The Fiery Furnace: Performance in the '80s, War in the '90s

The performance space at Franklin Furnace never stopped looking like the ordinary basement it was. Exposed pipes. Clip-on lights. Then, "75 people on hard folding chairs." (So Martha Wilson described the audience [Wilson 1997].) At the back a couple of windows opened on an airshaft, where the occasional intrepid performer entered the so-called stage. (There wasn't one.) The sink and refrigerator were occasionally incorporated into a piece, while the cement floor and brick walls never got an upgrade even to rec-room ambience. Yet this basement was the opposite of "nothing special." This was rare. This was an autonomous zone. Since it closed in 1990, it hasn't been replaced on the New York performance scene, and may never be.

The Furnace accommodated artists the way a gallery does, but like the East Village clubs, the space was funky and impervious, the attitude "no holds barred." Here an audience could see that part of the performance art spectrum that is not about theatre, though there was that too: a first show for Eric Bogosian, for example, in 1977. Here an artist could also choose to work all week on an installation, then perform in it, or live in it. Galleries may support such a project for someone who's established, but not for the emerging artists served by the Furnace. Even at other edgy downtown venues, you had to strike the set every night.

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Robbie McCauley in her autobiographical My Father and the Wars, 21 November 1985. (Photo by Marty Heitner; courtesy of Franklin Furnace)

The Furnace helped fill in some very important cracks, by supporting artists who might have otherwise fallen through them. Tehching Hsieh, for example, created world-renowned year-long ordeals in the late '70s and early '80s, but had no gallery, no funding, no actual toehold in the art world. In 1981/82, he did a piece in which he lived on the street, never entering a building, subway, tent, or other shelter. The Furnace arranged to display the artifacts—the maps he made every day to show where he'd been, his greasy pungent clothing, the photo documentation. They did this so soon after that preparations were negotiated with him on the stoop. He was still doing the piece and couldn't enter the space.

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Tehching Hsieh "Living Outside" during a One Year Performance, 26 September 1981 at 2:00 P.M. to 26 September 1982 at 2:00 P.M. (Photo courtesy of Franklin Furnace) The installation at Franklin Furnace, 16 February 1983-12 March 1983, included photos, maps, and artifacts. (Photo by Marty Heitner; courtesy of Franklin Furnace)

Back when she opened on 3 April 1976,Wilson saw the Furnace as a store and archive for artist books. Then that first June, artist Martine Aballea asked to do a reading from her book. Wilson said, "Yes." "Yes" was the ethos of Franklin Furnace. Wilson approached her job like an artist—with a willingness to take risks—and said "yes" if it was at all feasible. This would end up changing (art) history. For example, Aballea then showed up in costume, lugging her own light and stool—and the performance art program was born.

Franklin Furnace began as one of the alternative spaces made possible after the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. "In those days, NEA program officers came to the Furnace to encourage us to apply," Wilson remembers. A couple of decades later, she found it shocking to realize that the '70s had been a golden age. "We were the darlings of the avantgarde," she said of the Furnace and its Tribeca/Soho neighbors of that time: Printed Matter, the Clocktower, the Collective for Living Cinema, the Kitchen, Artists Space.

We got money. We got praise. The notion that experiment is good and should be supported by the culture was out and about. We had no idea that the climate would change 180 degrees. I...