Sublime Discomfort.

Performance art; Art museums; Artists' studios; Art museum curators; Basements; Archives; Wilson, Martha; Publishing

This article offers a look a the significance of Franklin Furnace, an institution that provides gallery for exhibitions and installations and even a publisher for artists and curators in the U.S., to performance arts. The rough-and-ready basement of 112 Franklin Street was uncomfortable, with its stairs, steep, chair hard and hot environment since it is located in unfinished room back behind the boiler. Some of the performances were uncomfortable too and that was a good thing. Franklin Furnace was a place for discomfort, for trial and error, for roughness and danger, for anger and humor and sometimes for moments of great theatre. Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., stoked its first coals in 1976. The Furnace was first an archive of artist books, and soon thereafter, nearly simultaneously because of the speed with which the founder Martha Wilson tenaciously pursued her vision, a gallery for exhibitions and installations, a performance space and a publisher. However, in 2004, Franklin Furnace has been stripped bare of most of its worldly possessions, its material self. After its basement performance space was closed in 1990, Franklin Furnace took its performances first on the road and then into cyberspace. After a few years of Franklin Furnace in Exile when the Furnace produced performances in a different downtown space each year, Wilson moved the Furnace into the ether.