Exit THE AZTEC

Tom/Lutz: Two Scenes in 1983

For a long time I’ve been interested in the photographic images that are used to document performances or theatrical productions. I was struck by how inefficient they are as a means to convey or record a live event taking place over time and yet how universally accepted they have become as the matter from which a history is constructed. Despite this inefficiency they are largely compelling to behold (I find this especially with the experimental theatre practices of the late 20th century – the Wooster Group, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Foreman) for the imaginative space they open as a viewer speculates about what took place before and after the photograph was taken. And yet they reflect a organising impulse that reduces complex, elaborate, multifaceted events to single images.

As part of an ongoing project titled Talker Catalogue I have been developing performances that seek to disrupt this impulse which seems symptomatic of a generally reductive approach to the writing of history.

Conceding that my attempts to articulate events will be equally inefficient while no less legitimate I have worked from particular images, footnotes and commentary from the history of contemporary performance in an extremely expanded sense. The resulting monologues, images and texts are fragmentary, composite stories that attempt to propose alternative historicising strategies that explore the familiar pleasure of storytelling, the paternalistic mode of a lecture and the inherent effects and registers of speech.