Hidden Signals: Excavating buried treasure in the Franklin Furnace Archive

The funny thing about videotapes is that no matter what the labels say, you still can never be completely sure of what you might find when you pop it into the deck (see Gearoid Dolan's Franklin Furnace "proposal" tape i.e. 80s porno "The Doorman Always Comes Twice"). As a student of Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at New York University, currently interning at Franklin Furnace and mining their moving image database, I've seen my fair share formats and descriptive information. Franklin Furnace Archives currently preserves and catalogues some 700+ videos which vary from event documentation, artist proposals, and random news clips and documentaries pertaining to the downtown performance scene and particularly the Art Wars of the early 1990s. While I considered myself to be relatively well-versed on performance art, particularly of the 1970s, I have come across a number of gems which have taken me completely by surprise, particularly works that were either peripheral to works in the Franklin Furnace Fund Program or were originally works-in-progress. To take a step back, a majority of my workday involves poring over the various events and moving image database records and reviewing videotapes from the collection to do basic quality control and to capture rich metadata. Of course, this means that I also get to bear witness to strange, subversive, playful, and just plain batsh*t material and some, frankly, have blown my mind. Unfortunately my knowledge at present is restricted to the VHS tapes in the D-F alphabetical ordering system, but here are some of the shining stars thus far (in my humble opinion).

 

Andrea Darriau - HYPE: The Mother of Invention

© Andrea Darriau 1986

The documentation from this Franklin Furnace performance in 1992 at the Ohio Theater (under the title of "Picture Perfect") is choice, but the diamond is the proposal tape which was shot and edited at the Mime Center in Amsterdam. This one-woman performance lies somewhere between emulation, iconoclasm, and baptism for Marilyn Monroe. This version of Marilyn depicts a woman who is cursed by being "publicly private," who ultimately slits her wrists and morphs into an angel to transcend her earthly prison. The awesome and vaguely new-wave original soundtrack (composed by Mathieu Darriau), inventive set design (sumptuous red drapes, cupids, paper doll projections, and a collapsing paper backdrop), and particularly the deranged costuming (self-inflated balloon breasts, bondage-y spring-loaded body braces,   and a backpack-turned-inflatable angel wings) make this performance both content rich and a feast for the eyes.

 

Sue de Beer - Making Out With Myself

© Sue de Beer 1997

While Sue de Beer's main interaction with Franklin Furnace was in collaboration with the Default Propaganda collective, her proposal tapes demonstrate some fun and cheeky camera trickery. Artfully incorporating chroma key video manipulation, de Beer softly engages in a make-out session with a frozen yet oddly alive video image of herself against an unnerving, almost neon pale-green backdrop. It's a short and simple work, but the video is also hypnotic and sly. Though this may debase the artist's intent, I feel that Franklin Furnace should license this video to nightclubs as party visuals.

© 1992 Media Mystics

Bradley Eros/Jeanne Liotta -M'Elevasti

No documentation exists for these Franklin Furnace performances ("Booby Trapped for Revelations" or "M'elevasti!") the latter for which this video of performance excerpts served as a proposal. This definitely elicits a strong feeling of lack from within me, and ultimately I'm hungry to see more of this duo's work. If this proposal tape is any indication, the Franklin Furnace performance was truly jaw-dropping. I could derive little about the narrative arc of these particular works...but a rotating stage with torches, intermittent showers of white powder from the ceiling, and a doom score by Circle X are all I need to give this work a major thumbs up.

Karen Finley on "The Eleventh Hour" with Robert Lipsythe

Finley with Franklin Furnace Director Martha Wilson

 and installation view of "A Woman's Life Isn't Worth Much" 

© Franklin Furnace 1990

Karen Finley needs no introduction. Her numerous performances and exhibitions are indeed some of the richest under the Franklin Furnace byline, but she is even more electric when simply being interviewed. Her treatise on Jesse Helms, NEA funding, and the social issues in early 1990s New York should stand as one of the essential documents of the time. While I am certainly a huge fan of her more brash and bawdy works, her aired spoken-word performance of "Black Sheep" is utterly devastating.

Bob Flanagan "Visiting Hours" (In Collaboration with Sheree Rose)

© Western Project

Bob Flanagan staged "Sick" as part of the Franklin Furnace "Asylum at the Anchorage" series (probably my favorite series in the FF oeuvre), though as is the case with Bradley Eros, there is sadly no video documentation of this work. What does exist is this all-encompassing look at Flanagan's 1994 exhibition and an extremely compelling interview with the artist in his "Visiting Hours" hospital bed installation work, moderated by FF Founding Director Martha Wilson. Flanagan's work deals with Catholic guilt, S/M and fetishism, and his affliction with Cystic Fibrosis, walking a fine line between pleasure and pain, jouissance and destruction.

The Logos Duo

© The Logos Duo

I am completely flummoxed by this one (particularly because I found it under "D" for "Duo"). By now I have dug through every imaginable nook and cranny of the Franklin Furnace event documentation, moving image records, and even scoured in the "creator" subjects headings of the individual names for this collective. I cannot for the life of me figure out what interaction Franklin Furnace had with Logos Duo (Godfried-Willem Raes and Moniek Darge). Regardless, I was completely endeared to this zany and adorable experimental dance/music/tone-poem pair from Belgium in this taped performance (possibly proposal piece) from 1986. Their work is at times mad-cap, shrieking in their own language whilst plucking on a violin or squawking on a clarinet. At other times they create meditative and transformative spaces, using movement and magnetic fields to turn the stage into one giant theremin. Above all, they just seemed like they would be amazing guests at a dinner party, using the splats of their mashed potatoes as percussion as they serenaded the table. And it would be a beautiful sound.

-Joey Heinen, Spring 2013