Martha Wilson: Before performance art was a movement, she helped push it - Avant-Garde's One-of-a-Kind Guard - Brief Article - Interview

This past year, Martha Wilson and legions of artists whose careers she has helped nurture celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace Archive. One of the nation's first "alternative museums," it helped spawn similar institutions around the globe. Today it exists exclusively in cyberspace as www.Franklinfurance.org. On February 13, to honor its legacy and Wilson's artistic vision, the first annual "McMartha Award" will be presented by Yoko Ono at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City. This monetary prize will support a winning artist or art collective's most "impossible" art projects, to support the spirit of risk that, in the words of Martha Wilson, "had been beaten out of the art world."

EDWARD M. GOMEZ: When did you establish the Franklin Furnace?

MARTHA WILSON: On April 3, 1976, as a bookstore [specializing in art books and individually created volumes by various artists]. At the time I was already showing artists who were making one-of-a-kind books. Three months into it, I gave up the store and kept the archival side Ito form the basis of the museum].

EMG: This was a time when new forms of art, like performance art, were also emerging.

MW: The notion of "performativity" was emerging, but we didn't have terms like "performance art." We just knew that any medium under the sun was available to express an idea.

EMG: Franklin Furnace was a launching pad for the careers of artists such as Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson and Karen Finley. What were some of the highlights of those heady years?

MW: Jenny Holzer's "Truisms," in 1978--one of my favorites. It was a 10-foot-high Photostat in our window. Somebody threw a bolt through the window, through the phrase "Boredom makes you do crazy things." The next milestone was "Carnival Knowledge" in 1984, [featuring] women artists and activist curators. They asked if there could be such a thing as "ferminist pornography," art that didn't denigrate women and children.

EMG: What is the avant-garde today?

MW: It's a need to grab people by the lapels and shake them with a new idea. That need to be heard or die is how freedom of expression will be preserved.

EMG: You're in the midst of putting "History of the Future," your choices for the 50 greatest performance-art works, on the Web.

MW: I want to create the online video "Archives of the Avant-garde," a project I'm working on with New York University. It's a crash course in performance art of the last quarter of the 20th century. As we gather this stuff, we see how important the avant-garde has been. The birthplace of postmodernism is spread all over Lower Manhattan.

EMG: This month, you'll announce the new McMartha Award, Franklin Furnace's answer to the "genius grants" given out by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation.

MW: The award will go to artists for what we're calling "impossible art projects" that don't lit into any category. The first recipient, whose name will be announced on the 13th, wants to build a new society from scratch on the space in Detroit left by the failed capitalist system [and the failed urbanrenewal scheme it engendered].

EMG: What's your wish for the future?

MW: To present the next generation of artists and their ideas while preserving what has gone before and making it pedagogically useful.

EMG: So, the avant-garde lives.

MW: The avant-garde lives--and long live the avant-garde!

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