User:Birk Weiberg/Performance Art in Switzerland

Performance Art in Switzerland

These notes are developing ideas for documenting performance art in Switzerland during an edithathon in the context of the exhibition BANG BANG – translocal hi:stories of performance art (Q111803182) at the Museum Tinguely (Q180904). At the moment performance art is hardly represented in Wikidata. Entries for performance art works exist primarily if a performance has its own entry in one of the Wikipedias. There are two related WikiProjects - one for Visual Arts, one for Performance Arts - however, both don’t address the representation of performance art.

The following thoughts are informed by some premises:

1. Performance artist and scholars attach importance to the fact that with performance art there is a distinction between the work as a concept and its performances which may differ in many aspects from each other. While this is certainly true, I will ignore this distinction for practical reasons and at least for the time being. A performance art item is an instance of (P31) a performance artwork (Q22672348).
2. Persons, groups, institutions and places of performance art are the first step when it comes to represent performance art in Wikidata. There are established practices of describing them and there is a higher chance that the data will be useful also beyond the limited scope of this endeavour. The works themselves should be added slowly and accompanied by a discussion of how they should be modelled.
3. Art history for various reasons is still organized largely along the idea of national identities. Just as the exhibition follows the idea of translocal histories, here the question what makes Swiss performance art Swiss is answered as open and varied as possible.
4. In many cases there are several ways to express something in Wikidata. So if there are two properties that both provide reasonable solutions for describing kind of the same thing, I will suggest to use both instead of splitting hairs over which would be conceptually more correct than the other.

Persons

Properties which describe a person (or any other item) can be considered to fulfill two different functions: identification or contextualization. Identifying properties are not domain specific: date of birth (P569), place of birth (P19), country of citizenship (P27), date of birth (P569), work location (P937), occupation (P106) and specific identifiers like GND ID (P227) and SIKART ID (P781). Some of these also contectualize a person by making a connection to Switzerland. The primary property for describing what someone is doing is occupation (P106) and here with the value performance artist (Q10774753). However, occupation (P106) often holds many values, which are not exclusive and performance artist (Q10774753) may just be one of many occupations as in the case of Christian Marclay (Q923306), who in general would not be identified as a performance artist even is he does performances. Alternatively we can also make a statement about the subject of a person’s activities with field of work (P101) and the value performance art (Q213156). This tends to more precise but less often used. Following the premisses above, it is suggested to use both as they can be useful in different scenarios.

Reference item: Marina Abramović (Q47496)

Groups & Institutions

Groups share many properties with persons. As a basic classification it makes sense to use artist collective (Q1400264). If a group consists of exactly two persons, the subclass artistic duo (Q85942930) would be more correct but it can be doubted if this additional specificity is worth the increased complexity of the data. For connection persons and groups there are two options: member of (P463) and the more generic part of (P361). But as member of (P463) doesn't have an inverse property "has member", part of (P361) and has part(s) (P527) seem to be more reasonable. To contextualize groups with the field of performance art the same properties should be used as with persons: occupation (P106) and field of work (P101).

Reference item: Muda Mathis & Sus Zwick (Q100393088)

Places

There are many established ways to indentify and describe places. And there are two aspects that make them complicated when it comes to performance art: They can have manifold classifications like venue (Q17350442), museum (Q33506), exhibition hall (Q57659484), cultural center (Q1329623) or artist-run space (Q4034417). And not all of the places relevant in this context can be described with field of work (P101) performance art (Q213156). This makes it difficult to find them and it is likely that in most cases this will only happen once one or more performance works refer to them.

Reference item: Kaserne Basel (Q1726074)

Performance Artworks

The basic classification should be instance of (P31) performance artwork (Q22672348) and genre (P136) performance art (Q213156). inception (P571) and location (P276) are obvious properties to describe a performance work’s time and place – at least if only one performance is described. To identify the artist and possibly other participants there is not a single generally accepted and practiced way. A first step would be to add the artist in the very general role of creator (P170).

In a similar way as with the above mentioned distinction between work and performance, it can be doubted if Wikidata right now is the best place place to describe performance arts works in all their complexities. Instead references to museums and archives with described at URL (P973) or full work available at URL (P953) seem to be more useful at the moment.

Reference item: Saemann meets Schneemann (Q110070477)

Queries

• Swiss performance artists and groups
• Map of performances by Swiss artists and groups
• Timeline of performances by Swiss artists and groups