A Different World: A Personal History of Franklin Furnace

Franklin Furnace opened its doors in April 1976. It was a very different world. As a cofounder and first curator, it is easy for me to look back on those early years in the 1970s and reminisce about the good times and the accomplishments of our youth. There are many many stories to be told about the art and the artists, and our struggles to keep it all going. But beyond the historical significance of personal anecdotes and descriptive data that need to be documented before they are lost, is the fact that Franklin Furnace is not only still here but continues to thrive when so many other artists' spaces have ceased to exist as such.

This leads me to look deeper into the philosophical underpinnings of the artist space movement and the pitfalls it faced in the 1980s when inflated budgets and ambitions and marketplace values brought about either the demise or co-option of many such spaces. By the 1990s a younger generation of artists emerged, but with ambitions honed by graduate school mainstreaming goals, they failed to lead the way and start new spaces. Not surprising, considering the collapse of arts funding for small organizations in recent years. Thus the artists space as we understood it, created it, knew it in its inception has become a seriously endangered species, almost extinct in some parts of the country. No doubt, there are those who may mourn that the Furnace as a physical space, a geographical site that was a point of exchange for two decades, is gone. But the spirit that fueled the Furnace for all those years is very much alive due to the fact that as an artists institution it has mutated and adapted to the needs and conditions of the times. Ironically perhaps, it has been able to evolve in form in response to the cultural environment without surrendering its primary raison d'etre because it has not lost sight of those principles on which it was founded.

How does an arts space become "established" without becoming the establishment? That's a bit like asking, How does the revolutionary not become the new dictator after taking power? The parallel between politics and art is apt because the politics of the whole artist space movement was about the empowerment of artists, and the demise of the movement is about the power and politics of money and media both in and out of the art world. So survival is a balancing act. Catch-22! The real politik is that you need to be able to work on the inside in order to stay alive financially and serve your community in a tangible way, and the ideal politic is that you need to remain on the outside creatively in order to remain relevant and meaningful. In the '80s the gravitational pull of a certain kind of "success" was immensely seductive and easy to fall into. In the early '90s the survival of one's integrity required standing up to the assaults of the culture wars (on both the right and the left); at the same time the notoriety could leave you martyred and defunct. Dead heroes are still dead! Add to that the real estate situation of the boom years, and it took something close to a miracle to keep the doors open in New York City by the year 2000.

How did Franklin Furnace do it? I could cite the obvious: Furnace creator and founder Martha Wilson's moxie. Fundraising skills, chutzpah, bringing in new artistic talent on the administrative end, a supportive and active board of directors, interesting exhibitions and daring performances, community activism. But that could be said about other spaces and organizations too. Minus the Martha part, which is no small thing. Part scholar, part Quaker, part radical, her idiosyncratic vision produced a paradox: a cross between the museum archive, the avantgarde kunsthalle, and the cabaret—all housed in a storefront and a basement. It is this paradoxical combination that defines the uniqueness of the Furnace.

A hard wind was blowing on a cold night in December 1975 as...