Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future

By Toni Sant

Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York–based arts organization whose mission is to preserve, document and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists – particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. Over more than thirty years, Franklin Furnace has exhibited works by hundreds of avant-garde artists, some of whom – Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jenny Holzer and the Blue Man Group, to name a few – are now established names in contemporary art.

Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive history of this remarkable organization from its conception to the present. Organized around the major art genres that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, this book intersperses first-person narratives with readings by artists and scholars on issues critical to the organization's success as well as Franklin Furnace's many contributions to avant-garde art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781841504438

Toni Sant

Toni Sant is Director of Research and Senior Lecturer at the University of Hull School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough, where he also leads the Media and Memory Research Initiative. He is the author of the book Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant Garde: A History of the Future (Intellect, 2011) and Digital Curation & Innovation Consultant for the Routledge Performance Archive. His podcasts appear weekly at http://www.tonisant.com.

Book preview

Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde

A History of the Future

Toni Sant

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Original logo for Franklin Furnace by Pavel Büchler

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Ed Hatton

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-371-4 /EISBN 978-1-84150-443-8

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

– William Gibson, novelist

We drive into the future using only our rear-view mirror.

– Marshall McLuhan, media theorist

I have a headache of which the future is made.

– Jim Morrison, poet

We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.

– R. Buckminster Fuller, visionary

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

– Alan Kay, computer scientist

This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.

– Steward Brand, online community pioneer

What remains is future.

– Patti Smith, poet

To Christine

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1: Franklin Furnace: A Timeline

Chapter 2: A Long Conversation with Martha Wilson

Art and the Loft Law in Downtown New York City – Paul M. Gulielmetti

Money and Art at Franklin Furnace in the Early Years – Barbara Quinn

Some of My Performances in Retrospect – Annie Sprinkle

When Franklin Furnace Went Virtual – Robert Galinsky

Exemplary Quality Irreverence – Adrianne Wortzel

You Can’t Stay Avant-Garde – David S. Perlmutter

Part II

Chapter 3: Broadcasting Artists’ Ideas

Chapter 4: Virtually Live

Chapter 5: Preserving the Avant-Garde

Franklin Furnace Publications

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has come about because of the generous spirit that has driven Franklin Furnace since 1976. I must therefore start by thanking Martha Wilson for making it all come together. I feel privileged to know the subject of my book beyond the archives she keeps in the name of Franklin Furnace.

Stacy Horn started the chain of events that led to the writing of this book. Robert Galinsky was among several guests she invited to speak during her Virtual Culture class, which I took at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 1998. I asked him to accompany me to the Fourth Performance Studies International conference at Aberystwyth in Wales and he insisted on inviting Martha Wilson to join us. I had been casually following Franklin Furnace as part of the contemporary New York art scene for about a year or so before actually meeting Martha Wilson in person for the very first time at New York’s JFK Airport in April 1999. Galinsky has been a gracious friend ever since. He was always my man on the inside and helped give the beast that is New York City a human dimension I’ve come to treasure greatly.

Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, Andre Lepecki, Anthony J. Pennings, Branislav Jakovljevic, and Eric Miller gave me valuable feedback on some of my earlier research on Franklin Furnace for my doctoral dissertation at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Performance Studies, in 2002/2003. Special thanks to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, my guide throughout my years in New York (she’s the one who first pushed me to write more about Franklin Furnace), and Catharine R. Stimpson, the amazing dean of NYU’s Graduate School of Arts & Science, whose support and sense of duty I will cherish forever.

My colleagues at the School of Arts and New Media on the Scarborough Campus of the University of Hull have been very supportive over the years I’ve been with them. The same goes for the deans who have overseen my department in the years I’ve been in Scarborough: Craig Gaskell and George Talbot. Special thanks to Fiona Bannon, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Linda Hockley, Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X), and Jason Raven. Jonathan Cant, Tracy Bower, and Liz Wilson from the University of Hull’s Research Funding Office deserve a special mention, too. Their assistance makes it possible for me to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing financial support enabling me to finish this book through their Research Leave Scheme.

Many thanks to the Franklin Furnace staff: Harley Spiller, Michael Katchen, and Eben Shapiro, as well as Tiffany Ludwig, Dolores Zorreguieta, Rachel Knowles, and B.J. Lockhart. I am also profoundly grateful to Nancy Buchanan, the late Paul Gulielmetti, Frank Moore, David S. Perlmutter, Barbara Quinn, Annie Sprinkle, and Adrianne Wortzel for their direct contributions to the contents of this book. Jacki Apple, Yvonne Brookes, and Marty Heitner graciously allowed me to reproduce some of the essential illustrations that appear in this book. For granting me permission to reproduce images of their work, I’m also indebted to Martine Aballea, Eric Bogosian, David Khang, Claes Oldenburg, William Pope.L, Diane Torr, Bernard Tschumi Architects, and William Wegman. Special thanks to Tim Miller, and Brian Routh (aka Harry Kipper) for sharing with me alternative insights into various aspects discussed in this book.

I would also like to express my appreciation to the book-publishing team at Intellect for all their support in bring this book to print, especially May Yao, Sam King, and Melanie Marshall. I’m also appreciative of Pierre Portelli’s help in picking the most effective book cover.

Amante Sant transcribed my long interviews with Martha Wilson and conversations with Robert Galinsky from 2001. I thank him for that and much more. I know that he is only interested in what I’m saying because it is being said by his son. No father can be prouder, and no son luckier. My mother, Pauline, has been asking me about this book for many years. Well, here it is Ma!

Toni Sant

Scarborough

November 2010

Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde

A History of the Future is supported by

Each year the AHRC provides funding from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. Only applications of the highest quality are funded and the range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please go to: www.ahrc.ac.uk

Introduction

This is a book about Franklin Furnace. If you’ve never heard of Franklin Furnace before now, you may ask who is Franklin Furnace? rather than what is Franklin Furnace? The who question may seem inappropriate to anyone already familiar with Franklin Furnace. However, the more you delve into the inner workings of Franklin Furnace, the who question becomes more and more interesting and significant. Any answer to the who question inevitably involves Martha Wilson, founding director of Franklin Furnace. This approach, however, may provoke a rather simplistic and somewhat misleading understanding of Franklin Furnace. The what question is quite essential. It gives Franklin Furnace a life beyond Martha Wilson; one built on a mission to make the world safe for avant-garde art.

Within a contemporary critical mindset, to define something as avant-garde arguably renders it no longer so. Naming something avant-garde has complex implications. In his highly influential Teoria dell’Arte d’Avantguardia, Renato Poggioli explains that "the hypothesis that [avant-garde art] existed previous to the era which coined its name is an anachronism twice over: it judges the past in terms of the present and the future (1968 [1962]: 15, original emphasis). Furthermore, as Hal Foster warned in the 1990s, terms like historical and neo-avant-garde may be at once too general and too exclusive to use effectively today (1996: 21). Foster also proposes that artists practicing within a contemporary avant-garde framework have moved away from grand oppositions to subtle displacements" (25, original emphasis). In this way, to discuss Franklin Furnace within the context of avant-garde art we must keep in mind that we are not dealing with one clear, specific thing.

Avant-garde is a fluid term applied to different approaches and works, with multiple focal points that shift in intensity depending on time, place, and context. Leafing through some of the most significant attempts to theorize the avant-garde, this immediately becomes fairly evident.¹ Richard Schechner takes this as a starting point in proposing his own theory of the avant-garde, stating that [w]hat the avant-garde has become during the past 100 years or so is much too complicated to be organized under one heading (1993: 5). Expanding on Poggioli’s theory of the avant-garde, Schechner proposes a schema of five overlapping avant-gardes (a historical avant-garde, a current avant-garde, a forward-looking avant-garde, a tradition-seeking avant-garde, and an intercultural avant-garde) but argues that the term no longer serves a useful purpose and should only be used to describe the historical avant-garde, which in his view spans from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1970s (18). It is somewhat ironic that the end of the historical avant-garde as delineated by Schechner coincides with the advent of Franklin Furnace. This apparent coincidence has not escaped Martha Wilson, who in establishing Franklin Furnace made it the organization’s mission to make the world safe for avant-garde art. Brandishing this claim publicly at any given opportunity, Franklin Furnace emerged at a time when something was needed to keep the spirit of the avant-garde alive. This makes even more sense when taken in the context of the prevailing idea that the project of the avant-garde is no more concluded in its neo moment than it is enacted in its historical moment (Foster 1996: 15).

Unlike other champions of the avant-garde – such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, which has featured some of the same artists over and over for more than two decades, establishing them as the foremost performers of contemporary dance/music/theater – Franklin Furnace continues to support emerging artists and works that defy instant classification. This makes the spirit of the avant-garde – the unknown, the new, the untried, the problematic, and other such aspects – rather than the artists’ name or the quality of the works themselves, the essential aspect that Franklin Furnace values above all. There is a discernable emphasis on artists’ ideas more than on any other element. The media used, the reception the works receive at established institutions, and other conventional values associated with works of art are not a primary concern for Franklin Furnace. Benjamin Buchloh sets down the type of avant-garde practice outlined here as a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistance against the tendency of the ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and control all practices and spaces of representation (1984: 19–20). This is not to say that Franklin Furnace has distanced itself from the historical avant-garde; as we shall see later on in this book, it most certainly has not. Without exalting any particular artist or movement above all others, various histories of avant-garde art are embraced by Franklin Furnace.² In this regard, it is not an accident that the organization is officially incorporated as an archive. An initial drive for the creation of Franklin Furnace was to preserve works of art otherwise overlooked by mainstream museums and galleries, particularly ones that by their ephemeral nature had a very precarious future from their very first moment of conception. In the spirit of the avant-garde, Franklin Furnace has always primarily supported artists and works from the current avant-garde. It does this so that they too can eventually become part of a historical art movement, entering the archive where they are kept from disappearing completely through ongoing programs to preserve the spirit of the avant-garde.

* * *

This book consists of two parts. Part one is a functional history of Franklin Furnace, which revolves around a series of first-person narratives ranging from an interview with Martha Wilson to a number of short pieces by some of the key figures associated with Franklin Furnace. In the second part I present my own insight into the workings of Franklin Furnace and pay special attention to the continuing development of the organization’s persistent mission to broadcast artists’ ideas and archive ephemeral art.

Franklin Furnace has a very checkered history as a hothouse for artists and art forms that may be vulnerable due to their ephemeral nature, institutional neglect, or politically unpopular content. An easy-to-follow timeline of the most significant moments in the history of Franklin Furnace opens part one of this book. Martha Wilson and various Franklin Furnace members of staff contributed entries to this list over the years. The version that appears in this book is based largely on one compiled by Rachel Knowles in 2001, when Franklin Furnace was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. That year, also as part of the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, I interviewed Martha Wilson at length about the history of Franklin Furnace. An edited version of the interview was published in TDR: The Drama Review in 2005 but something closer to a full transcript, with several updates from a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2009, appears as Chapter 2 in this book.

Although Franklin Furnace has had one constant leader since 1976, an endeavor like this enjoys longevity through collaboration. Indeed, in discussing this idea Wilson sees every single artist ever presented by her organization as a collaborator. Others collaborate in other ways: as administrators, archivists, legal advisors, selection panel members, interns, institutional partners, and so on. For this reason, when we discussed the best way to represent the collaborative aspect of the Franklin Furnace project in this book, Martha Wilson asked me to include the voices of some of her many collaborators alongside her interview. The initial list we talked about was much longer than the one we ended up with here. Most omissions were made for logistical reasons, but at the same time it is quite typical of the way things work at Franklin Furnace: cast a wide net and see what comes in. All in all, the final contributing collaborators extend over all the decades of activity covered in the rest of this book and span from art making to arts administration. The six texts included with the interview are loosely linked to specific areas of particular interest in our long conversation. Aside from Martha Wilson’s administrative fortitude and goodwill toward artists, real estate matters and sources of funding are the two things that have kept Franklin Furnace alive for as long as it has been around. Paul M. Gulielmetti and Barbara Quinn address these two issues, especially as they relate to the first years of the organization on Franklin Street. Annie Sprinkle writes about how her work found new meaning at Franklin Furnace. Robert Galinsky and Adrianne Wortzel reflect on how recent directions in experimental art with electronic media impacted on Franklin Furnace as it followed the spirit of the avant-garde into the virtual world. A clear understanding of the spirit of the avant-garde is offered by David S. Perlmutter, who served as chair of the Franklin Furnace board of directors throughout the years of transition away from Franklin Street.

Throughout its existence at 112 Franklin Street between 1976 and 1996, Franklin Furnace saw an evolving program of activities ranging from exhibitions of historical books and artifacts to performances by emerging or unknown artists. Most of it was planned from within the organization but some of it was simply an organic part of what went on in New York City at that time. In the early 1970s, numerous artists in downtown New York could be seen lugging video Portapacks, making films, publishing pamphlets, playing in more than one punk band, and performing for unwitting audiences on the street. It was a melding of high and low art forms driven toward intermedia, with a focus on emotion, the human body, unprecedented levels of exchange among racial and ethnic groups, and social change as the goal of art action. What would later be loosely referred to as the Downtown Art Scene describes an attitude rather than a location, but there were still a few important artist hangouts run by artists.³ The now-defunct Idea Warehouse on Reade Street and the Clocktower Gallery on Leonard Street, which still exists under the administration of P.S.1 (an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art), were among the most prominent venues. The Kitchen was on Broome Street back then, with young artists like Robert Longo and Eric Bogosian among the curators. Even the Whitney Museum of American Art established a downtown branch on Water Street in 1973. This new art-rich environment served as a backdrop for the creation of Franklin Furnace on Franklin Street in 1976. At this location, Franklin Furnace formed an integral part of New York’s downtown art scene, described by Richard Kostelanetz – who embedded himself within this community for four decades – as a cultural hothouse unlike anything anywhere else or any community before in American life, … an urban oasis created by hundreds of artists, if not more, acting independently (2003: 39). That specific art scene had dissipated considerably by the end of the twentieth century and Franklin Furnace moved on along with it.

The physical embodiment of the avant-garde is in perpetual flux, so it is in identifying and preserving the spirit of the avant-garde that Franklin Furnace really finds its raison d’être. Martha Wilson’s reasons for ensuring that Franklin Furnace remains concerned primarily with broadcasting artists’ ideas over more than three decades are explored in Chapter 3. In discussing the links between performance art and Live Art on the Internet through artists’ books I explain the way Wilson connects seemingly disparate art forms. Many twentieth-century avant-garde movements, which were concerned with the way new technology transforms power relations, explored interactive art while questioning the social role of artists in relationship to their audience. The greater degree of interactivity offered by the Internet coupled with easy access to the means of production and distribution are two of the main characteristics that make it different from other electronic media, such as radio and television. Yet it seems that for Franklin Furnace the Internet provides a means to broadcast artists’ ideas in a way that is more accessible and less difficult for art lovers to procure than any previous production and distribution methods.

Taking the decision that led Franklin Furnace to start presenting live art on the Internet in 1998 as a watershed moment, Chapter 4 relates the work of Franklin Furnace as it moved away from formats previously considered avant-garde into presenting similar works through the Internet. In doing so, Martha Wilson and the artists presented by Franklin Furnace came to see that this new medium has its own qualities, which can be