David Buuck's blog

http://www.ban5.org/YBCA/events/1050/detail.rol

From the city-wide cable car strike of 1907, Bloody Thursday (July 5, 1934) and the resulting general strike and march of 1934, to more recent alliances between union members and other activist movements, unions have been crucial in shaping the city of San Francisco. Syndicate will look at this history with a special focus on the role of union workers in visual and performing art spaces. In 1889, theatrical technicians in San Francisco formed an alliance with the Theatrical Mechanics Association in New York, and by 1892 Local 16 had been granted a charter with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, who are still active today in YBCA’s theater and forum and at most of San Francisco’s performance houses. In collaboration with the Labor Archives and Research Center, these artists have researched organized labor at nearby theaters and museums to create a series of sidewalk stenciled chalk paintings portraying active union members working or defending their rights. A podcast and map are provided for self-guided tours. Historian-and-artist-led walking tours of these venues will leave ybca at noon on July 26 and October 4. Reservations can be made at 415.978.2787. Audio can also be accessed by calling 415.294.3627.

Jessica Tully, Kim Munson, Wendy Crittenden, Tom Griscom, Christine Wong Yap, Greg O’Toole and the Labor Archives and Research Center

Great discussion w Dont on Monday - thanks to Rob for organizing & Lee for hosting. Many thoughts - on "the public record" (vs archive?), the shift from 'activism' to 'organizing' as horizon for militant arts practice, organizing as accumulating, the critique of relational aesthetics & conventional protest aesthetics ("audience as extra"), the questions around pedagogy & practice, & getting to work with/through U/R's "Theses"... etc...

But what I wanted to put out t/here for N/S is the question of audience & organization. It seems to me that a fundamental difference between a project like Ultra-Red & N/S is U/R's ongoing & direct interactions with social movements & political organizations, & how their artistic practice (& theorizations thereof) come directly out of such work. At the talk Dont gave in Emeryville earlier this year, he spoke also of how such interactions stage the question of "responsibility" (of the artist, of U/R) much more palpably when you are working directly with the communities & populations your work addresses/engages.

Anyways, this is certainly NOT meant to privilege some idea of activist-art whereby if you "work with" marginalized groups it makes for 'better' art/practice, nor to suggest that N/S is somehow working in some 'merely' aesthetic realm for being (speaking VERY generally) artists/archivists and not political organizers. But I do wonder how -- & maybe this is just a pressing concern for my own practice, & not for other N/Sers -- the politics of aesthetic practice 'work' when solidarity with certain fields/communities/classes remains largely outside of any ongoing interactions/work w said communities? What forms of listening are we participating in from behind the desk/screen/institutional divides? Which of our presumptions about theory & practice remain untested/unchallenged/unquestioned without such encounters? Are we producing more than 'works'?

DB

http://www.ban5.org/YBCA/events/1052/detail.rol

“Lovers Lane is the oldest trail in the Presidio of San Francisco and the shortest way out. Well before the founding of the Spanish military outpost in 1776, it may have been a deer trail and perhaps a trail used by the Ohlone to move from one hunting camp to another. Since then, it has been traveled by scores of soldiers and civilians, in war and peacetime, through boom and bust, one foot after the other, each journey something like the one before it, but different too. A Lover’s Line offers visitors a series of different perspectives on Lovers Lane, each one cued by a telephone message and a time/map that transforms the pedestrian trail into something more like a series of chronologies in three dimensions. The cast of characters includes the missionary, the soldier, the military wife, the translator, the dreamer, the hawk and the dove, the wayward trees and the water, whose chronologies overlap and intermingle, at different tempos and according to different, unconscious and imperceptible logics of repetition and return, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unknowingly—so that each history becomes a potential counter-history, each historical fact a fictional detour in someone else’s story.” —JP

Shuttles will leave YBCA for a tour of Lovers Lane on September 6 at noon. Reservations can be made at 415.978.2787. Audio can be accessed after September 6 by calling 415.294.3627 or downloading files at ban5.org.

I'm still not sure what to make of it, beyond filing it under the banner of archive-fever, but in addition to a number of recent archival/art projects in the bay (Theory of Survival at the Lab and now at Yerba Buena, which I HIGHLY recommend - http://www.theoryofsurvival.com/ - the CCA storage container show, the Jonestown exhibit at MIssion17 -http://mission17.org/exhibits/JonestownHadAGarden.htm - etc etc), there have also been a number of 're-enactments', ranging from the re-staging (if that's the word) of several Kaprow happenings in LA, similar performance art "covers" in NY, and the like. Of course historical re-enactments are not new, nor are leftist historical 'legacy' tours (labor history walks in SF as part of Yerba Buena's Ground Scores exhibit, the Black Panther Legacy Tour, NY Radical History tour, the Counterpulse SF Bicycle Tours - http://www.shapingsf.org/biketours.html - etc etc), but I'm curious about the impulse to restage radical political and/or artistic "events" - Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave being an exemplary project - http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/battle_of_orgreave.html - anyways... here are two local items of note:

1. The Port Huron Project is staging a reenactment of a 1969 Angela Davis speech this Sat at 6pm in deFremery Park in Oakland. http://www.nothing.org/porthuronproject/
note that the night before at the Oakland Museum Mark Tribe of the PHP will be in conversation with EMORY DOUGLAS (!) and Nato Thompson, to discuss the PHP, the BPP, and the experimental doc CHICAGO 10 -
http://museumca.org/cal-public/calendar.cgi?category=17&QueryTitle=First%20Friday%20Events (scroll down)

2. The Oakland General Strike Re-enactment Society did an event this weekend commemorating the 1946 strike, and is holding a follow up meeting this Wed. Here's the cut-n-pasted email:

Dear fellow rabble rousers, street performers, and radical
historians...

- Did you know that in 1946 there were more strikes and work Read more

http://www.joaap.org/5/articles/hofer/webspecial.htm

http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/5/articles/hofer/hofer.htm