TRC 2-50 contributor Gordon Winiemko writes, in his essay Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes: I suppose there must have been a time when “performance art” seemed new or fresh. Still, it’s hard for me to understand how anyone could do a performance, as in “Now I will perform for you,” when everything is already theater, everything is permeated by the spectacle – in the face of which what makes sense to me as a strategy is not performance, but performative action.
The other term that seems relevant is the increasingly familiar “intervention.” A theater or art space is the natural, expected venue for one to whip out a golden, inflatable, phallus; much less so a “Textiles of the Future” conference in Finland. Into the theatre of commerce, the Yes Men inserted the theater of the absurd. Or was it cruelty?
When the conference organizers mistook two artists’ mock WTO/GATT website as real, the artists decided to attend, masquerading as WTO representatives. They gave a presentation highlighting the gold phallic suit as a high-tech means to remotely monitor and control “workers” in third world nations. The attendees bought it wholesale, and the Yes Men were born.
Of course, the absurd could be said to be already a component of commerce, but this bit of art-as-activism (or is it activism-as-art?) – popularized by both the recent documentary on the Yes Men and the Mass MOCA show “The Interventionists” – strikes me as nevertheless more potent than the programmatic experience of the proscenium arch or art gallery.
other islands in this text-fed stream
