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Talker Catalogue. Talker Catalogue is a research project – in the form of a series of performances, that aims to propose alternative strategies for assembling and recounting a history of performance practice. Presented at several exhibition venues, it was also presented as a performance paper at the conference Inner Movement: the motor dimension of imagination, University College Ghent and developed into a text published in Not a Day Without a Line: Understanding Artists’ Writing, Academia Press, 2013, Ghent.

Talker Catalogue is a research project that aims to propose alternative strategies for assembling and recounting a history of performance practice. It aims to challenge the orthodoxies, conventions and methods of documenting performances, and also to challenge the ways that these become incorporated into traditional, linear historiographical models. Using performance itself as a methodological tool, it responds critically to the limited nature of, for example photographic documentation, and its failure to convey the nuances and complexities of time-based work. The research’s originality lies in its use of performance itself to become an active participant in its own history, rather than a dispassionate authority commenting on it from the outside. Attendant to this work are broader implications for historiographical practices in other fields and how they might be critically reappraised.

Each of the four performances that constitute the research, (Exit THE AZTEC, The Nineteen Sixties, Tom/Lutz: Two Scenes in 1983 and All Whirlwind Heat and Flash), address details, fragments, documents or footnotes of what could be considered as ‘the history of performance’. By experimenting with a combination of modes of public address (explicatory, academic, dramatic, discursive, anecdotal) texts were appropriated or elaborated from this material to be delivered as monologues. Through repetition, collage and speech, a new descriptive mode was developed emphasising the subjectivity of a singular, speaking subject. The performances thus interrogated the particularities of key historic visual material by integrating it into the live scenario. This introduced and problematised questions of appropriation, image reproduction and authorship for the audience. This research has been presented in a solo exhibition at The Chisenhale Gallery, London, and additionally at: Van Horbourg, Basel; CAGE, New York. Presented in group exhibitions at: Arnolfini, Bristol; Establissement d’en Face, Brussels; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; DEK 22, Rotterdam.