Franklin Furnace 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 gu...

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 l...

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...