Karma chameleons

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno understand it’s hard out there for a pimp. So to help sweatshop owners manage physically abused and grossly underpaid employees overseas, the duo better known as the Yes Men created the Management Leisure Suit. The gold spandex one-piece outfit sports a three-foot inflatable phallus equipped with a built-in television screen, which allows a bigwig wearer in the Big Apple to oversee his minions remotely. Through October 23, the suit stands in fully erect glory in Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery (1104 S Wabash Ave) as part of the pair’s new exhibit, “Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with the Yes Men.”

When they unveiled the Management Leisure Suit in 2001, Bichlbaum and Bonanno (whose real names are Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, respectively) posed as World Trade Organization employees trying to sell their magnificent spy schlong at a major international conference. Based in New York, the Yes Men have made a name for themselves as performance artists and activists by impersonating representatives from controversial corporations and agencies—and making humiliating fake public statements on their behalf, a practice they call “identity correction.”

The fortysomething Bichlbaum and Bonanno consider themselves merely the public faces of the Yes Men, which encompasses a network of activists operating mostly in secret. The pair began carrying out socially conscious guerrilla actions in the ’90s, years before they were introduced by a mutual friend.

During the past 12 years, the Yes Men have announced an ExxonMobil initiative to turn environmental-disaster victims into fuel, unveiled a McDonald’s campaign to solve global hunger by feeding starving populations hamburgers injected with post-consumer waste, and told the BBC that Dow Chemical would assume full responsibility for a 1984 pesticide plant explosion in Bhopal, India, which killed more than 16,000 and left 120,000 with permanent injuries, according to Bonanno. (Amnesty International and Greenpeace estimate the death toll at 20,000.)

“What we do is merely tell the truth, either according to how a corporation sees it or what’s right on behalf of humanity,” Bonanno explains by phone. “We hope to expose these organizations for the absurd criminals they really are and bring more press [to] issues that had been swept under the rug.”

Curated by Astria Suparak, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery, “Keep It Slick” offers a guide to orchestrating your own identity-correction events as well as an homage to past Yes Men pranks. The exhibition includes a parody issue of The New York Times, which only reports good news, videos of Yes Men speeches, instructions for creating fake ID badges and a detailed description of how to organize a false ad campaign.

“One of our central goals this year is to encourage the intersection of art and activism,” Glass Curtain director Neysa Page-Lieberman says. “This exhibit speaks so well to the college’s mission of creating change.”

How much change the Yes Men have created is unclear, however. While the fake announcement from Dow Chemical gained significant media attention, it didn’t yield any additional compensation for Bhopal victims. It did attract a flurry of outrage. A reporter from England’s Channel 4 told Bichlbaum the stunt was “a pretty cruel trick to play on the people of Bhopal” because it gave the victims false hope. “We always get that criticism, but we’ve found that it’s unfounded,” Bonanno says. “The actual victims of tragedies like Bhopal say, ‘We know who is abusing us and it’s not these other activists.’”

The group has had a few victories. On October 19, 2009, Bichlbaum, impersonating a representative from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (CoC), announced the CoC would stop opposing Congress’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. A hailstorm of media attention followed the Yes Men’s action. Two weeks later, the CoC did send a letter to the U.S. Senate affirming its willingness to work toward ending climate change. “We can’t claim the credit, but we did feel like that stunt was a success,” Bonanno says. “Doing things the way we do is not for everyone, nor should it be. It’s not the best way to be an activist, it’s just the way that we enjoy being critical.”

Bonanno and Bichlbaum will attend the “Keep It Slick” reception at Glass Curtain Gallery Thursday 23, 5–7pm.

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