What is the Knowledge Base?
Who Are We? (Team)
Content and Sources
Choice of Case Studies
Site Structure
Linked Open Data
What is the Knowledge Base?
As a project of the Artist Archives Initiative based at New York University, the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base offers in-depth information about selected artworks and exhibition case studies. It is a resource intended for curators, conservators, exhibition designers, performers, and other art world professionals along with academic researchers to aid in the future exhibition and study of Jonas’s work. The material contained in the resource primarily comes from the artist’s personal archive. Additional sources were museum archives, archives of photographers, galleries, university libraries, and other public and private archives and foundations where we found museum and performance documentation of the case studies, photographs, videos, publications, and exhibition ephemera. These materials allowed us to conduct interviews with the artist and people she worked with throughout her career. The resource is the second project of the Artist Archives Initiative, following the launch of the David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base in 2017.
The knowledge base is not an archive. It does not contain a traditional archival finding aid to guide researchers through catalogued information sources. Instead, it contains a combination of materials selected by our researchers, interviews that we conducted, and descriptive text written by our team. Although we tried to be thorough in presenting information about the case studies, we realize that any such attempt is inevitably limited and an ongoing process. We provide links to our sources for users of the knowledge base to verify our work and to conduct their own further investigations.
The inspiration for the knowledge base came from thinking about how artwork and exhibition documentation housed in museums and specialized or private collections for the purpose of conserving and re-exhibiting their collections, could be made available to the public through an online open source database. Another important factor was the proximity and privileged access we were given to Jonas’s extensive personal archive of her more-than-five-decade-spanning career that allowed us to provide images, floor plans, artwork descriptions, interviews, bibliographies, and other materials that are ordinarily only available to the artist and staff in institutions.
Our aim is to address the growing need for searchable, digital sources about artists built with more flexibility to support discoverability than traditional highly structured databases. This is particularly important for artists such as Jonas whose radical practice was created outside and alongside museum structures and whose works are flexible and adaptive. We are committed to sharing the technical research we conducted to address this need. We hope that others will benefit from the technical information provided in the knowledge base and extend it to develop similar resources for other artists.
Who Are We? (Team)
Along with a love for the work of Joan Jonas, the three project directors have combined backgrounds in art history, curation, conservation, and computer science. As academics, we are committed to providing students an opportunity to learn research and technical skills through practice. The student researchers on the project come from curatorial, conservation, art history, performance studies, museum studies, and computer science programs at various universities.
The writing in the knowledge base is descriptive rather than critical expressions of our points of view. Yet we realize that all writing and information organization is inevitably subjective. If not otherwise noted, the general descriptive texts were written and edited by members of our student research team, and each segment passed through a number of hands before final editing. We include biographical information of all members of the research team to allow researchers to know their academic and professional backgrounds. We also list the interviewers for each interview and link to their biographical information. Knowing their backgrounds will allow researchers to better understand their questions and selection of subjects to discuss with interviewees.
Content and Sources
The Joan Jonas Knowledge Base presents a collection of documentary materials about two seminal early multimedia works by Joan Jonas: Organic Honey (1972; 1972/1994) and Mirage (1976; 1976/1994/2005; 1976/2001). These are complemented by three exhibition case studies that represent important moments in Jonas’s artistic development from the early 1980s to today. They are her first US retrospective at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, entitled Joan Jonas: Performance/Video/Installation in 1980; followed more than a decade later by the exhibition Joan Jonas: Works 1968–1994 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994. As a final case study, we chose Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales, presented at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan in 2014.
The JJKB offers in-depth knowledge on the works from art historical, curatorial, and conservation perspectives, drawing a detailed and interconnected portrait of each case study, presenting a range of materials from archival sources to documents in circulation, such as notebooks, floor plans, interviews, chronologies, photographs, videos, and detailed bibliographies. Each case study in the JJKB interconnects with various documentary resources and is accompanied by a series of interviews with scholars, curators, conservators, and others familiar with Jonas’s work.
The work on the JJKB began in 2017, at a moment in time that allowed us to not only gather materials but to also present the ongoing evolution of these specific works over the last five decades. Since then, we were able to sight, collect, identify, and scan various documentary materials in close collaboration with Jonas as well as with the help of numerous institutions and experts with whom she has worked.
Jonas collaborated with our team by opening her archives and allowing us to interview her about a range of issues related to the principal artworks and exhibition case studies. A majority of the documents on the JJKB are from the artist’s personal studio archive and have not been catalogued or made available to the public before. These documents are supplemented with materials we researched and received from museums, private collections, festivals, galleries, and libraries.
Choice of Case Studies
Given the extent of Jonas’s work we decided, in consultation with the artist, to dedicate the first two years of our research to two specific early works, Organic Honey and Mirage. This choice was based on the seminal status of these works in the artist’s career and their various forms of iteration and evolution across various media, periods of time, and spatial formats.
As one of her key performances, Organic Honey, first performed in 1972, included a closed-circuit camera and monitor as well as projections that Jonas used to create a new situational experience, enabling audiences to view different aspects of the work simultaneously. Our second artwork case study, Mirage, was first presented in 1976 as a performance at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where Jonas used film, video, drawing, and props to evoke new rituals and forms of movement and transformation between the stage and the screen. Both works include performance, video, and multimedia installation versions. They are not only significant for the way the moving image is placed in dialogue with live action, altering the viewer’s experience, but for their overall iterative quality, which gives emphasis on temporality, repetition, and ephemerality.
Since their first performance and recording in the early 1970s and their transformation into multimedia installations, these works have become part of museum collections from the 1990s onwards. Their development from ephemeral time-based artworks to multimedia installations is based on Jonas’s adaption of these works for various exhibition contexts.
Acknowledging Jonas’s engagement with the reciprocal relationship between the stage, the projected image, and the exhibition, was an important factor for our subsequent choice of the three exhibition case studies. The first exhibition case study is Joan Jonas: Performance/Video/Installation at the University Art Museum (now UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), Berkeley, California, curated by David Ross in 1980. This exhibition combined live performances, video screenings, and early performative installations. The Berkeley exhibition was followed by Joans’s first European museum retrospective, Joan Jonas: Works 1968–1994, curated by Dorine Mignot at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994, where Jonas developed her multimedia installations. The third and final exhibition, leading us to the present, is her retrospective Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, which was curated by Andrea Lissoni in 2014 and later traveled on to the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden. It is a key example of how Jonas uses the site of the exhibition as an important element for the experience of her work.
Although there have been many other important exhibitions of her work, these exhibitions play a significant role in Jonas’s development of her multimedia installations and give insight into her close and often long-term collaborations with curators and conservators. They allow us to understand the interconnectedness of the iterations and transitional moments, when, for example, her performances became video works, environments, sets, and multimedia installations. In other words, we give equal attention to the before as much as the after of the event, as well as to its site-specific adaptations, highlighting the continuous evolution of Jonas’s work into the present as much as the future.
Together with the student research team we have carefully investigated the changes and continuities of our five principal case studies as well as related works and exhibitions, tracking the transitions and iterations from the artist’s studio to the exhibitions that have presented them and the museum collections that are now housing them.
Site Structure
Documenting and interlinking the contingent and iterative quality of Jonas’s multimedia practice and the rich historiography and reception of her work since the early 1970s are central to the JJKB’s concept and at the heart of the Artist Archives Initiative’s mission to share knowledge and to serve as a tool for future researchers, making artists’ archives and their exhibition histories available to the public.
These goals are implemented in the structure we developed for the JJKB site, by closely connecting each case study with the thematic components in the resources section and ensuring integration of new forms of data visualization techniques. This interconnected and non-linear approach is reflective of Jonas’s interest in juxtaposing different times and narrative threads moving through the stories and networks she activates throughout her oeuvre.
Linked Open Data
On the technology side of our project, the “D” in “Digital Humanities,” it became clear that the material we worked with does not fit neatly into a traditional hierarchical schema, such as an SQL relational database. Performance artworks are associated with many components, including objects (such as drawings, audio, video, and other media); performance art happens over time as new iterations are associated with the original work; and performance art may involve collaboration among artists and others.
We have therefore dedicated time in our research to design a linked data model to capture our data in the project and to implement our solution through Wikidata, an international linked open data resource that supports cross-cultural and cross-institutional research and collaboration. We worked with colleagues in the field who are active in establishing, documenting, and standardizing commonly recognized properties and terminology related to performance art so that our dataset is discoverable across the community.
Our project explores and presents the use of a variety of data visualization techniques as an additional approach to present our findings to readers. The resource also hosts training materials for readers who wish to further explore the works of Joan Jonas or research other artists and their works. As we continue to add data into Wikidata about Joan Jonas and her work over time, the resulting data tables and data visualizations will become more complex and more robust. We hope they will lead to new and interesting ways to study this artist’s exciting works.