Video
Joan Jonas, Good Night Good Morning, 1976. Single-channel video, black and white, silent, 11:38 min. Component in the performance Mirage (1976) and the multimedia installations Mirage (1976/2001) and Mirage (1976/1994/2005). Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Description
Shot with a camera turned on its side and intended to be shown on a vertical video monitor, the video Good Night Good Morning (1976) is a component of the Mirage performance and the installations Mirage (1976/2001) and Mirage (1976/1994/2005) and is also distributed as an autonomous video work. Made in New York and Nova Scotia during three separate weeks over the period of a year, the video shows Jonas briefly greeting the camera every morning upon waking and every night before going to bed. At different moments in the video, Jonas shifts the lighting and music, and arrangements of paper cones and chalk on blackboard drawings are visible in the studio in the background. Jonas returned to the diaristic structure of this video forty years later for the color video Good Night Good Morning ‘06 (2006).
—KP
Bibliographic References
“Good Night Good Morning.” Electronic Arts Intermix.
“Good Night Good Morning.” In Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions 1968–1982, edited by Douglas Crimp, 134. Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California; Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1983.
Simon, Joan. “Good Night Good Morning.” In In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas, edited by Joan Simon and Joan Jonas, 210. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015.