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.

3.4 M E T H O D S

The draft series and the examined parts are by default situated in the context of performing arts and more specifically within the genre of esitystaide/beforemance art. Taking thus beforemance art as the base, they can also be defined intermedial (see Chapter 1.3 for the definition utilized in this research). I have excluded these two (beforemance art and intermedia) from the list of methods, since they function more as umbrella terms under which the methods can be listed. The methods are all consequences of my attempts to fit and transform my artistic practice to the artistic research environment where it has been realized, and also to find methods that would fit the phenomena I have been addressing. Artistic research is by definition situated in the nexus of contexts of art and research, which encouraged me to find a way to superimpose academic textuality and artistic eventfulness. This goal has guided me to look for appropriate and inventive formats for experimentation and dissemination. Working in an intermedial way enabled a perspective that was at the same time internal and external to a specific genre, such as theatre or performance art, which in turn renders an intermedial approach suitable for experimental artistic research. Contextualisation serves as a way to legitimize this work in the academic system. I found especially the practice of referencing a fruitful way to navigate the terrain in between the academic institution and the institution of art.

There is a method-section in the end of the description of each Draft, in which there has been some note-worthy methodical development. Additionally, I have linked below the drafts were each method has appeared for the first time. Many of the methods re-occur, but I found it redundantly complex to add methodical pathways to trace those re-occurances.

DRAFTING & ITERATION appears for the first time in Draft 1

MEDIA OF READING

the printed programme in Draft 1

typography, metatext and bilingualism in Draft 2

footnotes in Draft 6

the codex, the paper and the pause in Draft 7

the letter in Draft 9

the collective notebook in Draft 10

geometry in Draft 11

theatre play in Draft 11

internet-based digital reading interfaces in Draft 19

scrolling in Draft 21

CONTEXTUALIZATION

discursive references in Draft 1

the parapractice of audience membership in Draft 3

artistic references in Draft 7

appropriating artworks in Draft 8

expanded referencing in Draft 17

OTHER METHODS

using informants in Draft 8

phenomenological practice in Draft 11

installation, a historical perspective and an etymological perspective in Draft 13

weaving in Draft 16

the practice of audiencing in Draft 14

<— 3.3 Motifs

Table of contents

4 Timeline —>

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Tuomas H Laitinen - How Audience Bodies Form - 2025