audience body have emerged while I have contemplated the phenomenon through my practice.

The practice can be approached either through the chronological timeline in Chapter 4.2 or through the motif threads presented above. Following one of the theads, you can see how it has appeared in different ways and developed in the process. Each of the threads ends up either in Chapter 2.1 or 2.2, where the motifs are articulated as components of the theoretical proposal.

<— 3.2 Parapractice of audience membership