GETTING TO “YES!”
Interview by Nathan Keene
Mike Bonanno is by trade a man of many identities—an international one, no less. Known to friends as Igor Vamos, Mike began his career of subterfuge at a point he can’t quite put his finger on. All he knows is that it’s gone from childhood strolls through local shopping malls in a suitcase; via coming of age with a Vice Presidential salute to Dan Quayle in red, white and blue vomit; to where he is now: one half of satirical prankster duo The Yes Men. There are two feature length documentaries; there are major arts grants from prestigious foundations—and best of all, a continuous blast of publicity exposing the moral putridity behind one gleaming corporate façade after another.
On a clammy afternoon shortly after the release of their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, Mike and his cohort, known publicly only as Andy Bichlbaum, arrive at a café off New York’s Union Square, breathless after a hurried bike ride from their Village crash space. As usual these days, they’ve been putting out fires (“Good fires!” Mike assures). Before long, duty calls Andy back into the drizzle. Mike stays behind to deliberate on avant-gardism, the anti-commodity, and the finer points of identity restoration.
PowerHouse Projects (PHP): Is it still Andy? I never know. I feel like you’re these international men of mystery.
Andy Bichlbaum (AB): Right. I think Andy’s better.
PHP: So Andy Bichlbaum it is, and Mike Bonanno is a more stable kind of name—
[The Yes Men chuckle coyly.]
We were just talking the other night with old friends of Mike’s who had shown up [to the film opening], about how we always knew Mike as Igor Vamos, and what a strange set-shift it is to call him Mike as a member of the Yes Men, and then elsewhere, still Igor.
Mike Bonanno (MB): I’ve got a Mike on Facebook, too, but it’s like people who knew you before—like some people know Andy as Ray. Like from a previous life.
PHP: And is it starting to feel like a previous life now, like The Yes Men is starting to subsume everything? I mean, the last time I saw you, you were both going pretty hard, and now you’re just like—
MB: Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. Whatever your name is, you get used to it. And especially you get used to it if you spend 12 hours a day being that person.
PHP: So, I wanted to go back a bit to the ‘80s and Portland Oregon. I remember people raving about this thing that you, Mike, and some other people had done to welcome Dan Quayle to town.
MB: It was a fundraiser for [Oregon’s senior Senator] Bob Packwood, which was being hosted by Dan Quayle. We vomited in red, white and blue, and we called it Reverse Peristalsis Painting. It was good fun! Definitely.
PHP: But it was definitely conceived as an art action?
MB: Yeah, I mean, it was, you know—it was color—[laughter]—color field painting. Just not with a brush.
PHP: Splatter painting, I guess you could call it
MB: Yeah!
PHP:I also remember Portland, which had divided bitterly over renaming a street for Martin Luther King, awakening one morning to find its main downtown arterial rechristened Malcolm X St. down to the last freeway exit; of course morning talk was swamped with irate calls, and so on. So you’ve been doing this stuff since you were a whipper-snapper, haven’t you?
MB: Since the late ‘80s, yeah. I think those early projects as a college student in Portland were encouraging mainly because there were local writers who decided to pick up on it—Randy Gragg at the Oregonian—and gave it a lot of ink. So that not only the people who witnessed it got to enjoy it, but it then took on a life of its own in the media. That was inspiring because I saw that it was possible to sort of speak at a volume that you normally weren’t able to as an individual activist. Or as an individual artist.
