ABSTRACT
Talker Catalogue is a project that proposes 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. 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. 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. Selectively working from the incongruous records that exist of the event, the performance entangles disparate elements of autobiography and other cultural residue to propose an subjective historiographic process that negotiates a defining moment in the history of performance art.
