Movers and Shakers: The 40 Most Exciting Soulful Artists of 2003

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The Yes Men merry global pranksters
These anonymous jokers elevate political protest to an art. They?ve constructed a Web site that looks just like the World Trade Organization?s, and it attracts unsuspecting speaking invitations and media inquiries?engagements the impostors happily accept. Once they?re on stage at, say, an international legal conference in Germany, or a textiles convention in Finland, the Yes Men deliver a free-market parody presentation that slowly spirals into the absurd.
At the textile conference, for instance, faux-WTO pundit ?Hank Hardy Unruh? tore off his business suit to reveal a superhero leotard with a silky golden phallus fitted with a video screen: He claimed it was a device to monitor and control worker productivity. At another engagement, ?Kinnithrung Sprat? announced a joint venture with McDonald?s to feed the Third World with ?recycled? (that is, previously eaten) Big Macs. The real humor? The corporate types in the audience are usually slow to get the joke. www.theyesmen.org?JOSEPH HART

Dennis Zacek
way-off-broadway star
Victory Gardens Theater is a tiny, cramped storefront, like scores of other nonprofit theaters scattered throughout Chicago. But VG, as it?s known, packs a Broadway-size punch. Presenting only original plays by local playwrights, it has established a national and even international reputation. Winner of the 2001 Tony as the best regional theater in America, it?s one of the favorite stages of Julie Harris, queen of American actresses, with six Tonys to her credit.
Artistic director Dennis Zacek, along with and managing director Marcelle McVay, (his wife), have defined VG as a playwright?s theater, maintaining a resident company of writers and premiering work like Steven Carter?s Pecong (which was later done in San Francisco and London) and James Sherman?s Beau Jest, which had a record-breaking New York run and productions in eight foreign countries. In an age of gimmicky megaproductions of yesterday?s hits, Zacek keeps his minuscule Midwestern stage lively with the best work of new voices. www.victorygardens.org ?JON SPAYDE

V?rttin? Karelian
Carolers
Karelia, a region of southeastern Finland mostly gobbled by the Soviets during World War II, is about as far off the pop music map as you can get. But it?s the point of departure for one of the world?s
most dynamic vocal groups, V?rttin??a Helsinki-based group that adapts folk songs and chants of Karelian village women and other Finns into an enchanting musical experience. In rousing harmony with touches of ancient dissonance, the women of Varttina belt out these tunes (many of which recount and relish the foibles of men) along with equally exciting original material. You don?t need to know a lick of Finnish to feel the power of these old musical traditions made fresh again. Seleniko (North Side)
?JAY WALLJASPER

Mark Napier Web Wonder
Images from the official White House Web site fragment and mix themselves up with pieces of a site about ocean coral. A virtual collage workshop gives you funny and grotesque body parts to arrange into your own version of a human being. Click your mouse on potatoland.org, the online studio of New York?based Internet artist Mark Napier, and enter a playful paradox. In a virtual world where there is no physical object to touch, Napier creates art works that offer the viewer intimate interaction?art that responds to us with almost infinite changes. A software designer by profession and painter by passion, Napier marries his artistic impulses with his bread and butter to create electronic art. Included in the Web art section of the prestigious Whitney Biennial art show last year, Napier is one of the most enjoyable and accessible practitioners in an art subculture that has a tendency to be super-serious and hypertechnical. Another is Ben Benjamin, whose fantastically rich site?www.superbad.com?is a bottomless well of graphic design high jinks. You can find a whole galaxy of Web art sites, arranged by type and by the date they were first put up, at www.whitney.org/
artport/commissions/idealine/Idealine.html. ?ELIZABETH LARSEN

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