To give a little more background to the first Issue of News of Common Possibility (which is focused on the August 7, 1965 protest in Lafayette Park, (SF) by the San Francisco Mime Troupe) I uploaded this video shot last year for the project. In this piece I asked the SFMT’s founder Ronald G. Davis, wearing a Commedia dell’arte costume, to reenact the actions leading up to his arrest, but to perform it without using verbal language. I then slowed the video down to emphasize his gestures and movements, which I felt to be an equally important language to the verbal one. The words he spoke on that day serve as the title of this work. This video and the newspaper together with an audio work and a large sculpture of the Mime Troupe’s unbuilt stage comprise the elements of this project, titled “Create the Condition You Describe”.

Artist: Anthony Marcellini
Title: “Mesdames et messieurs, signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, El Trupo de Mimo de San Francisco presents for your enjoyment today an ARREST!”
Duration: Video loop
Actor: Ronald G. Davis
Year: 2009

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).
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