Search

This article presents an interview with Martha Wilson, director and founder of Franklin Furnace, an institution that provides gallery for art exhibitions and installations in the U.S., regarding her decision to sell the artist book collection of Franklin Furnace to the Museum of Modern Art and the decision's implication to the institution. According to Wilson, the decision was the right thing for the collection since she believes that the largest collection in the U.S. of artist books published internationally after 1960, made of paper, should not be stored in a loft made of wood, with no climate-control, no museum conditions. In addition, the institution was unsuccessful at raising money for conservation of individual artists' books. As discussed further, Wilson said that though artist books are now recognized by the art world as a whole category in its own right, there was no term artist books in 1976 and just of evolved out of the mud, as the term performance art also evolved during this same period, to describe whatever it was the artists were doing.

The article presents information on "Mortal Coils," an installation by Carolee Schneeman exhibited at the Penine Hart Gallery in New York, N.Y. in March and April 2007. Schneeman is a member of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences & Technology (ISAST) and author of the paper "The Blood Link: Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology and Venus Vectors" published in a number 27 issue of the "Leonardo" periodical. The installation included newspaper clippings, 35-millimeter photographic slides, and motorized manila ropes.

This article presents an interview with Martha Wilson, director and founder of Franklin Furnace, an institution that provides gallery for art exhibitions and installations in the U.S., regarding the institution's programs. When Wilson first organized Franklin Furnace, its main activity was collecting artist books and showing them to the public until it decided to start on performance program. In the spring of 1976, Franklin Furnace was accommodating artists who did one-of-a-kind books, like Karen Shaw and Power Boothe. It started the artists' readings in September, October, November, December of 1976. It had a calendar: a series of readings, a number of exhibitions, mainly one-of-a-kind books, artist books, but they are object, 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. Franklin Furnace developed most of its new programs by responding to artists. One example program is the Sequential Art for Kids which started with only one artist in one school in 1985. This was a subversive effort to validate what the kids already knew but didn't know was knowledge.

The author presents his interactive digital installations of the past decade, featured in museums, media arts festivals and galleries, that engage the audience to contribute data that is then transformed into content and visually projected large scale in the exhibition space. Collected over time, the data occasions further data-mining, algorithmic processing, with visualization of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]