The Flue Volume 1, Number 5

[Franklin Furnace]

The Flue Volume 1, Number 5

New York City, USA: Franklin Furnace, 1981

8 pp., 43 x 29 cm., newspaper

Edition size unknown

Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace in 1976, to serve artists working in marginalized media such as publishing and performance, which could be vulnerable to "institutional neglect, cultural bias, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content."

Four years in, the Artist Run Centre began publishing a periodical called The Flue. Conceived by artist and printer Conrad Gleber, The Flue published sixteen issues between 1980 and 1989, which varied in format, including tabloids, posters, and newsletters. 

The publication served as a vehicle for promotion, political advocacy1, and helping to fulfill the mandate  of the organization, with articles on Artists’ Books, Performance Art, and Video works. It featured contributions by Jon Hendricks, Barbara Moore, Clive Philpot, Louise Lawler, Pauline Oliveros, and many others. 

A variety of artists were invited to serve as editors and designers, including Barbara Kruger, Linda Montano, Sherrie Levine, Carla Liss, and Buzz Spector. Richard McGuire served as both for this fifth issue2, which featured Laurie Anderson on the cover, promoting a concert she gave in celebration of Franklin Furnace’s fifth anniversary. 

The issue also features Diana Augaitis’ “Eastern European Bookworks,” "Sound Works 2" by Peter Frank (see last week's post, here) and descriptions of installations and performances by Al Aguilar, Sydney Blum & Janet Henry, Ronny H. Cohen, James Coleman, Toby MacLennan, Sandra McKee, Carol Meine, and Sandy Moore.

Copies of the periodical are now extremely rare. This issue can be bought for $175 US, here, or downloaded as a free PDF from Primary Information, here. As part of their ongoing efforts to make rare, archival material available, the publisher has collaborated with Franklin Furnace to digitize and disturb all sixteen issues. 

1. In her editorial, Martha Wilson notes "As I am writing this, President Reagan is dealing a heavy blow to arts funding for organizations which present avant-garde art. Below you will see my letter to the New York Times and a reply from a citizen who doesn’t realize that less than a dollar a year of tax payer’s money is devoted to the arts in America." 

2. Wilson remained as Editor-in-Chief and McGuire shared editorial duties with Lucy Evanicki. 

High Performance - The Record (Artists Doing Songs)

[Various Artists]

High Performance - The Record (Artists Doing Songs)

Los Angeles, USA: High Performance Records, 1983

31.4 × 31.4 cm.

Edition size unknown

High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine founded in 1978 with an editorial mission to provide support and a critical context for "new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts." It began primarily as a performance art magazine and eventually expanded into coverage of video, sound and public art. 

Linda Frye Burnham founded the periodical and was the magazine's editor from 1978 to 1985, and then co-editor wit Steven Durland until 1997, when it ceased publishing. Here she serves as a contributing artist (singing "Downtown Blues"), co-producer, co-designer and author of the liner notes. 

The double LP was released as issue #23 (Volume 6, No. 3) of the magazine, in the fall of 1983. Other contributors include Terry Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, Jacki Apple, Jill Kroesen, Bill Harding, Paul McCarthy, Martha Wilson and many others. 

As part of the Steven Leiber collection, the work is held in the library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and is included in Ursula Block's seminal overview of artists' records, Broken Music. 

Martha Wilson | Journals

Martha Wilson

Journals

Brussels, Belgium: michèle didier, 2021

272 pp., 27.9 × 21.6 cm., softcover

Edition of 400 signed copies

"Martha Wilson – Journals collects the most representative pages of performance artist Martha Wilson’s diaries between 1965 and 1983. In 2018 art dealer and publisher Michèle Didier asked Wilson if she could find in her diaries when she decided to become an artist and begin Franklin Furnace (the artist-run space and archive dedicated to artists’ publishing and performance initiated in New York in 1976).

Reading the multitude of pages which were scanned for the occasion, Wilson could not find what she calls “ah-ha moments,” so instead, she selected about 270 pages to be published in Journals, which allow us to approach intimately her thoughts during these seminal years. Within the book, these pages are presented in chronological order in their original size against an elegant black background. Page after page, the autobiographical, mostly handwritten texts reflect Wilson’s activities and concerns. If in 1965 she was still a teenager who defined herself as a “status seeker,” from 1971 onwards she questioned progressively her character, her ways of relating to others, and her (artistic) identity: “Why not be happy in the personality I have?”; “What is a relationship based on?”; “The object of my work should be to not care what other people think of me.”"

- Francesca Valentini

Just Another Asshole #6

[Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca]

Just Another Asshole #6

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2018

192 pp., 7 x 4”, softcover

Edition of 2000

My very first curatorial projects were exhibitions of artists’ magazines and artists’ records. Just Another Asshole was included in both.  

The periodical was a No Wave mixed-media publication started by Barbara Ess in her apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1978. It began life as a personal ‘zine of her collages, with the title scrawled in red nail polish on the cover. The third issue changed the format (to a tabloid newspaper) and each subsequent issue the format changed again. Number four was a four page spread in the 1980 issue of Artforum. Number five was a 12” LP: an anthology of seventy-seven very short tracks, by eighty-three artists. Co-published with White Columns, the album was co-edited by Glenn Branca and featured contributions from Jenny Holzer, Carla Liss,  Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Lee Ranaldo, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Thurston Moore, Amy Taubin and others. 

The sixth (and penultimate) issue was a paperback book. Again co-edited by Glenn Branca, this collection of writings included over sixty artists from the early 1980's downtown scene. It includes short stories, performance transcripts, plays, monologues, screenplays, and essays. 

Contributors include Kathy Acker,  Judith Barry, Buczak, Michael Gira (singer for the Swans), Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), David Rosenbloom, Jane Sherry (who co-edited a previous issue of the publication), Kiki Smith, Michael Smith, Wharton Tiers, Lynne Tillman, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and many others. 

Re-issued by Primary Information in November of 2018, the title is already out-of-print. 

Disband

Disband

Disband

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2009

31 minute Audio CD

Edition of 1000

Disband were an all-female a cappella group who performed as part of the No Wave scene in New York city, in the late seventies and early eighties. Disband was founded by Martha Wilson and the group featured artists Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, and Diane Torr as core members. Barbara Ess (later of Y-Pants, and the founder of Art-Rite magazine), Daile Kaplan, April Gornick, and Barbara Kruger also performed with the group. 

The band played at the Tribeca punk club Tier 3 (which - in it’s single year of existence - also hosted DNA, Rhys Chatham, Bush Tetras, Glenn Branca, Madness, Liquid Liquid, The Slits, ESG, Lydia Lunch, The Raincoats, Lounge Lizards, Delta 5, Young Marble Giants, A Certain Ratio and Bauhaus) as well as art venues like PS1, The Kitchen, Hallwalls, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Franklin Furnace (which was also founded by Martha Wilson). 

Disband borrowed elements of performance art and even stand-up comedy, performing without instruments, typically to the laughter of the small groups gathered to watch them. “We did play some instruments,” corrects Wilson in the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces, “we played plastic bags, newspapers, hammer, Col. Sanders chicken buckets, bed sheets, hotel bells”.

A tour of Italy with Laurie Anderson, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden and other artists brought them to Florence and Rome, and the group also played Ithaca, Toronto, Chicago, La Jolla, Philadelphia, and Seoul.

However, in their four-year existence they did not release an LP, or even a 7” single. 

In keeping with their mandate to make out-of-print (and never in-print) materials available at affordable prices, Primary Information released this CD of long-lost recordings in 2009 (a year after the group reunited to perform at PS1). 

The disk features 21 recordings culled from the band’s live performances between 1979-1982:

1 The End

2 Hudson Street

3 Black Lung

4 Fashions

5 Rebel

6 The Redneck Song

7 Missiles And Pistols

8 I'm On The Winning Side

9 The Girl's Bill Of Rights

10 Dow

11 Bartolucci

12 Look At My Dick

13 Sad

14 Missiles And Pistols (Alternative Version)

15 Every Day Same Old Way

16 Perry Como

17 Five More Years

18 A Model's Revengeful Acquisition

19 The Snatch Song

20 Never Been Anywhere

21 Hey Baby

The CD is available for the paltry price of $5.00, from the publisher, here. 

The Founding and Early History of Printed Matter

On Friday February 13th, Printed Matter will present a round table discussion about their founding and early years, for what they call "an extremely rare gathering of luminaries" from their illustrious history.

Participants include artist Mike Glier (who served on the board and staff of the organization between 1979 and 2000), writer/curator/activist Lucy Lippard (founding member of PM), artist Pat Steir (founding board member), Clive Phillpot (leading authority on the subject of artists' books), and artist Martha Wilson.

The discussion will range from the vision and principles behind Printed Matter to practical aspects of setting up and running such an institution. Moderated by Printed Matter’s current Director Max Schumann (who has worked with the organization as bookstore manager for twenty-five years), the conversation will also address Printed Matter's involvement in advancing and legitimizing the field of artists' publications.

The event is being held at the Judson Memorial Church, which has it's own rich history with artist-run culture (see post here). The church is located at 55 Washington Square South (wheelchair accessible via the entrance at 243 Thompson Street) and the discussion takes place in the Meeting Room, between 6:30 and 8:00pm.

For more information, see the Facebook group, here.

Martha Wilson | Autobiography

Martha Wilson
Autobiography
Chicago, USA: Chicago Books, 1979.
[16] pp., 5.25 x 8", staple-bound
Edition size unknown

Diaristic text accompanied by photographs.