Posers and Pranksters: Getting serious on the art of The Yes Men and Hasan Elahi
When thinking about fakery in art, copying an original most likely comes to mind, from De Chirico copying his own paintings to Sherrie Levine placing a Walker Evans’ photo under her own name. But these artworld postures are just that: an aesthetic proposition with little impact or relevance outside the gallery walls. I don’t take issue with artists who make us question the cultural desire for authenticity, but want to call attention to artists who use posing and fakery as a way to perform their art on a much wider scale. I’m thinking about The Yes Men and Hasan Elahi, because these artists recently visited Minneapolis, hosted by the Art Department at the University of Minnesota and the Media Arts Department at MCAD, respectively. The two key projects that I want to focus on both began online: the BBC Bhopal Anniversary Hoax began through the Yes Men’s fake Dow Chemical website, dowethics.com, and Hasan Elahi began ridiculously mundane self-surveillance as a way to do the FBI agents’ job for them in trackingtransience.com.
Issues of authenticity and identity are at the core of their performances. Andy Bonnano (the half of the Yes Men who came to Minneapolis) and Andy Bichlbaum (other half not present) look the part of the corporate spokesmen they pretend to be, using their white maleness to the best affect. Hasan Elahi is an easy target Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
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r terrorist watch groups due to his name, his country of birth – Bangladesh, his family’s religion – Muslim, his color of skin – not white, and his occupation – international artist who travels extensively. On his way home from an exhibition in Senegal he was detained by the INS in Detroit, which kick started six months of biweekly FBI interrogations, including nine polygraph tests. Elahi’s identity is immutable. He is a “natural” terrorist suspect, so he uses his skill as conceptual artist to upend the power of the gaze and perform unrelenting self-surveillance. They play on a social stereotyping that persists and use it to their advantage, employing satire to reveal this social tendency and ignite the fire of reform of the rules of engagement with, for example, the white man, who is not who he says is or the brown, Indian looking man who is going out of his way to do his bit for the FBI.
Satire is an effective tactic, an age old tradition that involves using the tone, cadence and method of the voice of power to say utterly absurd things. In fact, Naomi Klein has called the Yes Men, “the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation.” Swift called the English out for their inhumane treatment of the Irish, by creating a preposterous argument in “A Modest Proposal” that they should eat Irish children to solve the problem of not having enough food and having too many children to feed. Likewise, the absurdity of unaccountable and unethical corporations, as well as of our increasingly surveilled lives as well as racial profiling, which have come to be seen as a “natural” part of contemporary life, are exaggerated and counteracted by these artists. At the heart of their work is laughter: watching those in power be the butt of a joke and shaking up the order of things enough for us to discover a possible voice for ourselves in the media machinery. Different from Swift, the Yes Men and Elahi’s interventions more closely resemble those of fine artists historically because they trade in the currency of the imagery, in which the greatest truth is thought to reside. Therefore, instead of distributing an anonymous pamphlet on the street like Swift did, they disseminate snapshots, (Elahi reminded us that everyone is always equipped with a camera phone), and documentary video of their satirical pranks, edited later into Yes Men films.
Their battles in the trenches of news media and virtual space are continually in motion. The Yes Men keep being agreeable and accept all invitations to falsely represent real corporations, and Elahi continues self surveillance as he perpetually remains on the FBI terrorist watch list. The struggle is seemingly never ending. Tom Holert, in an Art Forum special issue on Pop, discusses the Yes Men among many other contemporary artists who continue the Pop approach to making “the only imaginable form of realism…in order to fulfill a cultural task, even if in an entirely different way than traditional art… Pop [is] a strategy for coming to terms with the power structures and representational techniques of consumer society.”[i] Pop art since the 60’s engenders a processing of societal change precisely because it plays within the everyday realism of our world.
Our current realism is BBC World 24 hour news service found on cable TV or online – the medium the Yes Men chose to work in for their piece on the 20th Anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe. The Yes Men hijack a chair in front of the camera across from a news anchor. On live feed Andy Bichlbaum, as Jude Finisterra, reports on behalf of Dow Chemical that it will adequately clean up the 1984 environmental disaster their plant caused in Bhopal, India, killing 18,000 people and harming thousands more. The BBC reporter responds with relief, as if he assumed this Dow spokesman would attempt another cover up and states that it must feel really good to finally “do the right thing.” Jude responds, “Our shareholders may take a bit of a hit, Steve, but I think that if they’re anything like me, they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion of doing right by those that we’ve wronged.”[ii] And then it happened: art affected the real world and Dow stocks prices lost two billion dollars in twenty minutes, until this news story was revealed as a hoax. This 21st-century Pop grasps the irony of a situation that requires fakery and humor to reveal the severity of the reality of the event that took place in Bhopal.
Watching this clip from their new documentary, The Yes Men Fix the World, felt great. Just to laugh along side others gave me an undeserved feeling of satisfaction. Huge corporations like Dow Chemical loom faceless and elusive with little or no accountability, it seems. Even though I and other audience members did not directly participate in this trick on Dow, it didn’t matter; we were able to get the inside scoop and feel a part of it, watch Bonnanno’s sense of fulfillment and ease as he stood beside his work. “This form of acting undercover and mimicking the very postures and practices that are responsible for an individual’s sense of disempowerment can be claimed as a central artistic thrust within the post-Pop performance of the system.”[iii] Sure, we can go to protests outside the latest meeting of the WTO, or closer to home, the RNC, to feel active in changing how things are run. Bonnanno told the crowd at the U of M, oddly enough in the Carlson Business School, that he got sick and tired of the tear gas. He and a colleague began “culture jamming”, as it is often referred to, creating fake websites for the WTO or for George Bush, articulating on its behalf a voice of good conscience. Their performances are risky, due to the aliveness of the arena of live feed to millions of viewers, and even more so because the Yes Men must be convincing in their parody for the real people they play off of, the reporters, the representatives of the organization they are parodying (like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). Their movies are wise to display the nervousness of the Andy Bichlbaum. He is so awkward and uncomfortable in his corporate posturing that the viewer can easily relate to the experience, perhaps even envision making a similar move. It would be much less effective if the performer was cocky and self-assured of his success. Rather, he is clearly out of his element. When the Yes Men parody the center, as a result, they get to speak to the center, that entity which does not normally listen to anything off to the left or the mass of protesters on the street.
I felt a similar sense of satisfaction when listening to Hasan Elahi talk about a sort of role reversal he needed to perform in order to throw off the oppressive weight of the intense FBI surveillance. This surprised me, because after watching the clip of his interview on the Colbert Report, I must admit, his artwork seemed one-dimensional. But hearing him tell the background story, I realized that in fact this is what the work is about – storytelling – told through countless photos of meals (intake) and toilets (output), without ever picturing himself. On his website, trackingtransience.net, we know where he is at every moment. The GPS system he carries with him pin points his exact location, while a picture taken of the building fills the other half of the screen. Probing further into the website, Elahi shows us his recent meal and a shot of the toilet he visited as well as an image archive of those that have come and gone before. Any toilet in art instantly replays Duchamp’s Fountain and food as art subject is reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim, Claus Oldenburg, and Helen Chadwick. Elahi’s images of plates of food and toilets also develop an abstraction by forming a pattern of circles inside the square photo frame, repeated over and over, like the cycle of return.
This cycle always comes back to that moment when Elahi was detained in Detroit, singled out and found suspect due to name, skin color, and birthplace. The repeated circular form relates also to the continuous cycle of surveillance happening all the time, even before he began doing it for himself. The FBI accrued an incredible amount of detail on Elahi’s whereabouts even before he was assigned a personal FBI agent, who he had to update with any movements. Clearly Elahi’s experience of detention and interrogation, plus the fear of Guantanamo, incurred a trauma out of which the work Tracking Transience needed to flow. Elahi’s sense of disempowerment under the light of FBI probing performs as an exaggerated version of our feelings of anxiety and disempowerment in the face of large corporate and governing bodies. Elahi’s method of coping, to reverse the orientation of the lens back onto himself and act as if he were the FBI, is ridiculous, playful, but also kind of sensible. In the end it’s funny, hard not to chuckle along with good-natured, easy going Elahi, playing a prank filled with honesty and transparency on an a bureau built out of secrecy and deceit.
By embodying the system itself, either through performance of the self on a virtual stage in Tracking Transience as Elahi does, or through donning the corporate power suit like the Yes Men, who make it speak on behalf of people versus profits, these artists not only expose the unethical operations of, for example, big oil companies like Dow or the FBI, but actually exert influence on the stock market and on our own awareness of the hidden mechanisms that watch us. Like the Pop artists before them, the Yes Men and Elahi, use the everyday medium of mass culture found on the streets and now online for two-fold effect – create art in a real life arena and perform a “unifying (and leveling) operation” in art. Mike Bonnanno and Hasan Elahi ended their talks with a “call to arms”, if you will, for today’s rabble rousing youth to cut out fake press passes from the Yes Men’s catalogue Keep It Slick or jam the data currents with too much info by putting it all out there. As Joseph Beuys told us, “Everyone is an artist.” These artists remind today’s art students that artistic talent, technique, authenticity and objecthood is fleeting and out of step with the real world around it. A Pop “approach grasps the system of mass media and consumer society very materially, even bodily, despite its dematerializing effects.” The form the art takes matters very little, hence how these artists adapt and change the final products they create, focusing much more on process to best embody the system on which they comment.
What recourse do we have left? In a world where sincerity in action is usually flat out rejected, not even listened to, falling on deaf ears, or pushed back with considerable force, our motivation slackens, leaving us in a state of apathy. The only other option is to just start laughing hysterically at the absurdity of the situation, an angry humor that gives in, resigns itself to the absurd and opts to play in the same crazy arena as those in power. And thus a sort of post-Pop boom is born, an art that “performs the system” by using the age-old device of satire and the latest media technology to jam the populist machinery. Both the Yes Men and Hasan Elahi creatively develop alternative methods of taking on our increasingly unethical systems of business and governance. The core of the practice for these artists is play. The Yes Men perform hoaxes, pretend to be spokesmen for some of the world’s most influential organizations, while Elahi creates a visual puzzle for the FBI to decipher, asking his FBI agent to put the puzzle pieces together as he zips across the world, realizing that the more data he pours into the virtual world, the harder it will be to decipher the real progression of information. The beauty about their art, then, is that through all the complexity and sheer dump of media and data out there, their work belies an incredibly simple message, or not so much a message, as the simple act of human integrity and reality inside a vast virtual and media machinery. That is where their play turns serious.
[i] Tom Holert, “Performing the System,” Artforum XL III, No 2 (Oct 2004) 250.
[ii] The Yes Men, “Routledge Just Says ‘Yes’ to Dow: The collaboration of a Progressive Academic Press and a Large Chemical Corporation”, http://theyesmen.org/dowtext/
[iii] Tom Holert, “Performing the System,” Artforum XL III, No 2 (Oct 2004) 303.
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