Martha Wilson Interview Part III: The Franklin Furnace Programs
- Martha Wilson Interview Part IIIThe Franklin Furnace Programs
When you first organized Franklin Furnace, your main activity was collecting artist books and showing them to the public. How did you start your performance program?
Our thought was that the same artists who were publishing these books could be invited to read their published stuff, the stuff that we had in the collection.
Isn't this similar to the many public book readings that happen at many mainstream bookstores now?
But not at the time! No.
Readings in bookstores have been around for quite sometime, haven't they? I mean, if we go to a different place and time other than New York in the mid-1970s, such as San Francisco in the mid 1950s with the Beats, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and Allen Ginsberg reading Howl . . .
That's absolutely right. OK.
Were you building on anything like that? Were you aware of such things or were you reinventing the wheel?
Reinventing the wheel, I would say. I was not focused on the performance program at all because my friend Jacki Apple was my coconspirator and curator. We had already collaborated on a performance work in 1973. I was living in Canada at that time.
What had you done together before Franklin Furnace?
We started corresponding because Lucy Lippard had come to Halifax and introduced us through the catalog to an exhibition that existed only on notecards, about 7,500. So I knew Jacki: she had been in the art world for a billion years already. She had this idea of doing a reading, inviting Martine Aballea to read her work.1 That was in June 1976. There wasn't a performance program, you know, not even a concept yet. In fact, for the first two years the calendars say "Artists' Readings."
Can you elaborate on the first reading?
Sure. Martine came to Franklin Furnace in June 1976 for her reading, bringing her own lamp, wearing a costume, reading in character. So from day one the artists are not considering these things to be readings where you stand at a podium and read your text. And many years later [in 1991] at Judson Church, Eileen Myles did a wonderful performance called Life where she explains that she made the break from being a poet to being a performance artist when somebody pointed out that the way poets read is like this [demonstrates], and the way performance artists read is like this.
So poets read with their head down while performance artists look at their audience. Perhaps that's because most poets are absorbed in the words whereas performers are more concerned with their audience.
Yes!
Was there any art hanging at Franklin Furnace in 1976?
Yes, both hanging and lying down. September was the first show, but even before this, in the Spring of 1976, I was accommodating artists who did one-of-a-kind books, like Karen Shaw and Power Boothe. We started the artists' readings in September, October, November, December. We had a calendar: a series of readings, a number of exhibitions, mainly one-of-a-kind books—artist books, but [End Page 80] they're objects—plus there were exhibitions of artist books that were published. But there were no terms yet and the artists themselves were not making distinctions among all these things. John Mc Clurg's books hung from the ceiling, which was 16 feet high, and Charlemagne Palestine's books were like giant flowers covered with pigment, but they were blank notebooks from Canal Street, the pages of which he had crumpled. So they're kind of multiples/not multiples. My point being that it was not a big step from where the artists were . . . no, I'm putting this wrong! The artists didn't make a big distinction among all the forms. They were also doing installations, pretty soon audiotape, film, music . . . it was all one big blob. It was the beginnings of postmodernism, and everybody played in three bands, and made films, and did...
