Stepping up to Carriage Trade’s second-floor glass doors, you’ll see a still from a BBC broadcast with text reading: “Dow accepts full responsibility.” It’s meant to feel like walking into a TV, passing through a mediated image. Thus begins a career survey of the Yes Men (Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) who have spent decades culture jamming, pranking, protesting, and infiltrating the highest echelons of global neoliberal governance, from the World Trade Organization to Shell Corporation to the Republican National Convention. This blown-up image (Dow Does the Right Thing, 2004), perhaps their most recognizable work, shows them live on air as spokespersons for Dow Chemical, publicly pledging massive reparations to victims of the 1984 Union Carbide pesticide plant disaster in India.

Most interesting for me is the historical context to their development present in ephemera. Rather than typecasting them as maestros of the “parafictional,” the show begins from their inception during the alter-globalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, from which many of today’s street tactics and autonomous media projects emerged. Before they were the Yes Men, Vamos was part of the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), which swapped the voice boxes of three hundred talking GI Joes and Barbies on store shelves, while Servin worked as a developer on 1996 video game SimCopter, sneaking unauthorized gay characters into the Sims universe. They met one another through a mutual friend, formed ®™ark, and executed several ambitious actions, such as building a fake George W. Bush campaign website, egging on the war criminal qua painter to foreshadow the Patriot Act on live TV: “There ought to be limits to freedom.” Reminding gallery visitors of their militancy, as discourse on “pranks” is often depoliticizing, in Genoa during the 2001 Group of Eight protests, they distributed mirrors to focus sunlight into the eyes of rampaging police (Archimedes Project, 2001).

There has been much discussion over the past two decades about whether critical art can be materially effective while still being complicit with institutional frameworks. For more than twenty years, the Yes Men have sidestepped this question, itself determined by liberal premises of social change. The materials assembled at Carriage Trade are an entryway to strategies that are important tools in a wider arsenal, a diversity of tactics if you will. The exhibition amounts to more than just an archive—it is a toolbox for intervening in the dissemination of information, inviting repetition and escalation for these worrisome and ever more mediated times.

— Andreas Petrossiants