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Fueling the Flames
Labor and greens must join forces to stop Bush’s assault on the planet.
More African-Americans are running for governor than ever before.
Rigged elections are widespread throughout Africa, and not just in Zimbabwe.
A New Detente?
The Bush administration cozies up to China.
Disinformation follies.
Marriage proposal.
No evidence, but a Missouri inmate is facing execution.
Britain passes measures to elect more women.
Seeds of Destruction
Genetic contamination raises stakes on GMOs.
Bad Math
Pennsylvania debates are calculated to exclude Greens.
HMOs aim to stop even modest reform in its tracks.
BOOKS: Israel, the occupation and "apartheid."
Disasters in Waiting
BOOKS: Ahmed Rashid on more impending Jihad.
Play It Again, Sam
MUSIC: How multiple reissues keep record labels flush.
FILM: The moral dilemmas of Storytelling.
An interview with ®™mark's Frank Guerrero.
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March 1, 2002
The Art of Confusion
An Interview with ®™ark's Frank Guerrero
Anti-corporate saboteurs ®™ark have been causing trouble since 1993,
when they started off as an Internet bulletin board. They have grown and developed
to such an extent that they are now at the forefront of “culture jamming”—subverting
the language of corporate and advertising culture to point out what is brewing
beneath the surface. ®™ark operates somewhere in the gray area between
activism and performance art, or what Hakim Bey once referred to as “poetic
terrorism.” In These Times spoke with Frank Guerrero via e-mail to discuss what
®™ark had been up to, specifically the Voteauction.com project (“The
only election platform channelling ‘soft money’ to the democracy consumer”)
and the “Yes Men” project. The first part of this interview, in which
Guerrero discusses the group’s mission and tactics, is condensed from an
interview conducted for Sandbox Magazine #7: Art vs. State. ORIGINS OF ®™ark From looking at your Web
site (www.rtmark.com), it seems there’s a certain amount of
ambiguity about whether a specific project should be taken as a joke or a really
serious act of sabotage. A lot of the projects do use humor as a means for slipping under the radar
of social acceptability. Now just because a lot of the projects are funny doesn’t
mean that ®™ark’s mission isn’t serious. It is a serious
system that means, through a combination of real actions and theater, to criticize
and hopefully undermine the role that corporations are taking in supplanting
democratic or social processes of governments. This is our main reason for being. We feel very strongly that corporations have been slowly but surely supplanting
and subverting the processes of government that were put into place so that
the people could have some sort of say in their political and social destiny.
It seems like this is an important moment in globalization—with all these
international borders coming down—at least for capital, though not necessarily
for people. We see it as a real problem that’s boiling over. So ®™ark is a way to attack that system from within using primarily
theatrical and pedagogical means. We’re there to destabilize the system
in such a way that people might get a little entertainment and at the same time
have those projects ask a few questions of them. How did you develop from your original structure as a bulletin board? When the bulletin board went up in 1993, it was a networking tool that worked
mostly through word of mouth. But ®™ark changed and is now coming into
its own by using the Web as an open-ended networking and databasing tool. We have a database that lists basically three things: the project idea, a funding
amount and, lastly, workers. So you can come to the site and read through the
list of ideas. If you see one that you like, you can offer to sponsor the project
with some money or you could offer to perform the project. If it’s an idea,
let’s say, to change a gas tank in a production automobile so that the
gas tank can only hold two gallons of gas instead of 20, and you happen to be
working on a production line where they’re installing gas tanks, you might
volunteer your services. It’s an open-ended system, and you can come to it with money, or you can
come to it as a worker with an idea looking for money. … That’s probably
the most common thing. … People submit ideas they want to carry out themselves
but need to raise some capital to do it. So ®™ark is a facilitator? Yes, ®™ark is a facilitator, and ®™ark’s primary reason
for existing is to use the corporate veil as a way to permit people to offset
their liability for participating in these projects, many of which fall into
the gray areas of the law. … [Some] of these projects receive cease-and-desist
letters and legal attacks. As a corporate entity, ®™ark is able to take these projects and provide
a corporate umbrella for them, absorbing some of the liability and displacing
it from the workers and the funders. This is the way the business world works
anyway. If you form a corporation, your corporation can go bankrupt or, in the
case of Union Carbide, have a major avoidable accident that kills 8,000 people,
and yet the corporation stays in business despite having these crimes on the
record. We feel that in this way ®™ark can highlight what we see as
a double standard for corporations and people with the limited liability potential
of corporations. Voteauction.com One of your projects caused quite a stir during the U.S. presidential elections
last year. Voteauction.com, a site created by James Baumgartner, was described
as a project “devoted to combining the American principles of democracy
and capitalism by bringing the big money of campaigns directly to the voting
public. We provide a forum for campaign contributors and voters to come together
for free-market exchange.” The site used parody to point out that elections are influenced by the amount
of money poured into the process by large corporations. Voteauction.com was
closed by Network Solutions without any kind of notice after the Chicago Board
of Elections filed an election fraud lawsuit against the domain. The New York
State Board of Elections also told Baumgartner that they could press charges
against him. Having received this threat, Baumgartner closed his site, selling it to
Hans Bernhard, an Austrian businessman who took the site outside of U.S. jurisdiction.
What was your involvement in this project? We helped with the Voteauction launch by putting James in touch with a worker
(a publicist who could help him get the word out), and by procuring a small
investment to help him pay for some of his hosting costs and phone bills. …
Later on, when James was under attack, we helped negotiate the sale of the site
to ubermorgen.com in Austria. To what extent was this intended to be a parody? It seems like some well-meaning
people took it at face value, as a genuine subversion of the electoral process. Many famous satires have been taken seriously by some of the public. Even things
like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” despite being completely unbelievable,
made people genuinely angry about eating babies. … But perhaps the lesson
here is that even something as outrageous as suggesting babies as food isn’t
that outrageous, given the past relationship between the English government
and the Irish, and the circumstances of the potato famine. And in the case of
Voteauction, it really isn’t that outrageous for a company to be selling
votes, given the way that elections work in this country today. Was the project a success? It was extremely successful because it was seen by millions of people and became
a subject of public debate around the world. I think in many of those news stories
it successfully demonstrated just how corrupt our so-called democracy has become. YES MEN AT WTO The Yes Men at WTO is another fine example of creating confusion and certainly
one of ®™ark’s funniest projects. It is summarized on the ®™ark
site: “In early 2000, ®™ark transferred Gatt.org—which people
sometimes mistake for the World Trade Organization's official Web site—to
a group of impostors known as the Yes Men. ... In May 2000, the Yes Men received
an e-mail inviting Mike Moore, Director-General of the WTO, to discuss the WTO
at a conference on international trade matters [hosted by the Center for International
Legal Studies in Salzburg, Austria]. The Yes Men decided to do the ethical thing
… and to try their best to fulfill the request. In late October, one Dr.
Andreas Bichlbauer—the substitute “Moore” decided to send—spoke
at the conference. His lecture described the WTO's ideas and ultimate aims in
terms that were horrifyingly stark—suggesting, for example, the replacement
of inefficient democratic institutions like elections with private-sector solutions
like an Internet startup selling votes to the highest corporate bidder. None
of the lawyers in attendance expressed dismay at Dr. Bichlbauer's proposals.” The only people who seemed to react to Bichlbauer’s outlandish remarks
were some Italian delegates who were offended by his statement concerning the
impossibility of a merger between KLM and Alitalia due to the basic laziness
of the Italian worker. Posted on the ®™ark site is a hysterically comical series of letters
and e-mail correspondence between Dr. Bichlbauer, Professor Campbell (the conference
organizer), “Mike Moore” and his administrative assistant, Alice Foley.
Through the series of letters, memos and e-mails, we see the farce unfold. The whole thing really goes over the top when the Yes Men prolong the hoax
by announcing that their representative has been “pied,” contracting
a grave illness from a bacterial infection. (Was the pie intentionally poisoned?
Possibly by an offended Italian delegate?) Dr. Bichlbauer is promptly disposed
of and a memorial service announced. The hoax is revealed as messages expressing
both sadness and confusion pour in. Finally, a conversation takes place concerning
the point of the exercise. So what was the point? The Yes Men use affirmation to make their point. It is an unusual rhetorical
strategy, almost a reverse-psychology approach. Instead of debating their opponents,
they assume their opponents’ identities and enthusiastically affirm their
adversaries’ beliefs. It’s an unorthodox approach, but hardly new
or original. In fact, I think something like Swift's “Modest Proposal”
also falls into this category, in a sense. The point of this Salzburg action was to enhance the legibility of the WTO’s
policies. To that end, the Yes Men gave a kind of uncensored version of the
WTO’s positions. … There was an audience of legal experts who basically
did not object to Andreas Bichlbauer (real name: Andy Bichlbaum) explaining
that the WTO believed in doing away with all cultural differences (for example,
siestas) that get in the way of free trade. Since the expert audience agreed that Voteauction.com was a model for making
elections more efficient and opening new markets, it appears that the Yes Men
failed to cause any revelations at the event. However, clearly this should be
a wake-up call to all of us who care about our votes … or any kind of representative
government reflecting social interests. So why did Bichlbauer's offensive remarks not cause a stir? I think it reveals that belief in late capitalism runs so deep that even an
audience of specialists in trade and law refuse to see a fundamentally antisocial,
if not fascist, message in the text. When that happens, people can only be blind
to their complicity in an oppressive system. CONFUSION Although you claim to use pedagogical means, it seems that creating confusion
is one of your preferred tactics, and this is one of the recurrent criticisms
made of your methods. Don't you think that this might just result in preaching
to the converted and antagonizing the other side, further polarizing the debate?
®™ark is one of only a few organizations who try to support these
bizarre projects, so I think that is why we become known for confusion. …
Try to find a “legitimate” funding organization interested in the
value of confusing people, and I think the list will be pretty small. And yet,
if we sample history, I think we will see that confusion is a very important
aspect of human communication, one that is as useful and prevalent as a more
didactic approach. You attack corporations and large international organizations, yet you get
reviewed in Artforum. Are you artists, activists, anarchists or a little of
all three? Do you care how people perceive you? All of the above. Most importantly, we are people. We see all media outlets
as potential sites for communication and dialogue to a wider audience. …
If we end up in art mags, so be it. We also like to be able to express ourselves
in business publications, sports rags, etc. We do care about how people perceive
us; we hope that through ongoing outreach we can contribute to the growing movement
against unfettered global capitalism. Sylvie Myerson is the editor of Sandbox Magazine, a nonprofit arts magazine whose forthcoming issue is titled “Incarceration & Surveillance.” She can be reached at sandbox@echonyc.com |
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