Elly Clarke: Dragging the Archive

Franklin Furnace Archive was set up in 1976 by Martha Wilson, initially as an open collection of artists books out of her live-in loft on Franklin Street in Tribeca in downtown New York. This quickly evolved to include both a performance art program and exhibitions of time-based arts. In 1995, Wilson made the pivotal decision to reinvent Franklin Furnace as a virtual entity, building a new home online and distributing part of their physical collection to MoMA. Collaborating with Pseudo Studios to create Franklin Furnace’s first live netcast performance series entitled The Future of the Present, Wilson’s progressive embrace of the internet mobilized Franklin Furnace to reach a broader, virtual audience, as well as adapting its means of archival preservation to the digital age.

Twenty-five years after her internship at Franklin Furnace, artist researcher Elly Clarke returned to curate the online/onsite exhibition Dragging the Archive — a personal re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings, which traces the digital shift taken by the organisaion between the years of 1996 to 2002. Dragging the Archive takes us on a nostalgic ride to look back at the early days of the internet and its utopian promises.

Displayed across three levels of the Library at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, items extracted from Franklin Furnace’s archives in Deep Storage and the Franklin Furnace ‘headquarters’ just 500 yards from the library, demonstrate the laborious process of compiling the (digital) archive: the migration to the internet was not an easy journey. On the second floor, printed-out email correspondence between Martha Wilson and Galinsky from Pseudo Studios coordinating the digital launch of Franklin Furnace reveal that like many nonprofits, Franklin Furnace, was underfinanced. In letters responding to Wilson’s invitations to perform as part of Franklin Furnace’s Netcast program, artists including Laurie Anderson and writer Jessica Chalmers reacted to the internet — at the time an emerging art platform — with various degrees of ambivalence or distrust.

Performances parallel archives in that they both create spatiality through their disruptions of temporality. The digital re-birth of Franklin Furnace synchronizes the actions of performing and archiving, and re-configures the temporal and spatial axes in both producing performance and preserving archives, realizing new possibilities for participatory feedback. The Future of the Present was a grant issued by Franklin Furnace between 1998-2008 to support art and performance designed to be shared via Netcasts. The juried grant served artists whose radical subjects were likely to have been sidelined by mainstream art institutions. These performances were live-broadcasted, documented and archived on Franklin Furnace’s cyber platform all at once.

The Nipple Project by Laure Drogoul (1999) invited viewers (/participants) to design areolar tattoos for the artist’s breast reconstruction during her recovery from breast cancer; the ephemerality of performance manifested through the ephemerality of the artist’s body. The net-based premise that grounded the programming and collecting for projects like this one diffused audience’s interpretations and interactions in a network of spatial and temporal coordination. The cyber platform of Franklin Furnace embedded both performance and archives — two hyper-contextual forms — in a hub of social relations.

Drag as a verb entails lateral motion as well as drudgery. Dragging the Archive in Deep Storage – with Martha Wilson, Harley Spiller and Elly Clarke is a series of continuous frames that document the three artists retrieving boxes of archives from FF’s tightly-packed Deep Storage with wall-to-wall shelves of boxes.

The juxtaposition between outdated and contemporary modes of telecommunication is another recurring theme in this exhibition. In the encounter with Missed Calls (Telephone Logs from Deep Storage, 1984-1988), what seems as archaic as the concept of telephone logs is the bodily activities (read: drag) associated with this form of correspondence – and the box of these logs, taken directly from Deep Storage, claimed by Clarke as a readymade sculpture. Next to it are screenshots from Elly’s video-call conferences in 2022 held as part of the planning of the exhibition, calls us to question how the development of personal technology in the past 20 or so years has transformed our corporeality.

Provided alongside each vitrine is a QR code linked to the online curation of Dragging the Archive where detailed descriptions and historical contexts of exhibited items are provided. By scanning the QR code, a digital rendering of the physicality of drag, visitors are invited to take a step back in order to zoom in, embodying the inter-exchange between physical and cyber spaces. Compared to the physical effort required to maneuver the hefty materiality of information in the late 90s to early 2000s — boxes of VHS tapes, slides, and floppy disks, Rolodex… — pinch/nip/pick would all be action words that better apply to how we now retrieve information across either time or space.

The curator is present in Dragging the Archive. Many of the items on display are paired with (redacted) transcripts of Clarke’s diaries excerpts from her internship at FF in the late 90s, echoing the subtitle of this exhibition: “a personal re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings.” Clarke’s labor of transcribing her diaries and presenting them in the exhibit — a drag along her very own private chronology — mirrors her retrieving material from FF’s deep storage. Part of Clarke’s academic and artistic approaches is a scripted a drag performance alter-ego called #Sergina, who embodied by Clarke and/or other performers to communicate desire and loneliness in the digital age. #Sergina’s hat and T-shirt are on display on the second floor of the exhibition. The dynamics between costumes and identity in drag performance resonates with the mutual containment between preservation and presentation of archives.

The Future of the Present Questionnaire 2019 collects insights from artists featured in the Future of the Present net-casting series regards the differences in their relationships with the internet based on then versus now. A consensus of pessimism surfaced in the status of the cyber-reality infiltrated by hyper-capitalism and the commodification of information.

Dragging the Archive delivers an especially spirited message to remind us that, in Wilson’s own words, the internet is “still a wide-open frontier with very few fences (read: censorship) in place” to organize counter-cultures. Looking back in order to carry on, the exhibition sends its visitors an open invitation to envision cyber possibilities to preserve the imminent NOW.

Biography

Li Li is an undergraduate student studying Art History at Pratt Institute and currently writing her biography in third person. She indulges in yoga, running, hiking, being near the Ocean, doodling, reading fiction, cooking, and can be found hippie-dippie in between Beijing and Brooklyn.

Li Li first encountered Dragging the Archive when Elly Clarke guest-lectured a workshop in her Art Since the 90s Seminar taught by Professor Kim Bobier. In this workshop, Professor Bobier’s class collaborated with Elly Clarke’s MFA curating class at Goldsmith to creatively interpret items from the exhibition.

Visit the online exhibition HERE: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive

See the events that took place alongside the exhibition here: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive-exhibition-events/

View a video tour of the exhibition by Elly Clarke here: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive-virtual-tour-loft/