THE YES MEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE INFORMATION ... - Index of

public spectacles, and press coverage afterward. In the works of both, the spectator and the
media become just as vital to the piece as the actions of the group. The Yes Men likewise
employed similar tactics with their Bhopal hoax, in which the media coverage became integral and
inseparable from the work. In all (including the works of the Yes Men), commercial and televisual
modes of distribution are employed. As San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Christine
Hill notes, “a fundamental idea held by the first generation of video artists [and later, RTMark
and the Yes Men] was that in order to have a critical relationship with a televisual society, you
must primarily participate televisually.” 88
The Yes Men have also culled their strategies from the vast pool of political theater of the
1980s. This particular brand of social commentary is embodied in the works of Gran Fury, an
offshoot of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), an artist activist group that spread
awareness of the AIDS epidemic. In 1989 Gran Fury produced their Kissing Doesn’t Kill poster.
According to Nina Felshin, this poster “exemplifies the spectacular strategies often exploited by
the collective: it mimics the codes of capitalist pleasure and visual seduction to capture the
viewer’s attention and direct it to the AIDS crisis.” 89 Like TVTV, Ant Farm, RTMark and the
Yes Men, Gran Fury adopted an already established – and loaded – language to lure the
unsuspecting audience into absorbing their previously ignored information. Similar to RTMark’s
adoption of the mutual fund system and their use of corporate double speak (as well as the Yes
88 Quoted in Michael Rush, New Media in Late Twentieth Century Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, Inc.,
1999), 78.
89 Nina Felshin, But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art As Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, Inc., 1995), 52.
43