Martha Wilson
Interview realised in winter 2022
We know the 1970’s were an important period for publications and artists’ books, and maybe, 1976 was one of the years we will remember as it was, one one side the year Printed Matter, Inc was founded and defined as a distributor and publisher of artists’ books, and the very same year, in the same district, TriBeCa, NYC, you founded Franklin Furnace, which, at first, was created as a storefront, which quickly became an ‘alternate’ space for artists to find an audience outside of the market. At the time, for at least a decade, a lot of artists were publishing as their artistic practice. Would you say there was a lack of interest for editorial practices? How did you came with the idea of founding Franklin Furnace?
I became an artist early in the 1970s through my exposure to Conceptual artists visiting the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). After graduation from college in 1969, my boyfriend didn’t want to get drafted into the Vietnam War, and I had been raised a Quaker, who are pacifists, so we moved to Canada. I enrolled in the graduate English program at Dalhousie University, which was across the street from NSCAD. When I discovered WORDS could be VISUAL ART, I became an artist. When my boyfriend and I split up in 1974, I moved to New York to find out if I really was an artist or not; and found lots of others who were publishing their work in book form, or as posters, or broadsides, which were sent through the mail and posted on the street. I published a book version of a piece I did at 112 Greene Street Workshop entitled 1. Truck 2. Fuck 3. Muck and I knew about 30 other artists who were publishing their work in book form, so I decided to open a bookstore for artists’ books and one-of-a-kind book-objects in the storefront where I was living in TriBeCa.
At the same time that this was happening, the founders of Printed Matter, Inc. (PMI) (about a dozen people) were meeting to discuss what the community of artists’ book makers needed. We thought it would be a great idea for Printed Matter to move into Franklin Furnace’s storefront; but Willoughby Sharp, who lived on the top floor of 112 Franklin Street, came downstairs with his attorney and yelled, THIS WILL NEVER BE KNOWN AS THE PRINTED MATTER BUILDING! This frightened the founders of PMI who established their business a block away on Hudson Street before finding a storefront on Lispenard Street. But during our meetings we decided to divide the job of aiding this new field, with Franklin Furnace taking the not-for-profit purpose of exhibition and preservation, while PMI took the for-profit jobs of publication and distribution.
Until 1993, in approximatively 15 years, Franklin Furnace gathered the most important collection of artists’ books. This year, the collection has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, NY), did it change the way you were working with artists’ books? Did you continue to collect material until nowadays?
Between opening day on April 3rd, 1976 and 1993, Franklin Furnace gathered the largest collection of artists’ books in the United States. At some point in the early 1990s, the Board discussed how the books were made of paper, and the loft was made of wood; so maybe Franklin Furnace was not the best guardian of this material.The Board reached out to major institutions that also had collections of artists’ books, and Clive Phillpot at MoMA won the collection. We had asked the artists for 3 copies of their books (the archival standard) so MoMA kept all the first copies; sold the second copies to pay for the acquisition; and (eventually) returned the 3rd copies to us. We continue to collect artists’ books, and consider it to be a teaching collection that may be handled by researchers and students at Pratt Institute where Franklin Furnace is now an Organization-in-Residence.
What is your role in Franklin Furnace? And what does it imply?
My role at Franklin Furnace (FF) is Founding Director Emerita. This means that Harley Spiller, the Ken Dewey Director of FF, does the day-to-day administration and fundraising, along with the staff; but I am available to provide institutional memory and advice. The way this works in practice is that I am a participant in events in FF’s digital LOFT, which FF’s Program Director built as the COVID era closed art spaces where FF Fund grant recipients were supposed to have presented their performance work. Along with five other organizations, we just celebrated Linda Mary Montano’s 80th birthday with a 21-hour online celebration in the LOFT.
Also, in 1997, the board of Franklin Furnace decided to create franklinfurnace.org to pursue its mission, helping emerging artists to reach a broader audience through specific medias. You were ahead of your time! How has this new support and space impacted the role of Franklin Furnace?
On February 1st, 1997, FF ‘‘went virtual’’ in the wake of the Culture Wars in the U.S. in order to ensure that the artists it presented would have freedom of expression. At first we presented artists ‘‘in exile,’’ in other organizations’ spaces: Judson Memorial Church, Cooper Union, the New School, P.S. 122, but eventually we considered the entire city of New York to be available, and to find the right venue for each artist’s concept. At the same time, we were building a relational database in FileMaker Pro to catalog our artists, their events, exhibitions, performances, artists’ books, and reference collection. We were pretty proud of this work; of course now, our system is ‘‘old fashioned,’’ such that if you Google Ana Mendieta, her FF event record does not appear in your search. Consequently our Senior Archivist made the decision to migrate everything to CONTENTdm; this years-long effort is now underway.
Your support to publications and artists was not only founded on the collection work, but also, you are allowing grants every year. Could you please tell us more about those grants and how you now are supporting artists?
Franklin Furnace Fund grants to performance artists were initiated in 1985 with the support of Jerome Foundation. Over the years, other foundations and agencies have come and gone with their support; this past summer, FF had $40,000 from Jerome Foundation, The SHS Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to distribute to artists who are selected annually by a peer review panel. This panel changes every year, and in so doing, it remains responsive to the social, political and spiritual changes taking place in the performance art community. Fund performances must take place in New York City, or now that the COVID era is upon us, in the FF digital LOFT.
Franklin Furnace was build on this idea of democratizing some ‘alternate’ art forms, as artists’ books, but also you said earlier, performances. This idea of democratizing art has been criticized and attacked by art historians as it didn’t work as planed. Still, through the work you are realizing at FF, especially with the grants, the multiple events, meetings, shows, Sequential Art For Kids, etc. you are always looking for a broader audience, in this idea of democratizing avant-gardes. Is it something important to you?
In the 1970s New York was an abandoned city so the artists moved into vacant loft spaces and started doing their work in every available form, including playing music, making films, artists’ books, photography, street actions, video. One democratizing impulse was to create works that could NOT be bought and sold by galleries and museums – or were too cheap to produce a profit. Of course the galleries and museums figured out ways to sell it anyway, presenting temporary installations (like the alternative spaces) in the front but selling the prints, photos and paintings in the back. Still later, the museums started collecting artists’ books and performance art documentation. Nowadays, it’s sometimes hard to tell which spaces are not-for-profit and which ones are commercial! And finally, the Internet has done more to democratize the art world and the rest of the world than any technology before, except perhaps printing. Social movements like Arab Spring were made possible by electronic connections. It is interesting to watch how new generations of artists and non-artists operate in our connected world!
Over the last decade or so, we noticed a proper development of artists’ editions; more and more artists are publishing their work as a practice. Active for almost 45 years in contemporary art and artist’s editions, creating and publishing your own editions but also as a former director of Franklin Furnace, I would be curious to know your point of view and thoughts regarding contemporary editorial practices.
Artists’ books became a preoccupation of mine about half a century ago, when I was in graduate school in English Literature but hanging out at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design where Conceptual visiting artists from Vito Acconci to Lawrence Weiner were using language as a visual art medium and producing publications to hold these ideas. The first work of art I ever made was a 1971 text, A Short Story About Nova Scotia, which is really about getting itself written and not about Nova Scotia at all. By 1975 I had moved to New York and discovered that there was a whole community of downtown folks who were making photo-text works, doing performance art and street actions, publishing posters, books, broadsides, Mail Art, shooting film, video and building temporary installations-time-based practice. I was invited to produce an installation at 112 Greene Street Workshop and when the show was over, I decided to make an artists’ book out of the text. This was 1. Truck 2. Fuck 3. Muck, the same story told three times but from different levels of consciousness. The first telling appeared on the right hand page of the book; the second telling was on the left hand page; and the third telling was upside-down, such that the reader had to turn the book 180 degrees, becoming aware of the vehicle provided by the book form itself.
On April 3rd, 1976 Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. opened in my storefront loft on Franklin Street in TriBeCa with 200 titles. WOW! Who knew there were so many artists doing this kind of work? As time went by, more artists contributed their work, and I heard about other efforts around the country in Rochester, Chicago, and Seattle, and around the world in Amsterdam, Japan and South America. By 1980, the history of artists’ books had become a fascination so Franklin Furnace engaged Clive Phillpot to curate 1909-1929; Charles Henri Ford to curate 1930-1949; Jon Hendricks and Barbara Moore to curate 1950-1969; and Ingrid Sischy and Richard Flood to curate 1970-1980 of The Page as Alternative Space.
Meanwhile, the collection of artists’ books continued to grow and evolve such that early offset-printed and xeroxed pages became more and more highly produced with photography and professional binding. Now I think it is safe to say that the artists’ book field encompasses the complete range of possibility, from scruffy to slick, and is being produced on every continent except perhaps Antarctica.