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