From Visible Object to Reported Action: The Performance of Verbal Images in Visual Art Museums

Tracing the possibilities that verbal images offer within contexts historically premised on visual encounters, this essay argues for reported action—a rhetorical device wherein events are disclosed through speech rather than enacted in front of an audience—as an innovative curatorial strategy emerging through performances presented in, and devised specifically for, museum settings. Grounded in particular examples of practice, by Tim Etchells, Boris Charmatz, Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş, and Bedwyr Williams, staged recently at art museums in London, this study engages in detail with those events in order to chart a contemporary response to the established frameworks that govern museum sites and place certain limitations on performance. Spoken description enables the display of complex and elaborate arrangements of objects, images, scenes, and characters. The essay assesses how verbal images contribute to the creation of performance in contemporary art museums, and suggests that the classic theatrical technique of reported action takes to a certain extremity the heightened emphasis on visual perception still predominant in such institutions. Moving the discussion beyond concerns with the exhibition of live bodies, reenactments, and archival documents, the essay situates current debates about the place of performance in dialogue with a much longer history of distinctly theatrical practice. Repurposed in the situation of the museum and alongside curated collections of visual artworks, reported action is reimagined here as an experimental display practice, both sustaining and intervening in long-standing presentational traditions while offering a creative extension of what it is possible for museums to contain.