1996 was another fateful year. By the time we had made some decisions that changed the path of the organization's history:

1. We collectively pledged to look beyond artist development, our focus for 20 years, toward audience development. Could we cultivate a broad audience for the consumption of avant-garde art by utilizing electronic delivery media?

2. We decided to sell the loft, a step which would separate us from real-estate based presentation activity and commit us to an unknown course with rapidly evolving technology.

3. We embarked on a multi-year project to electronically catalogue, digitize and build a relational database of our program files from 1976 to 1996. My dream for Avant-Garde New York, the working title of this project, is to keep going after we have completed bringing our own history on line, to make accessible the archives of Fashion Moda, Minor Injury, JAM Gallery, the Collective for Living Cinema, -- small, but important centers for avant-garde art activity now out of business-- to make the "unwritten history of American art," as Jeanette Ingberman (Co-Director of Exit Art) calls it, accessible to future generations of artists, scholars and aficionados. This is not something I think I can do on my own. So I am trolling now for a university affiliation that would give Franklin Furnace the stable context necessary to raise the kind of money this project will require, and also allow the material to serve as the basis of curriculum development now and in the future. Well, a girl can dream.

But back to the subject of about time: Altogether, Franklin Furnace got in trouble four times with the forces of darkness in Congress and among conservative Christian right groups. Most recently, in September, 1996, the Christian Action Network mounted a performance art spectacular on the steps of the Capitol Building to protest the $132,000 in federal dollars (not true) we were spending on our Voyeur's Delight exhibition, and to call for the death of the NEA. Their press release linked us with the virus eating away at the health of the body politic, and the performance included two coffins and a guy dressed up as the Grim Reaper. (I think it says something when the Christian conservatives recognize the power of performance art tactics in getting their point across.) But this time, Franklin Furnace was building its website as its public face, so I decided to put up a page called U-B-D-Judge, to collect public comment, both positive and negative, regarding the works in exhibition. We reprinted CAN's press release in its entirety, and ours; and asked permission of the artists to publish their work on our site, each piece accompanied by the artist's statement explaining why Jocelyn Taylor had a speculum up her vagina, for example. Sure enough, this page has generated both positive and negative comment, intelligent and stupid comment, all of it I believe valid and important to the discourse that surrounds and emanates from contemporary art.

 

20. "Carnival Knowledge: The Second Coming," January, 1984. Photo by Marty Heitner

21. Karen Finley performing in Buffalo at Hallwalls in 1983. Photo by Gary Nickard

32. Jocelyn Taylor's work for "Voyeur's Delight" concerned the invasive nature of medical practice in regard to women's bodies. Photo by Marty Heitner