Friday, May 18 – Saturday, May 19, 2007
Location: Southern Exposure

Join the Los Angeles based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest for a weekend of activity, dialogue and production. The Journal's aim is to activate culture with smart, anti-authoritarian discussions, publications and events to help build good things and stop bad things in the world. Founded in 2001, the Journal is co-edited by Cara Baldwin, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst and Christina Ulke.

Weekend Schedule

Friday, May 18, 2007
7:00 PM: Presenting the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Issue #5 and Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices.

Saturday, May 19, 2007
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM: Move! People Activate Positions: A magazine writing workshop, interactive dance and body movement seminar. Working interactively as a group to create situations within the workshop that highlight conflict and othering with a possible outcome of publishing a magazine. The magazine may be a xerox, may be a poster and may be a street event.

2:00 – 4:00 PM: Fragments from a strike: Reconstituting the SFSU Walkout, a Participatory Re-Speaking Workshop.
In November 1968, SFSU's Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front led students and faculty in a walkout that closed down classes for five months and resulted in the establishment of the School of Ethnic Studies. Artist-activist collective BLW invites you to re-constitute with us recorded moments from the strike. Working with rescued archives of newsreel footage, we will re-speak recorded student, faculty and community member statements, considering the relationship between politics and education that this history brings to bear on today.

4:00 PM: Mark Tribe, Port Huron Project 1: Until the Last Gun is Silent
The Port Huron Project is a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the 1960s and 70s. Each event takes place at the site of the original speech, and is delivered by an actor to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. The first event in the series, Port Huron Project 1: Until the Last Gun is Silent, took place in Central Park, New York City, on Saturday, September 16, 2006. This event reenacted a speech given by Coretta Scott King at a peace march in Central Park on April 27, 1968. The speech, which was based on notes found in the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s pockets, addresses the war in Vietnam, poverty and the power of women. We will be screening this video in the SoEx space on Mission.

3:30 – 4:30 PM: Automobile Event and Blank Placard Dance, Reenactments
We invite you to join us in performing these simple powerful pieces in the streets of San Francisco. These collective movements derive from the Mission’s own avant-garde history. The San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop and Anna Halprin originally performed versions of these two choreographies in 1968 and 1970. Participants will be asked to walk silently and crawl over cars.

4:45 – 5:05 PM: Art Workers' Coalition (revisited)
In response to the spirit of Move! Activate! Remember! and inspired by artist and Issue 5 contributor Kirsten Forkert's open call for participation in historic speech and conversation about its meaning over time, Christina Ulke and Cara Baldwin of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest invite visitors to SOEX to actively participate in a public speech re-enactment in front of Southern Exposure at 2901 Mission Street (@ 25th Street). Participants in this performance are invited to select and read aloud in public space texts from the Art Workers' Coalition, reflecting on the ways in which our voices lose or retain meaning and agency in different social and temporal locations over time.

The activities of the Art Workers' Coalition began when the artist George Takis removed one of his sculptures from the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. This act drew attention to the conditions for artistic production, within the broader context of feminist, anti-racist and anti-Vietnam War movements, and the critiques of artistic autonomy that were beginning to emerge out of Conceptual Art and Minimalism. The Art Workers' Coalition presented the director of MOMA with a list of 13 demands, one of them being an open hearing on museum reform. They were refused, so they instead held the meeting at the School of Visual Arts. These documents are from this meeting; they raise questions around the artist's place in society, the role of art institutions and the market, especially their implication in the military-industrial complex. They reflect demands ranging from the specific to the general, from calls for minor reforms to total revolution.

The Art Workers Coalition (revisited) is a project by Kirsten Forkert in which artists, writers and activists have been asked to select and read a text that they thought had an interesting relationship to the present; perhaps because it struck them as relevant today. The performative act of reading aloud allowed for a reconsideration of the ways in which the role of the artist or function of the art world might be the same or different now. Moreover, it calls on readers and listeners to reconsider how the language we use to talk about social change might be the same or different now.

Texts by: Architects Resistance, Frank Hewitt, Iain Whitecross, Seth Sieglaub, Carl Andre. Hans Haacke, John Perrault, Lee Lozano, Faith Ringgold, John Denmark, Selma Brody, Lucy Lippard, Gene Swensen, Naomi Levine, David Lee, Jean Toche, Dan Graham, Iris Crump and Frederick Castle

These readings and reflection on these questions by readers are available on Journal of Aesthetics & Protest website. Visitors are invited to participate in this project at and after Move! Activate! Remember!

5:15 PM: Coffee Shop Organizing Project
When a group of strangers get together in a coffee shop and figure out what they can immediately do to stop the war in Vietnam. We will have 30 minutes to acquaint each other with our comfort levels and knowledge of tactics/activism and then up to an hour for any created action.

7:00 PM: Remembering Forward; Bumping Into Yesterday's Mistakes Tomorrow.
A roundtable discussion dealing with radical legacies. A roundtable discussion on how do we remember and how do we move ahead. Part of the discussion uses performance and activated public space as a focal point. Confirmed participants: Sam Green (filmmaker), Patrick Reinsborough (activist/smartmeme), Josh Kahn Russell of the new SDS, and BLW artist’s collective (Rozalinda Borcila, Sarah Lewison and Julie Wyman).