Selling the Loft to Go Online: Franklin Furnace Goes Virtual, 1998
In 1998 Franklin Furnace, the Tribeca home of artists' books and early performance art, sold its loft and started netcasting performance to the world with Pseudo, betting its future on the internet.
On April 3, 1976, the artist Martha Wilson opened Franklin Furnace Archive in her living loft, a storefront at 112 Franklin Street in Tribeca, to collect and show artists' books that major institutions ignored. That June, Martine Aballea came to read from her book and arrived in costume, "with her own lamp and stool." In Wilson's words, "the performance art program was born." In 1977 Robert Wilson performed there, repeating the word "there" 144 times with a chair on stage, and the basement went on to premiere a generation of New York performance artists.
Then came 1990. After an installation by Karen Finley, Franklin Furnace was reported to the Fire Department as an "illegal social club," and its performance space was shut. Wilson moved the program "in exile" to Judson Memorial Church, The New School, P.S. 122, Dixon Place and The Kitchen, and in 1993 the book collection went to the MoMA Library. On Halloween 1990, she later wrote, the landlord died and the artists in the building were offered the chance to buy it. But in the summer of 1995 Wilson had a different realization: Franklin Furnace "would never be remembered for its blonde oak floors, but rather for its program." That September she asked her board to sell the building and "concentrate the program on broadcasting artists' ideas."
The internet was the broadcast. In October 1996 Wilson gave her first virtual performance on ParkBench's ArtisTheater, run by the artists Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell, who had staged a realtime web performance by webcam in 1994. She played Tipper Gore singing the national anthem, slowed to suit a stream of 1 frame per second. The website launched on February 1, 1997, the loft sale was signed that September, and in spring 1998 came Franklin Furnace at Pseudo Programs, with Josh Harris's streaming network and its performance channel. 10 artists, among them Bingo Gazingo, Nora York and Alvin Eng, got 6 hours of production time each for 50 minute netcasts with no commercial breaks.
The audience changed, Wilson wrote, "from 75 people sitting on hard folding chairs" to viewers around the world, with more of them in Japan, Australia and Europe than in the United States. They asked questions in chat after each show, and the netcasts stayed on Pseudo's server to be watched later from anywhere. Nora York's Fox Fire, netcast live on May 1, 1998 with images by Nancy Spero, became the face of the new Virtual Furnace homepage. "Going virtual has not been easy," Wilson wrote in 2000, "but it has been challenging and important." What she missed was "the smell of the beansprouts, the roar of the crowd." Franklin Furnace turns 50 this year.
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