ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the ecology of performance's media-based contingency, specifically looking at the pictorial and performance-based strategies of four case studies: the work of Joan Jonas and Babette Mangolte in the 1970s and that of Sarah Pierce and Jimmy Robert since 2010. The curated presentations of Jonas's archive typify the significance of the archive to the institutionalization of performance art. The developments and ongoing processes inherent to performance's historicization eventually will lead the Organic Honey Archive to become an accompanying extension or even part of the multimedia installation of the work itself. Pierce uses the exhibition space as a site of production as well as a format to investigate the politics of the ephemeral and its physical manifestation at the heart of museum politics and the increasing desire for event-based art.