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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
YES MEN FIX THE WORLD WHILE RUNNING THE NUMBERS WITH CHRIS JORDAN:
Or, Where is the line between art and activism and what does that mean in the future?
In a Yes Men Fix The World curriculum guide downloadable on their website, an interesting paradox presented on the title page becomes s a statement that creates a framework for a comparison of the activist artists Andy Bichlbaum (Jacques Servin) and Mike Bonanno (Igor Vamos) with Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan:
“Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth”.[1]
The Yes Men use activist interventions, performance art, video animation, and writing to confront corporations and market forces they see as having the potential to “…happily drive the whole planet off a cliff”. Chris Jordan’s photographs ask us to think about our individual responsibility in graphic terms as he makes the sheer magnitude of consumption, incarceration, military spending, etc. comprehensible to his audiences. Jordan says in a recent TED video clip that he is worried about us: “The reason that I do this, its because I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now, there’s this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We’ve lost our sense of outrage, our anger, and our grief about what’s going on in our culture right now,, what’s going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our name around the world—they’ve gone missing.”[2]
Jordan takes a lie and makes it truthful by using a series of computer scans or digital images and reproducing them to catalogue the unprecedented and mind-boggling data we’re confronted with, making the numbers of cups discarded in a single six hour period of time on airlines in America comprehensible in one gigantic photographic canvas where he uses design and references the history of art to make this data real to us. It is a lie that exposes the truth, essentially, because there is no real way to assemble that many plastic cups in a single photograph without computer-assisted technology and still have the details of the photographs be intelligible. But Jordan—who was a corporate lawyer for ten years prior to working as a full-time artist[3]-- keeps a meticulous command of the statistics and data that propel his imagery so that we are convinced of his truthfulness even as we try to see in his images where the plastic bottles repeat themselves or as we look at the succession of toothpicks trying to find where they are seamed together in the prairie they cover so completely.
The Yes Men are much more flamboyant about their lies, but have discovered and exposed essentially the exact same lack of feeling described by Jordan in their audiences. One story in “The Yes Men Fix The World” traces their invitation to represent the WTO based on their online “corrected” website found at http://www.gatt.org/. They arrived to give a presentation as representatives of the WTO, and then, ripping off Mike’s newly-purchased thrift-store suit, exposed a gold lame super-hero-style spandex suit with an inflatable phallus with a “hands free” television set that would allow corporate executives “real-tine” supervision of their international operations and instantaneous supervision of all workers in their employ. Here too the Jordan quote about feelings fits perfectly, except that this cultural “anesthesia” is not just American, but may instead be middle class and part of a multi-national corporate culture as the reaction of the Yes Men’s western European audience to their presentation was so polite they wee asked to attend a dinner where Servin was seated at the head table as an honored guest.
Jordan doesn’t want you to leave his work without thinking about what you can do as an individual to change the world, however, and in the same TED video, he says he wants his work to be seen as a catalyst for a very personal change: " How do we change? How do we change as a culture, how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of—and that is our own behavior."[4]
I think the Yes Men would agree, except that their vision is less passive. They operate a “Yes Men Lab” where NGO’s and institutions of higher education can contract with the Yes Men to address tangible corporate encroachment into their own communities. On their website now is the results from just such a collaboration:
"Students from Columbia College in Chicago came together with Greenpeace and The Yes Lab to take on theChicago coal industry. The group created an elaborate scheme to announce that a new Coal Plant was planned – but instead of going in a poor neighborhood (like the two coal plants that already exist), this one would be built in a rich one."[5]
These kinds of collaborations, the Teacher’s Guide to the Yes Men film, and their respective careers as professors tell me that Servin and Vamos are very much rooted in being teachers. They have figured out how to illustrate truth to power, as well as how to manipulate the media with such grace that that actually becomes the vehicle for spreading their message. Perhaps most important, though, is their ability to move people to action. The teachers guide actually says, “Hope explodes at the end of this film with a power that may take students out of the classroom and into the streets.”[6]
Jordan is similarly moved by students who react to his work. Although his contemplative style may be seen as encouraging a more deliberative and disciplined internalization of social change by individual viewers, his blog includes a 4-minute video on his work documenting the baby albatross’ killed by ingesting plastic and then dying where Jordan then photographed the carcasses and the pollution exposed inside them on Midway Atoll. Grade school students looked at Jordan’s photos, and then collected bottle caps (part of the very recognizable trash that kills the birds) and made a mosaic mural of a healthy albatross in flight with the caps they had brought from home. These students internalized the message in a very heartfelt way, and Jordan says in the video, “One of the leaps that’s hard to make in this work is from the despair and the kind of horror of the phenomenon out there to hope, empowerment and action…and, to see…[he falters, emotional], “and to see these kids achieving that is really powerful.”[7]
The complexity of all three of these artists’ works and their relationship to a sense of responsibility to community and to environmental and social justice move us to think, to consider, and to act. While the Yes Men’s work allows for a sense of humor and a volatility that comes from juxtaposing corporate culture with the absurd in the public spectacle, Jordan’s visualizations of data are somehow more contemplative (although one might argue that reading a publication detailing the latest Yes Men lab results might require a more contemplative mindset from a reader/viewer while at the same time arguing that Jordan’s photographs are a kind of silent public spectacle…). Both bodies of work ask us to internalize the idea that change is possible if we choose to take action to make it so.
When I walked out of the Jordan show, I threw away a paper coffee cup and a sandwich bag.
I thought about it, and in thinking about my thinking I found myself wanting to change that habit…
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