A History of the Future: Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde (single authored book)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Franklin Furnace is a New York-based arts organization established by Martha Wilson in 1976. The organization's main mission is to preserve, document, and present ephemeral works of avant-garde art by assisting emerging artists, particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. As one of the foremost presenters, archives, and facilitators of contemporary avant-garde art, Franklin Furnace has been directly involved in some of the key developments within contemporary art. A History of the Future documents all this by engaging in the issues raised by the spirit of the avant-garde over a period of over three decades.The book is illustrated with unique images drawn from about 15,000 slides and documents housed within the Franklin Furnace Archive in Brooklyn and the MoMA/Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art.The organization has been featured in numerous books, scholarly journals, newspaper articles, and even a small number of post-graduate dissertations and academic papers. A book about the history of Franklin Furnace will serve as an appropriate reference for future writings about the organization and the type of works it continues to present.The following publications cover some of Franklin Furnace's activities and other similar works during the same period:Banes, Sally. Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85 (University of Michigan Press, 1998) Carr, C. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) Taylor, Marvin. (ed.) The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (Princeton University Press, 2005)However, these three books deal with the history of Franklin Furnace only marginally, at best. They also contain no reference to more recent works. More than a decade's worth of development at Franklin Furnace has not been covered adequately in any book-length publication. TDR: The Drama Review (Vol 49 No 1 - T185, Spring 2005) had a special section on Franklin Furnace, partly addressing this gap, but there is a clear need for a book on the history of the organization.Intellect Books have assessed a proposal for this publication and committed to publishing it under contract in 2010.