It's noontime on a warm midwinter day in San Francisco's Mission District, and six women dressed in battle black are fighting mad.

Berkeley anti-war marchers carry effigies of President Bush. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn

"Comrades, we are the art liberation army," their leader, Krissy Keefer, trumpets from an alley fire escape. Her charges brandish toy machine guns behind her and take up the chant: "We must stop the war! We must stop the war! " The scene draws a crowd, but it's only a rehearsal for the real thing, a site-specific anti-war performance by the politically activist Dance Brigade.

Across the bay, at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, anti-war ideas get a more rueful spin in Fred Wilson's installation, "Aftermath." Here, in an eerily serene mock-archaeological dig site, everything from a felled Meiji period Buddha and a worn Burmese pipe to a Guatemalan child's shirt and armless Chinese tomb figures (c. 140 B.C.) register the timeless ravages of combat. Wilson created "Aftermath" from artifacts collected by Berkeley's Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

At the San Jose Museum of Art, visitors are invited to react to "Disarming Parables," a Conversation Piece Gallery show on the theme of war. "America is planning to go 'off the deep end' again," wrote one viewer in a posted response to Hans Burkhardt's skull-studded canvas, "My Lai." "When will we learn?"

With the drum roll building for war in Iraq, artists are posing that question in a multitude of ways and forms. Although it may be premature to herald a decisive grassroots movement in the arts, San Francisco's fabled reputation as a locus of showy and pointed protest could well be re-engaged by a Bush-led war.

And it could happen in a distinctly 21st century way, with both the global implications of the crisis and the power of Internet-speed communication fueling an urgent new artistic rhetoric. Everything from protest poems to Xerox art to digitized dance performances can now, as never before, reach a worldwide audience deeply invested in the consequences of a U.S. move against Iraq.

Choreographer Krissy Keefer (bottom center) and Sarah Bush (clockwise from top right), Kimberly Valmore, Lena Gatchalian, Debby Kajiyama and Tina Banchero rehearse "Cave Woman . . . the Next Incarnation," an anti-war performance, on the fire escape of San Francisco's Dance Mission. Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart

"This definitely feels more intense," says Karen Elliot, who has been performing with Dance Brigade for more than 10 years.

"I think there's been a sea of change since Sept. 11," says Susan Landauer, curator of "Disarming Parables." "There's a real hunger for humanism in the arts, for the broader premise."

Some local artists are thinking and working in ambitiously idealistic terms.

Installation and conceptual artist Richard Kamler envisions a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly at which each member nation's delegate will be accompanied by an artist. He calls his conception "Seeing Peace" and acknowledges it may never come to pass. Nonetheless, he argues, "it's almost like we've got nothing to lose."

A Feb. 15-16 Sacred Visionary Art & Music Video Festival at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts will advance producer Da Vid's proposal for a global peace center on Alcatraz Island. The goal, says Da Vid, an artist and holistic physician, is to "create powerful forces for cooperation, reconciliation and healing."

Other artists are employing blunt political commentary or barbed satire. In the recent "No War" show at the Luggage Store, an alternative San Francisco art gallery and performance space, Josh On and Amy Balkin overlaid a map of the world on a functioning dart board. The darts were U.S. flags.

STREET-THEATER ENERGY

"Bye Bye Bin Laden," an impudent musical revue performed in November at San Jose State University, featured a sketch with President Bush offering 0 percent financing on Pontiacs in Afghanistan. Another piece in writer-director Scott Sublett's show paired Osama bin Laden and "Psycho's" Norman Bates in a musical duet.

Street-theater energy erupted in full force at the Jan. 18 peace march and rally in San Francisco. Marchers of all ages filled Market Street with a multisensory confetti of call-and-response chants ("What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!"), cheeky wordplay ("Cheney Bush Rumsfeld: Axis of Weasel," read one sign) and improvised props (a toilet seat labeled "Flush Bush").

Some of the instant art was skillfully deployed. One placard depicting a huge drop of blood dripping from a gas nozzle into Uncle Sam's hat made its argument with graphic efficiency. Certain expressions of unity came with a sly humility that winked at politically correct identity politics. "Fat Ugly Men for Peace," one hefty demonstrator advertised from his curbside perch.

But there also was a certain recycled '60s aura that day. Perhaps it was the sound of Joan Baez's voice at the Civic Center rally, or the preponderance of graying Baby Boomers in the crowd. A man in a yellow Smiley Face mask teetered by on stilts. Even a rapper sounded a bit studied and archaic: "Capital is their god. The system is so flawed."

POETRY SYMPOSIUM CANCELED

Last week, poets of more prominent standing made their voices heard even as the White House turned a deaf ear. Dodging a show of anti-war views by participants, Laura Bush scuttled a planned Feb. 12 symposium titled "Poetry and the American Voice." Among those decrying the decision were former U.S. poet laureates Rita Dove and Stanley Kunitz. A call for anti-Iraq war poems (by Copper Canyon Press editor Sam Hamill) produced 2,000 submissions.

A threat of war can produce strange shifts in polarity and public attention.

How often do poets and poetry make the news? Anything, in this kind of ionized environment, can set off spontaneous heat lightning.

The artistic response to any war has a kind of dual identity. On the one hand, it captures the specific social and cultural zeitgeist of the moment. On the other, it inevitably shares the streams of war-themed art that precede it.

Protest plays date back to Euripides' "The Trojan Women" and Aristophanes' "Lysistrata." The latter, with its plot of wives denying sex to their husbands until a war is ended, sounded the primal agit-prop call to "Make Love, Not War. "

War is a major theme, treated with both horror and celebration, through the history of visual art. Many of the world's museums would suffer significant losses if they had to remove the masterpieces that glorify battle. Great paintings that express revulsion at war -- Goya's "The Third of May" or Picasso's "Guernica" -- are both rarer and more immediate. They seem to leap out of history, patronage and patriotic politics and hold the viewer face to face with human suffering.

Art's effect is never fixed. Works are forever shifting in context and impact over time. Benjamin Britten's anguished 1962 "War Requiem," written to reconsecrate Coventry Cathedral after its World War II bomb damage was repaired, must have been heard as a Cold War warning at its premiere. Last year, when the "Requiem" was performed at Davies Hall, listeners had a different looming conflict and combatants to read into the score.

OLD PLAY SEEMS CURRENT

Peace activists march down Market Street during last month's protest against a possible war against Iraq. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn

A play such as Robert E. Sherwood's 1936 "Idiot's Delight," seen at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival a few years back but relatively little known, might have aged right back into currency. Its international fan of characters, impish treatment of national stereotypes and a collective American anxiety about war have a suddenly familiar ring.

Even television commercials can experience a second life. An infamous attack ad on the hawkish Barry Goldwater has been updated to indict Bush's stance. The 1964 spot depicts a young girl plucking a flower and ends with images of a nuclear mushroom cloud.

With an Iraq war still in prospect rather than in process, the artistic responses to it are extremely early, unformed and almost certainly transitory. It often takes years, even decades for a war's meaning to crystallize in significant art. The notable Vietnam War films -- "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "The Killing Fields" (1984) and "Platoon" (1986) -- came years after the fall of Saigon and even then prodded fresh psychic wounds.

Joseph Heller's defining World War II novel, "Catch-22," was published in 1961.

No one can say how a potential Iraq war might be reflected and refracted artistically. But somehow, whatever its course and outcome, it will be. Art always writes its own version of human combat -- in Greek tragedies, Matthew Brady's somber Civil War battle photographs, the traumatized poetry of World War I. The best anti-war art penetrates to the heart of human nature and transcends all the strategy and speeches and national interests. It endures beyond the nations themselves that make war with one another.

In the moment, artists can only follow their instincts and the imperative of the times. One of them, San Francisco playwright Greg Beuthin, had been working on a play about the Algerian war of independence for about a year when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened.

Overnight, he says, his lens opened. "It made me think of what might be seen as a justifiable revolution and what the damages of that might be. Is any sort of war justifiable, and how do we define that?"

Beuthin began talking out his questions to friends and fellow writers. Together they decided to mount a program of short anti-war plays, most of them written for the occasion. "A Loud Little Handful" ran for two performances last October, in an old gun battery in the Marin Headlands. The irony of the venue was fully intended.

ALTERNATIVE TO MARCHING

Only about 20 people showed up for the opening -- there was an anti-war rally in San Francisco at the same time; 50 more attended the second and final performance. Several people, Beuthin says, thanked him for providing an alternative to the protest march.

"There are many ways to express your dissension about this war," he says. "This was one way. This was a beginning."

CAVEWOMEN . . . THE NEXT INCARNATION: Dance Brigade's site-specific dance theater production continues through March 2 at Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., San Francisco. Tickets: $20-$25. Call (415) 273-4633 or go to www.DanceMission.com.

AFTERMATH: Fred Wilson's installation continues through March 30 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. Museum admission: $6. Call (510) 642-0808 or go to www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

DISARMING PARABLES: The Conversation Piece Gallery show continues through April 13 at the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose. Free. Call (408) 271-6840 or go to www.SanJoseMuseumofArt.org.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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