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Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics 281
paradoxical temptations for artists is to use the cooperative Weld of the event
to directly represent the globalized state—to show its true face, or to become
its distorted mirror. This is what the Yes Men have done, by launching a
satirical mirror-site—gatt.org—as a way to pass themselves off as representatives
of the World Trade Organization (WTO). 20 Appearing before a lawyer’s
conference in Austria, on a British TV news show, at a textile industry convention
in Finland, or at an accountant’s congress in Australia, always at
the invitation of unsuspecting functionaries, the Yes Men reverse the usual
activist’s position of “speaking truth to power.” They speak the truth of power,
by complying with it, assenting to it, overidentifying with it, exaggerating
and amplifying its basic tenets, so as to reveal the contradictions, the gross
injustices. And in this way, they bring the critical distance of art into the
closest possible contact with political life. By miming corporate codes with
precise and sophisticated writing, and by inWltrating the virtual and real locations
of transnational institutions, they carry out what Fredric Jameson called
for long ago: the “cognitive mapping” of “the great global multinational and
decentered communicational network in which we Wnd ourselves caught as
individual subjects.” 21 So doing, they act like a miniaturized version of the
counterglobalization movements themselves, whose participants have restlessly
“mapped out” the shifting geography of transnational power with their
feet. But the Yes Men are very much part of those movements; they are immersed
in the world of punctual collaboration and deviant appropriation of
professional skills for the creation of the political event. The collaborative
process is clearly symbolized by the project-table drawn up by their earlier
avatar, ®ark, which lists interventionist ideas and the material and human
resources needed to carry them out; readers are invited to contribute time,
money, equipment, or information, or to propose a project of their own. 22
Bureau d’Etudes is another artists’ group that has followed the
mapping impulse to the point of producing a full-Xedged representation of
tremendously complex transnational power structures, which they call “World
Government.” 23 They carry out “open-source intelligence,” where the information
is freely available for anyone willing to do the research. The artistic
aspect of their project lies in the graphic design, the iconic invention, but
also in the experimental audacity of the hypotheses they develop, which try
to show the impact of farXung decision-making hierarchies on bare life. Like
the Yes Men, they engage in multiple collaborations, exchanging knowledge,
participating in campaigns, distributing their work for free, either in the form
of paper copies or over the Internet. And like many contemporary artistactivists,
they are extremely dubious about the kind of distribution offered
by museums; they only appear to consider their own production signiWcant
when it becomes part of alternative social assemblages, or more precisely, of