ArtSTOR blog post about Franklin Furnace's 35 Birthday Party

ArtSTOR has posted a blog post about Franklin Furnace's 35th Birthday party. Here's how it starts:

Martha Wilson: If I had known 35 years ago how much work it was going to be to establish a not-for-profit organization in my living loft at 112 Franklin Street in TriBeCa, I probably would not have done it. Several times I was tempted to fold the tent. Yet the vacuum in the art world that need to be filled (with hot air!) was obvious, and kept me going: none of the major institutions in town were paying attention to what artists were doing. Artists were publishing cheap stuff, artworks masquerading as books. Around the same time, Printed Matter was being formed (as a for-profit corporation at first) by a collective of artists and activists, to publish artists’ books; soon we divided the pie such that Franklin Furnace took on the exhibition and preservation of artists’ books, Printed Matter, Inc. took on their publication and distribution.

Read More

Franklin Furnace Vimeo !

Franklin Furnace now is the proud owner of a Vimeo account.

Check it out at http://vimeo.com/franklinfurnace


New videos will be posted each week!
Please become one of our contacts or subscribe to us if you too have a Vimeo account.

Cheers!

Intern's Perspective: FF intern Philippa Chan

This is Philippa Chan, an intern at Franklin Furnace. I have been interning at the Furnace since the end of July of this year. After the recent completion of my Bachelors of Art History and Theory, I decided it would be beneficial for me explore the art industry before going on to complete my honours and (finally) graduate. My life in New York is immensely different to my life back in Sydney. It has taken some time for this city to feel “like home” but I can now say with confidence that it definitely does.

I came to New York from Sydney, Australia because I felt that this city could offer me the best in contemporary art and culture. I feel privileged to have stumbled across the Franklin Furnace internship programme because I believe it has been able to offer me an uncensored view of the art industry. Franklin Furnace has been extremely inclusive of me and all the other interns that I have worked with. I feel that we get real responsibilities and projects, rather than just the menial tasks you normally associate with a regular internship position.

To give you a rough idea of what it is like to be an intern at Franklin Furnace, here are a few of the tasks that I have been assigned.

I started out my internship photographing various pieces of artworks that Franklin Furnace has collected in its deep storage area. I became closely acquainted with works by Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre, Christo and Stephen Shore, just to name a few.

In between I had a few small tasks to fill the gap (i.e. creating a disaster plan...lets hope it never has to be used because I feel it may be highly inadequate!) and my current project is working on the Ree Morton sketch books and note books. I am assisting Michael by making three copies of each digital image for the archive before we ship her work off to MoMA. Concurrently, every Tuesday afternoon I have the adorable, yet challenging task of assisting the artist, Ron Littke with a 4th grade class at Clinton Hill, P.S. 20. The making of the video has only just started but the children are already eager and ready to jump onto that camera and start making the film. It was immediately apparent who the aspiring actresses/actors are and which children feel more comfortable being behind the camera and away from the limelight. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project pans out.

I greatly admire Franklin Furnace and its dedication to preserving vulnerable forms of art. There have been many times during the course of my studies that I have come across a description of a work of art that has been near impossible to find photographic or cinematic evidence of, so I think it’s really excellent that Franklin Furnace has dedicated itself to this very worthy cause.

Living in New York and being a part of the Franklin Furnace Archives has cemented my love of visual arts and has reiterated to me the importance and significance of art that is challenging and art that deliberately pushes the envelope. I am really enjoying my time here in New York and at Franklin Furnace and I am very much looking forward to the rest of my time here. I’m sure you will hear more from me as the year progresses.

Interns' Perspective: FF interns from Italy

Hi, this is Marco, one of the two new Italian interns of Franklin Furnace.
I’m so happy to be here, working for such a great association in the city that never sleeps.

I am working here for four weeks and my past habits in Italy seem so far away. Italy: one of the most beautiful countries on the earth, with an amazing history especially in the art’s field. Millions of people come every year from all over the world to see Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Raffaello, Giotto, Tiziano (the list is so long!). Despite that, in my country there aren’t in reality any public grants for avant-garde artists. Would Michelangelo’s life have been the same without fundings?
This is such a shameful inconsistency!

For me it would be a dream to recreate one day an association like Franklin Furnace in Italy. Yes, I can say that this my long term goal.

So, here I am in New York City: I’m trying to learn as much as I can about this reality.
I’ve had several times the opportunity to explore the archive. Let me say: “wow”! It’s huge, plenty of fascinating files. You can feel a vibrant atmosphere of creativity there. Only those who have walked around that archive can understand what I’m talking about. Who knows what I could find out there in the future?

Now I give the floor to my “colleague”…

…hi! I’m Chiara, the second Italian intern.

I decided to start this internship at Franklin Furnace six months ago.
For me it represents an important experience to know the infinite languages of art.
I’m very glad to work in this organization, because I believe in the importance of making culture from art and from different languages.

Artists, especially avant-garde artists, always broke all the rules to express their selves and to communicate a concept to the audience.

I think that this is the best way to awaken people’s minds and to open new ways to understand the world.

As Marco said also for me is very significant to work in this field. I would like to promote through art and performances a new mentality and an open minded view. These languages have a lot of impact on public attention and can broadcast important messages.
I hope this experience at Franklin Furnace will give me new ideas and it will encourage me to achieve my purpose.

Marco Gallorini & Chiara Savarino

Intern Perspective: File from the Archive!

This is Andrea, one of the Franklin Furnace interns. I just recently returned from Florence, Italy where I was studying painting conservation and jewelry design. Although I miss Europe and now have mixed feelings about America it feels good to be back at the Franklin Furnace office and to be able to explore the archives. Martha Wilson suggested I find something from the first ten years of Franklin Furnace that interests me and write about it. When scrolling through the files I saw a lot of interesting performance, artist books, installation and mail art projects. There were a few that I recognized and I was excited to realize that Franklin Furnace was a part of them. However, one specific project called out to me. Guillaume Bijl's "The Art- Liquidation Project" of April 14, 1982 was part of a series of installations that transformed the art galleries into spaces for pragmatic or business purposes. These spaces were turned into places such as a travel agency, vocational guidance center, a shoe shop, a psychiatric clinic etc. Changing a gallery into these settings makes the viewers react with critical reflections of society. The visitors are examining these settings and exploring them in a way that is different than going for the actual purpose. It's an art gallery, you're not going there to plan your trip to Hawaii, but it may look like you can. These symbols of our society when placed out as art change their meaning and thus change the viewers interaction. It's true that once something is pronounced as "art" the way we react to it is different. That's the debate of readymade art that can go on forever. If I get into it you'd be reading for hours. (side note: i still don't really think an empty shoebox can be called art, but that's okay.) In a way, what Guillaume Bijl did was a form of readymade art in which the placement into a gallery changed the meaning of the objects. This therefore changed how the viewers reacted to these objects of our society. It's complicated but that's what art can be. I think it's exciting because it forced the viewers to really contemplate where they were and what they were looking at. I particularly like installations that provide this reaction. They use a space to make a new space.

photos from the Franklin Furnace Database of the installation

The reason why I chose this project to look it is that I did a similar one last year in December at Boston University's Gallery 5 in the School of Visual Arts. My contemporary issues teacher, Dana Clancy, who was an intern here at Franklin Furnace in the summer of 1992, got the class grants to do gallery shows. After a few weeks of brainstorms and splitting into groups we came up with concepts that toyed with changing the gallery space. My group decided to change the space completely and make an installation of a marketplace. The show, titled "Market!" physically changed the gallery into a fake farmers market. The one key difference between our project and Bijl's is that we made all the "products", mostly out of recycled materials. We had steaks created from felt, cacti created from nylon stockings and cotton balls (my creation), plaster donuts, bubble wrap corn, felt carrots, toilet paper roll cannolis and fabric layered cakes. We played with the idea of consumerism and its relationship to waste. We also enjoyed how the space was drastically changed and the reactions of the viewers. It was a concept that was accessible to those not within the art world, which is something our show had in common with Bijl's. It pushed what we could do with a gallery space. I can only think that the viewers of our market and the viewers of Bijl's installations had similar reactions that forced them to contemplate society, consumerism and everyday interactions.
Check out BU today's coverage of our show here. I'm the one in the green shirt that's not really ever looking at the camera. oops.
To sum it all up, I'd like to say that looking through the archives here is intellectually stimulating and a great learning experience.
-Andrea Lynn Anastasia Bartunek

From the archives: artists' books and the inception of Franklin Furnace

Martha Wilson wrote this Introduction for Franklin Furnace's The Flue magazine of Winter 1983 in a Special Issue on Artists' Books, Archives and Collections.

I am writing this introduction to acquaint you with the reasons I founded Franklin Furnace in 1976. First, let me digress a bit to tell you I had been practicing my artwork in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, which took the forms of publications, video, performance, film, and written articles. My boyfriend and I received the Art & Project bulletins from Amsterdam and bought Gilbert & George books, Larry Weiner's Statements, and Something Else Press works as well as works by other Conceptualists such as Dan Graham, Doug Huebler, and Robert Barry, in order to understand what was happening in contemporary art from our perch in the Far North. When I moved to New York in 1974, I met many other artists such as Marcia Resnick, Athena Tacha, Jenny Snider, Conrad Gleber, Gail Rubini, Tim Burns, Leslie Schiff, artists who lived in New York and elsewhere, who chose to publish their work, or at least chose publication as a suitable format for some of their work. I figured if 1 knew offhand about fifty artists whose work took the form of publication, there must be 500 or so works out there which could be gathered together for a bookstore and permanent collection to draw further attention to this field. At this time, all the major museums in New York were actively ignoring the field of artists' publishing it seemed to me; after the Information show at MOMA, the bookstore took on the publications, for a short period, of the artists who were in the show: Lawrence Werner, Richards Jarden, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Gerald Ferguson; and Barbara London was acquiring works for MOMA that later appeared in the "Bookworks" exhibition pre¬sented there in 1977. But by and large, the prospect of sales and distribution of artists' publications was grim in 1976, and exhibition of these works was rare. Franklin Furnace was founded to fill a gaping hole in the artworld which no other existing organization was filling adequately. I had no inkling at this time of the tremendous scope and international participation by thousands of artists in publishing activity.

Early in 1976, I wrote to all the artists on the 112 Greene Street Workshop list to ask if they had pub¬lished works to consign and donate to an organization that would both sell and preserve these works. Franklin Furnace Bookstore and Archives opened its doors on April 3, 1976, with about 200 works strewn on trestle tables and protected with plastic slipcases for the public to browse through and purchase. At the same time that I was sanding a patch of floor in

the front of 112 Franklin Street to prepare for this opening, Printed Matter, Inc. was being formed by a collective of artists and individuals who wanted to publish titles by artists and distribute them as well. Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter, Inc held many powwows between April and June, at the end of which time these two young organizations agreed to divide the pie along the profit and non-profit lines that distinguished them: Printed Matter incorporated as a profit institution to both publish and sell artists' books, and Franklin Furnace Archives, Inc. retained its non-profit status as a permanent collection for artists' books and an exhibition space for other text-related and book-related activities such as installation art, one-of-a-kind books, and performance art. Today, Franklin Furnace's permanent collection, exhi¬bition and performance programs have grown, but its original purposes remain unchanged: To collect any published item by an artist and archivally preserve it for future research by artists, art historians, collectors, curators, art educators, librarians, other professionals, and members of the general public.

Martha Wilson

An intern’s early experiences with the artist book

I was first introduced to an artist book only very recently, when I did a small presentation on Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip for an art class. The artist book is a form that, just as it was when Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in 1976, is still somewhat ignored, and certainly misunderstood. One reason for this is the artist book’s incompatibility with the conventions of art exhibition. On the one hand, an artist book needs to be handled in order to be fully appreciated and, on the other hand, the more famous books (such as Ed Ruscha’s) are now valued at thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

In preparing for my presentation on Every Building on the Sunset Strip, I was exhilarated to learn that my college library had a copy of the book and that I thus had an opportunity to experience it first hand. I sat in a corner of the library, with Ed Ruscha’s book on the table in front of me, savoring both the fact that I was holding an important piece of art history in my hands and the fact that I had accessed it so casually, as though it were just another library book. This new-found accessibility of art was thrilling—and felt just as revolutionary as it was intended to be.

Of course, the Internet has made art relatively accessible in a different way: any Google or Artstor search will yield images to satisfy fleeting curiosities. And if we want a more intimate access, every museum sells posters and postcards of their most famous pieces that we can send to friends and stick to our walls. But the original work remains on a pedestal. It is precisely this restrictive category of ‘high art’ against which the artist book rebels.

“What function does an artwork which is cheap, portable and potentially unlimited serve? It functions, as so many artists are aware, as alternative space—a channel which circumvents the exclusivity of galleries and the critical community,” Director and Founder Martha Wilson wrote in her 1978 article “Artists Books As Alternative Space.” (Full article can be read here)

Beginning mostly in the 60s, “[t]he book was recognized by artists as a portable unit which could disseminate art ideas efficiently, and a means by which to influence the general public.” Unsurprisingly, the populist dissemination of art ideas was a concept that became very important in the 60s and 70s, with Conceptual Art taking the reins on the book medium.

Whereas lines and alarms separate me from museum pieces by at least a foot, through my college library I was able to spend an hour leafing through Every Building on the Sunset Strip at my leisure. Through that interaction I began to more fully understand why the idolatry of art is an antiquated practice, something to be combated. The old art world has so effectively fabricated a holy aura to distance average viewers from ‘high’ art that we willingly acquiesce to its god-like power. Blinded by this artificial light, we fail to see that dominating art institutions have forced the entire natural diversity of the viewing experience into a unified experience of unquestioning reverence. The artist book blows this experience out of the water.

As an intern at Franklin Furnace, I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon perusing our collection of artist’s books—once the largest in the country, it was acquired by MOMA in 1993. Among the most famous artists whose books I had the chance to look through were: John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Allan Kaprow, Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Seth Siegelaub.

It was exhilarating to have that experience—to be able to hold the books in my hand, a rare opportunity now that only a limited number of them can be viewed, let alone handled. And yet I’m somewhat ashamed to have been so exhilarated—to have felt special because of the rarity of the piece I was holding when the pieces were created to be widely available. Sadly, it has become impossible to experience these works as they were meant to be experienced. Now that artists like Baldessari, LeWitt, and Nauman have been assigned their coveted seats in art history, we cannot view their artist books without subjecting them to the fame of the artists who created them. But just as some artist books, now sold for thousands, were once available for under 10 dollars, so too are there now artists creating books to which the general population pays little attention but which may be worth our attention and pocket money.

Artist books were created to exist in people’s homes, on their coffee tables and in their purses. We would do well to strive to experience art this way, if for no other reason than to exercise our freedom to choose how to view and appreciate artwork. What if ‘art appreciation’ meant taking casual daily doses of accessible art instead of making special, infrequent visits to world-famous museums? The artist book, still an unconventional and uncommon art form, frees us from the confines of traditional art viewing which are, though not exactly wrong or destructive, certainly restrictive. With an artist book in hand, we might be more empowered to experiment with the viewership experience and thus widen the lens through which we experience art and the world.

-Hannah Garner, student intern summer 2010