Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Gold bodysuits, giant inflatable phalluses and an orangutan mascot for gay divorce. With a new book and movie, the Yes Men prepare to take their activist performance art to a whole new level.
Sep 23, 2004 | The four male figures standing in the moonlit yard of a Los Angeles hillside house are plotting strategy. And central to it is the 6-foot-tall tree, with bug eyes and a black ministerial hat, standing in front of them.
"That's Smokey the Log, our mascot," explains Mike Bonanno. He and his partner, Andy Bichlbaum, together known as the political prank team the Yes Men, plan to use Smokey the Log in their latest act of activism/performance art. Smokey, it seems, will be deployed during the group's bus tour of presidential swing states to persuade voters to sign petitions stating that they are supporting President Bush's forestry policies and are "promoting global warming," Bichlbaum says.
The Yes Men are sort of like "Jackass" for the MoveOn set, except they set the artistic bar a bit higher. "'Theater' is basically the closest word we could use to describe what we do," Bonanno says, adding emphatically: "It's protest, it's theater, it's performance art. It's identity correction."
Their pranks are reaching a broader audience this week with the release of their book and documentary film (opening Friday in New York and Los Angeles), both called "The Yes Men." Impersonating Republicans and members of the World Trade Organization, they have attended conferences and spoken on television, expressing what they believe to be the unfiltered and uncensored agendas of their nemeses. And -- to further aggravate their NEA-bashing foes -- they've received grants to pursue their passion: a Guggenheim new-media grant, a California Institute of the Arts Alpert grant for film and video, and an experimental/new genres grant from Creative Capital Foundation in New York.
"When it comes down to it, we like to think that we're telling the truth," Bonanno says. "If anyone took us to court they would be doing their own identity a disservice."
"The Yes Men" chronicles Bichlbaum and Bonnano's prankish "Identity Correction" projects as they impersonate their initial target, the World Trade Organization, online, on television and at business conferences around the world. In the film's climax they make it all the way to Tempere, Finland, for a business conference on textiles where Bichlbaum transforms himself into "Hank Hardy Unruh, WTO representative."
Amid a roomful of a dozen or so unassuming attendees, he gives a lecture explaining that the problem with slavery in the United States was not an ethical one, but its lack of cost-efficiency. The stunned audience is speechless until Unruh's assistant (Bonanno) helps him further the presentation by yanking off his breakaway business attire to reveal a skintight gold lamé jumpsuit. The conference-goers gasp.
"This is the management leisure suit," Unruh proudly proclaims. With another tug at his groin, a large phallus with a mock television screen at its tip inflates from his waist. This schoolboy's accidental nightmare is the intentional climax to the Yes Men's political theater of the absurd. Unruh paces around, gold protrusion bouncing with each step as an instructional video shows how the businesses of the future will monitor workers through the strange TV penis he's demonstrating. The baffled audience applauds, and as seems to usually be the case, "nobody gets it," Bichlbaum says, resigned.
New York natives Bichlbaum, 40, and Bonanno, 36, met eight years ago and immediately hit it off. The two had both taught university courses in new media, and "we were both politically active in our different ways," Bichlbaum says. "People we knew introduced us to each other because we had done similar projects."
