Iain Boal sitting on the mound in front of a replica of the SF Mime Yes, Parks Commission No, protest sign from the 1965 protest in Golden Gate Park, to the right is Ronnie Davis with Mime Troupe photographs.

On October 11, 2008 Iain Boal sat on the grass mound and gave a talk entitled “Conflicts On The Common”. This lecture was basically concerned with the history of enclosure, emparkment and it’s relationship with art, one in which Iain, a historian with exhaustive knowledge on the body and the commons, spoke about many, many things. This talk spanned from Thomas Moore, to Wordsworth, to Gerard Winstanly and the Diggers, to 60’s experiments with communal living, to Utopian endeavors and the problematics of Utopian vision. It was a way to mark a path through these histories of resistance taking place in the common open air, as a preamble for a question which Iain asked to Ronnie Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (SFMT); ‘what was the SFMT trying to do in the late 60’s when they brought their political theater outside into the open air of the park?’ This talk was the fifth of six event that I produced as part of A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia).

Below you can hear the full talk, Iain’s preamble and Ronnies rebuttal. I have split it into two parts because Iain’s talk was already quite long and then Ronnie Davis’ response (which actually went on much longer but was cut off) is almost equal in length. Also after more of my words there is a great interview between Iain and I, concerning many of the concepts of his talk.

Iain Boal: Conflicts on The Common Part 1
Iain Boal: Conflicts on The Common Part 2

Many aspects of this project have focused on the theater of the everyday, how do we perform or act in everyday life, what does our performance say and what role does creativity play to structure and communicate our performances within the everyday? In our interview Iain and I didn’t stray far from this subject, in fact our conversation reinforced the necessity for a greater investigation into theater. Many of the things Iain had to say were immensely thought provoking, but I was particularly struck by Iain’s response to a question I asked regarding the theories of the German dramatist and theater producer Bertold Brecht (who is also discussed at length in Joseph Tanke’s talk on October 18). I asked him, do you think that Brecht’s innovation of breaking the frame, the barrier between performer and audience in the theater (what Brecht calls breaking the fourth wall) is still relevant today? Iain’s response was basically to say no, not in the way Brecht saw it. He said Brecht’s notions “have been overtaken by historical developments. We have become so overwhelmed by the virtual life. There was a time when you had to go out and see drama; there was only live theater, which is no longer true now. It’s not that drama is dead; far from it. When you reach the late 20th century people are watching more drama than at any time in human history. But people are watching it all on a screen, many people five, six, seven hours of it a day. How is Brecht able to help us on this?… the stage has changed in a qualitative way. It is still a question of form. But it is not about tearing down the fourth wall, or breaking frame out of a dramatic persona, or actors changing in full view and mingling with the audience. We have moved into a world of hyper-proliferating image machines that swamp all those brave gestures.” He continued by saying (I am paraphrasing here) that because of this all efforts at de-commodified sociability must be welcomed. And don’t forget the importance of the relations that take place, in the public and semi-public space, in the open air and the commons.

With this in mind I set out on October 10th, to see some public theater in the open air. I traveled down to Fisherman’s Wharf, the tourist center in San Francisco, to watch the multitude of street performers there and judge if any of them were performing de-commodified sociability in the perfect site of mass commodification. I walked around and saw many entertainers. I saw mimes, silver and gold human statues, break-dancers, musicians and magicians, but none of them seemed at all provocative, effective, or even engaging for the audience there (except for maybe one guy in a strange silver outfit who was basically heckling everyone who walked by him but even he seemed tired or bored). I realized that what I was really watching were performers who were just mimicking street performers in other cities in the same way that Fisherman’s Wharf is a mimic of tourist centers in other cities; both of them were unconvincing and weary in their presentation. They were utterly uninterested in the audience and their audience in them. None of these acts of street theater (including the silver guy) were eliciting much response from anyone. And maybe this was the wrong site for it anyways, because anyone performing something abnormal or confrontational, even in San Francisco, would probably have been removed or arrested

But on my way home On Townsend and Third Street I did see an act that was generating dramatic response. I saw an balding older white man driving a blue Mercedes slowly down the street, while blasting military marching music and honking his horn. He had signs pasted to his side and back windows and he was waving one out of his sunroof, all advertising “elect McCain and Palin in 2008”. I was dumbstruck by this, though I did not entirely understand the purpose of his performance. Was it to promote a political candidate? Was it a statement about the existence of other beliefs in city with a fairly unified ideology? Or was it simply an act of provocation aimed at a fiery response. Whatever the intention the response was explosive. Everywhere shouts of “booo” no way and many a “fuck you” rang out, resounding for blocks as he drove by. And I found, strangely, that I was quietly cheering him on, smiling at his bold action, not because I supported the candidates he was promoting quite to the contrary, but because his performance was the single most radical one I had seen that day. It gave me a greater sense of creative freedom and possibility than any magic show or silver colored man ever could.

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Cover image from The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years, by R. G. Davis

This interview between Iain Boal and Anthony Marcellini took place on October 5, 2008, at the Café Roma in Berkeley.

Anthony Marcellini: I thought generally we could begin to set the stage by having you describe your interest in the commons and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (SFMT) specifically their struggles for free expression and political protest in public space.

Iain Boal: Well I have two intersecting interests really, one as a historian of the commons and commoning, and the other as a historian of science and medicine. I am very interested in the history of the body and I did a very long project over several years focused in the 17th century when these two things came together. It was both a history of the enclosure of Ireland, of the Gaelic common land, following the invasion by Oliver Cromwell, and at the same time I became very involved in writing the biography of Ireland’s most famous healer, who used the power of touch. And I did that in collaboration with somebody who had studied with the master of movement and mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, as Ron Davis of the Mime Troupe did. So these wires were crossed for me long ago. I began seriously to investigate the history of the enclosure of the commons back in the 1980s, and that took me to the history of emparkment, the history of public space, and the history of the open air. If you look on the dustcover of Ron Davis’s own history of the first ten years (of SFMT), you will notice the words “Engagement, Commitment and Fresh Air”. Somewhere in there Davis mentions the flash of insight the troupe had about what the open air does to performance. It entails large gestures, and you are looking at the plebeian tradition of Commedia dell’Arte, pantomime, and what a difference it makes to be out in the open. Next Saturday I should talk about a very haunting quote by chief Tecumseh when he meets the governor of Indiana, at the moment of the great enclosures of North America, two years before the war of 1812. Tecumseh is invited into the governor’s mansion but refuses to enter. He replied: “Houses are built for you to hold council in; Indians hold theirs in the open air.” He also refused to take a chair when offered one, saying that he would repose on the bosom of the earth, and he lies down on the grass. There is a resonance here with the barefoot spirit of the 60’s and the movement into the parks and a literal reconnection with the earth. Of course one needs to take a dialectical view of this movement, and stay alert to the grisly record of the fetishizing of nature, “blood and soil” and all that.

AM: Do you think that an interest in earth has a relationship with Marxist ideology?

IB: No, I really don’t think that Davis’ interest in Marx motivated, for example, the move outdoors to natural settings qua nature. Marxian interest in nature is focused on nature as material substrate to be transformed by willed human effort, by the powers of the human brain and body enhanced by tools, the realm of technology. To the contrary, what Davis and the early Mime Troupe were doing was paring down, stripping away apparatus except for a prop or two, going back to basics, a certain kind of abstraction, an interest in the expressivity of the body, in order to critique bourgeois forms and alienated, exploited life under capitalism.

IB: The big Marxist questions of alienation and class meant the occlusion of gender relations within the company itself and led to the split in 1970. (I’m happy to report that when I MC’ed the Mime Troupe’s 40th anniversary event at Fort Mason in San Francisco things were amicable between Ron Davis and the old Troupers.)

After the founder took a “leave of absence”, the Troupe as a collective went into another crisis because affirmative action melodrama makes for lousy theatre. The root of the problem had to do with the conservatism of traditional and popular cultural forms, despite the radical elements to be found in burlesque and knockabout theatre. Davis himself was certainly aware of this, and thought he saw a way out through Brechtian strategies. He went off to Europe to study the problem, and the Mime Troupe settled into its annual rituals of alfresco family entertainment.

Still, the “fresh air” question is actually very important. Why does popular protest take to the street? What is the history of art outside? Most of the major events in history have happened outside. I would even venture to claim that big-h-History will only be made in the open air. In the sense that the decisions taken inside, in the chancellories, boardrooms, smoke filled rooms etc, are ultimately conditioned by things that happen, or do not happen, in the open air. Of course this is an absurd thing to say but an interesting way to begin to think about it, no? And it is connected in my own mind to that haunting line of Tecumseh. I don’t intend, in saying this, to romance the red man, and they spent plenty of time in smoke-filled spaces (with eye and lung disease to show for it).

How, really, should we interpret Tecumseh’s retort to Governor Harrison? Well, I take his remark not as a statement of “lifestyle” preference or personal comfort, but implying something profound about spatial and political form, about the different architectonics of propertarian and commoning societies. The spaces of modernity are shaped and dominated by private and state interests; under modernity public space is a subordinate category, residual even, and confined to what is left over once land has been seized, commodified and parcelled into private lots. What is left over is in the open air. Literally. Of course, the air is treated also by capitalists as a common, or an “externality”, as they say in the business schools, which are commons of a peculiar capitalist kind, in this case used as a deadly sink for the waste produced during the manufacture of commodities. This amounts to the theft of a common, though it is sometimes hard to see since it doesn’t happen all at once, nor everywhere. Like many other things, pollution is very uneven, and for sure it has a clear class geography, and is racialized too.

In general we can say that the condition of commons and the rights of common are even more degraded than public space, which is ultimately a state-derived form, and which therefore is afforded some protections – of speech, assembly etc – however vestigial. By the same token, “the public” as an imagined body has some political clout, at least formally, by virtue of the ballot etc. Clout, that is, compared with commoners whose use-rights have been either extinguished completely during the long theft called “modernity” or else massively eroded. The streets are just about the last public space, even though they have been for a long time given over to the demands of circulation and the movement of traffic. There is, therefore, good reason why there so much is at stake over “the streets”, because they remain potentially a flashpoint.

AM: I am curious what your feelings are then about the Grass Mound, something that was meant to be outside, grass, or a mound of grass, removed from the outside and placed in the well lit enclosed space of the gallery.

IB: Well, I take it to be some kind of poignant and dialectical comment on the pathos of human projects, and on the folly of utopian projects in particular. If you look at the history of utopias, not as a literary genre but as attempts to give material form to the longing for a better world, the record is of course depressing. In California if you ask what is left of them materially, it’s hard to find even any ruins, although Mike Davis opens City of Quartz with a picture of the rubble of Llano del Rio, the socialist commune in Antelope County outside Los Angeles. I like very much your grass mound, because although it is a metaphor for the absurdity of utopian dreams, it also speaks to the possibility of standing up and debating to the contours of another world built among the ruins of this civilization, which will not last and frankly does not deserve to. I take encouragement from the anarchist Durutti’s line: “We are not in the least afraid of ruins.”

After all, it is amid the ruins of the medieval commoning landscape that Thomas More begins his Utopia, the fountainhead of the whole genre. The entire first half of Utopia is a critique of the enclosures. It is their disappearance, the extinction of the commons in the early 16th century that prompts More to write Utopia. On Saturday I will be saying something about the paradox of utopias, about utopias that are dystopias, clearly. Say, Bellamy’s “Looking Backward”, which projects a socialist utopia, yet from a contemporary ecological viewpoint its productivism is a kind of nightmare. Of course there is an egalitarian moment there, but the tone of it doesn’t feel that much better to me then Dubai, which is now the iconic neo-liberal utopia, though of course a utopia of consumption. Dubai’s Palm Jumeira island, by the way, looks uncannily like More’s island in form.

AM: The whole notion of Utopia being on an island indicates a fear of outsiders a disinterest in communicating or exchange. It is a fortress.

IB: Yes, they do tend to be a kind of paranoid fortress, either islands or islands-in-the-land. On the other hand, given the ragged-arsed makeshift contingency of almost all countercultural utopias of the sixties, there is something fine about the scale and confidence of 19th century “blueprint utopias”, as Russell Jacoby puts it.

That said, I think your “grassy mound” is a nice metaphor, or rather synecdoche. I like the non-specificity of it; it’s a graveyard of buried dreams, and at the same time, as I said, a platform for discussion – “Fail again, fail better” in the great phrase of Sam Beckett. And also much more in the spirit of the utopias that I could stand with, as it were. In the 19th century it would be William Morris’ News from Nowhere, which takes seriously the question of transformation, the getting there from here. In that sense, it’s not a blueprint but in Jacoby’s terms an “iconoclastic utopia”. In the 20th century it would be Bolo Bolo, the Swiss anarchist utopia. And I should put in a word for “The Disposessed”, Ursula Le Guin’s great imaginative projection that had its roots in 1930s Berkeley, just a few doors up from me on Arch Street, where Le Guin was born into the Kroeber household. She was surrounded by storytellers, ethnologists and anthropologists like the legendary Jaime De Angulo, contrarians and idealists, new world continuators of William Morris, makers and fakers who all the time were thinking in counter-narratives, imaginative counter-worlds. “The Dispossessed”, Le Guin’s anarchist masterpiece messes with utopia as a genre in a wonderful way. I am convinced that Le Guin’s genius was nurtured in the firelight of the arts and crafts drawing rooms and in the outdoor hillside theatres of her Berkeley childhood.

AM: In R. G. Davis’s “The First Ten Years” Davis discusses initially doing their performances in the parks, not being granted permits to perform, but performing anyway because they felt that their content was being censored and there was a real need to fight that. Though they begin to win these battles after a time and are allowed to perform, it seems that Davis’ disillusionment with the Mime Troupe begins after these early successes, allowing for other events to take place in the parks that begin to overshadow theirs. So much so that by 1969, the music promoter Bill Graham and other SF music writers and promoters, proposed to present the west coast’s answer to Woodstock, a “festival of life” in Golden Gate Park, but were opposed by all the art, political and protest groups in the Bay Area, from the Mime Troupe to the Panthers because they saw it as irrelevant, and a marketing ploy. Davis felt like the Mime troupe was trying to talk about real issues and trying to create community, not just entertainment. He says “Our passage in the park was no longer unique, rock bands were giving concerts to thousands.” He also begins to get weary of fighting the state, he says, “Fighting for the chance to present a radical show became a boring confrontation.” Suggesting basically that he was more interested in the performance and not the fight. These are tensions, which I think are really interesting regarding public space or the commons. Is a concert enough as an act of engagement within the common space, or does the common space call for more?

IB: Actually I was thinking of these questions yesterday at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. In some ways these events embody the spirit of those times. These are performances in the park, they are free, and there is a tremendously mellow spirit. Certainly too there was a political dimension to it. Listening to Steve Earle, and his great song about John Walker Lynd, I mean there is commentary in there. It is a kind of political theater. To be sure these tens of thousands of people are coming as spectators, to consume the music and the scene, but not just.

I think that Davis would be interested in how the seating arrangements are negotiated. In the tradition of bluegrass festivals, if anyone goes away for a break their area becomes squat-able until they come back. I was with a friend sitting in a couple of those folding seats, an hour an a half later the owners of the seats come back and they say ‘thanks for keeping our seats’; they were complete strangers. In other words there is a kind of messing with the categories of a privatized world and a propertarian culture, which you might say are trivial but they are far from trivial actually. I would certainly agree with Ron and say that the Mime Troupe is stupendously boring now. Except in so far as it is a diminishment of alienation something that gets you away from the screen world and into an embodied face-to-faceness of a certain kind.

AM: Yes and that is something that the Mime Troupe has retained from earlier times, despite being boring. When I saw them two weeks ago there was still a feeling of relation between the actors and the audience.

IB: Yes, true, there is still a way in which certain kinds of spectacular distance and certain forms of bourgeois propriety have been dissolved. But the other kind of distancing, the Brechtian kind, is not there.

AM: I am interested in the Mime Troupe’s interest in Brecht. Davis is supportive towards using Brecht’s notion of breaking the fourth wall however he is quite critical of Brecht’s pedanticism or didacticism. The SFMT’s reaction to that didacticism seems to have been to use comedy, offence and provocation to break down the relationship between the audience and the actors, which is partially a way of creating a relation, of breaking the fourth wall. But I wonder: do these issues still make sense; was the Mime Troupe moving beyond these notions?

IB: Breaking down the fourth wall and looking into a bourgeois drawing room was at a certain historical moment a radical move. The same goes for naturalistic “kitchen sink” drama in the class-bound Britain of the early sixties. However, breaking the wall doesn’t on its own challenge the essentially passive relationship of the audience to the play or to the actors. And certainly Davis pushed against the separation early on, by having the actors constantly “break frame” in various ways. But I fear that this kind of debate – about theater and its conventions and Brecht – has been overtaken by historical developments. We have become so overwhelmed by the virtual life. There was a time when you had to go out and see drama; there was only live theater, which is not longer true now. It’s not that drama is dead; far from it. When you reach the late 20th century people are watching more drama than at any time in human history. But people are watching it all on a screen, many people five, six, seven hours of it a day. How is Brecht able to help us on this? How do you get an alienation effect with television and film? It can be done; in the limit case, as Guy Debord did, by making unwatchable films. I’m not saying these are not good questions, but I fear that they have been rendered for the most part irrelevant.

AM: Because the stage has changed so to speak?

IB: Yes the stage has changed in a qualitative way. It is still a question of form. But it is not about tearing down the fourth wall, or breaking frame out of a dramatic persona, or actors changing in full view and mingling with the audience. We have moved into a world of hyper-proliferating image machines that swamps all those brave gestures. That is what Retort’s Afflicted Powers was trying to get at – the consequences, both for politics and for the human imagination, of the commodity penetrating into spaces previously untouched. We argue that the colonization of everyday life is a kind of globalization turned inwards. In this context all efforts at de-commodified sociability must be welcomed, including the tired old free concert in the park, even if it’s only a parody of a false memory. And don’t forget the open air and Tecumseh’s retort. Here’s a thought-experiment - what if all portentous decisions by bigwigs had to be made in parks, in the open air, with children playing around them.

AM: That reminds me of the redesign of the Reichstag. When the German government was relocated to Berlin, back into the Reichstag, they ripped out the impenetrable doors, walls and roofs, and installed huge glass windows so that everyone could see all the way into the interior. German politics is now rendered completely visible, so that the things that happened before, in the past, in the enclosed spaces will not happen again. Which is of course actually really beautiful. But I just wonder does it mean anything, really? Or is it simply an image, a façade, a hollow representation of the idea?

IB: Ultimately I would say it is a distraction because our problems are deeper than that. I’m not saying that the architects of the new Reichstag designed in bad faith, just that it’s a move within the horizon of representational politics, and has little to do with direct horizontalist democracy. Except maybe in order to dissimulate it. So what I like about your green podium is that, however fleetingly, it takes life off the screen, quiets the phone, unplugs the ipod, and allows us a face-to-face discussion of the news from nowhere.

AM: Is this kind of practice (more generally than the SFMT and ignoring all the problematics of the theatrical structures of Artaud, or Brecht) of performing art in public space and on the street, still relevant? Does it change people’s relationships to have this happen in public or are they overly familiar with it?

IB: I think, for the reasons I have just mentioned, it has never been more important. It is not for nothing that we began Afflicted Powers by invoking those two extraordinary days of the Iraq war demonstrations in 2003. The problem is that the “community”, the Utopia if you like, conjured up during these brief reappearances of bodies-in-motion, given the de-realization of human collectivity under the conditions of spectacle, these moments produce only fleeting and often toxic manifestations of community. They were nevertheless extraordinary. You could feel it in something as banal as the free concerts yesterday in the open air. Why do people still hunger for it? Well, this brings me to a key theoretical point. Life under conditions of spectacle, under the reign of the commodity cannot deliver on its promises. At least that’s the wager that those of us who are declared enemies of the present have made. In other words, a view of human powers and capacities from which it follows that the virtual life is a travesty. Similarly with the notion that the pinnacle of political participation is the vote; as if periodic ratification of our masters by ballot is anything other than an embarrassment. It is bad enough to have masters, but to choose them is simply embarrassing. The wager further implies – and here we have come full circle in our conversation – that there is an awful lot riding on the “commonist” strategy. That is, on claiming back the commons. And I am not talking about the denatured capitalist commons, which are entirely congenial to realtors and developers – you know what I mean, green parks, open spaces, well-maintained roads, clean beaches, etc. Fair enough, as far as they go. But I’m talking about rights of common that have use-value, in the traditional sense of providing livelihood and sustenance - food, energy, building materials, fodder, unpolluted water, all of nature’s bounty. At the level of political spaces it is also important. Increasingly so. As the neo-liberal world order goes into profound crisis, it will be these other forms of commoning that will matter, mainly on the side of production. We will have to work together to produce our own lives. We are just in the dawn of a time when we must reinvent a whole range of extinct commoning practices. Meeting in the open air to deliberate over this would be a good start.

So my conclusion is, I suppose, somewhat paradoxical. Those intense struggles in 1950s San Francisco, to abolish censorship, to speak freely, to perform without license – Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti at City Lights, the syndicalists who founded Pacifica radio, the Mime Troupe in the city parks – seem to many just cold-war tales of long ago. The antics of some uppity theater folk, anarchists and longhairs, and irrelevant now. And in some ways, it’s true, the powers accommodated to their demands. What performance now in Golden Gate Park would get you arrested? And surely any serious discussion of utopia has been utterly discredited, if you are to believe George Orwell or Isaiah Berlin or Karl Popper. Even Marx himself, for completely different reasons, snorted “I do not write cookbooks for the kitchens of the future.” And yet, and yet. First, an obvious point, we may well be entering a new dark night of censorship – not much of a stretch, given the gulag of liberal state terror that has emerged with Guantanamo as its public face, all brought to us by disciples of Orwell and Berlin. So what price a conversation about utopia? Shall we shut up because Popper called them blueprints for fascism? Not as long as Wallace Stevens is somewhere in the park to remind us: “The imperfect is our paradise”.