Packard Jennings’ work ranges from instructional pamphlets, altered billboards, ad-hoc installations, action figures, lottery tickets, prototype PEZ-dispensers, and performative interventions in public space. Deftly combining activist techniques, humor, and a bold visual style, his work often simultaneously infiltrates and critiques the worlds of mass-consumerism and mega-corporations. His recent collaboration with Steve Lambert, Wish You Were Here! Postcards from Our Awesome Future, was a series of giant posters installed in kiosks in downtown San Francisco that re-imagine the city without the pesky limitations of bureaucracy, politics, and physics. Jennings’ art has been published in Adbusters, Playboy, Scene Missing, New Art Examiner, and Atomica. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Phoenix. Jennings lives and works in Oakland, CA.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

PJ: My first attempt at doing a comic book was in the fifth grade. I was trying to knock off Hergé. My parents kept a stack of Tintin books in the house. The negative feedback from my peers was difficult for me and I didn’t try again for years. Critics can be cruel. Every time I read a great comic I have a renewed affection for the form and make another attempt at drawing my own. My “Day at the Mall” pamphlet in 2004 was the first comic I actually completed. This is where I found my preferred form, which involves a small-scale story that’s made for a specific purpose or action in the real world. The Mall pamphlet was propaganda put into products at the mall. I think another big moment for me in my progression in comics, and drawing in general, was the discovery of illustrating with a brush, which gives the illustration much more life and character. I grilled Dan Clowes about what he used and he was very generous with his time and let me know what specific mediums he used. I think my love for comics also comes from being a huge movie lover. I watch a ridiculous number of films. I wrote a screenplay last year. Comics allow me to tell as big a story as I want. It’s a movie done on a tiny budget.

In 2005, you created Bible Stickers with a warning against creationism for anyone to adhere to the inside of motel-room bibles. And your Creative Dissent Workstation is a comprehensive instructional resource for remixing and disseminating subversive messages. Do you see your work as mobilizing, and perhaps defining, a distributed army of “culture jammers”? Are you providing tools for people to resist dominant power structures?

PJ: I’m very interested in the power of creative dissent. I’m constantly searching for ways to prod and question our cultural and political systems. I try a lot of different methods to effectively provoke thought, challenge authority, and empower others and myself. My interest in this subversive method of working is in large part due to the times that we live in. The effectiveness of peaceful protest in America is all but dead (I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this point), the recent protests against Clean Coal in DC being an exception. The media is as responsible for this change as anyone. I think it is important to voice your dissent, but how can we do it in a way that will captivate and inspire people? Does it require violence? What are other ways can we go about it? I'm exploring that territory with much of my work. I specialize in making prototypes of actions that can be done on a large scale. Downloadable projects from my site are one way to allow for a dissemination of ideas. I’m expanding this DIY template aspect of my work, including a dedicated DIY website, which should be launched in the fall of 2009. It is a major focus for me this year.

This kind of work has the potential to impact any number of random individuals: a shopper who picks up one of your “shopdropped” anarchist action figures in a Wal-Mart, or an office-worker who opens a returned postage-paid envelope to find one of your “Business Reply Pamphlets,” a manual for corporate revolution. How do you think about the “audience” or “participants” for your work? How does your practice of public interventions interface with your more formal gallery exhibitions?

PJ: That is a whole lot of question. The gallery shows are mostly documentation of actions and other artwork that does not have a life in the public realm (such as animations and videos.) In my last solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, I had the Creative Dissent Workstation as part of the show. It allowed visitors to participate in one of five projects and post their results on the wall. Providing a framework for these small, rebellious acts allows for a much broader range of people to take part. I’ve found that it sparks some core radicalism in people that you wouldn’t expect. Ideally, the participants or audiences experience a fissure with our accepted relationship with authority and commerce. Perhaps they begin to create their own small subversions.

How do you see your work’s relationship to the aims and viral tactics of other “culture jamming” groups, such as RTMark or the Yes Men?

PJ: I altered billboards for years before I learned that there were dedicated groups who had been doing it consistently since the 70s. I was in a billboard alteration show at CBGB’s with Billboard Liberation and Ron English in 1997. It was pretty humbling for me. I find out about these groups from peers who see my work and turn me on to others who are like-minded. I found out about RTMark and the Barbie Liberation Front when I was doing my “shopdropping” Wal-Mart Project in 1999. A fellow grad student in western New York saw what I was doing and told me I had to check them out. Amazing work. I contacted them and we exchanged videos. I went on to work with the Yes Men (who grew out of RTMark) a few times over the years, most recently on the New York Times spoof. It has been great to connect with the people who share my interests and goals. That is, people who use humor and creative dissent, with ambivalence for the legality of the act, to provoke thought and, hopefully, action.

You’ve been trained in painting, glass blowing, and animation. When did you first decide to adopt the visual language of instructional brochures (like airplane safety guides) and government propaganda? There’s something inherently powerful about taking a set of tools for visual communication (and perhaps coercion) and turning them back on themselves to issue a call for revolution. What motivated you to work in this way?

PJ: There is something very gratifying about using an existing structure to undermine that very structure. It provides a format that is already readable and accessible to the general public. I started figuring this out with my early billboard work from ‘95-‘98 and have continued to build on the tactic. It is a staple of “culture jamming,” which I share a lot of strategy with, but I don’t hold myself rigidly to any particular model or tactic.

I came up with using an instructional format in 2004 when I was invited to participate in a show at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. The show, Paper Bullets, was about “Special Ops” leaflets. These are little instructional propaganda pamphlets that are dropped by one army onto another army or citizenry during warfare. The gallery had access to a collection of hundreds of these leaflets from all over the world. They ranged from descriptions on how Iraqis should surrender for food and luxuries to leaflets that were letters from the Viet Cong that were directed at black soldiers, supposedly written by a black soldier, using phrases like “Why do we destroy their hamlets?” We got to look at this collection long in advance of the show before making our work. I also started to think about Jack Chick comics (the scary little Christian pamphlets) and how they are left in phone booths and other random public spaces. I was trying to figure out how I could put this strategy to use in my struggle against consumerism and I came up with my “Day at the Mall” pamphlets, which were put inside products at the mall and depicted the destructive conversion of a mall into an anarcho-primitivist Eden.

Something that seems to tie all of your work together, no matter how subversive and dark it may seem, is a sense of humor—a playful skepticism about the messages that saturate our society. Is humor an important part of your toolbox as an artist and activist?

PJ: Humor is not only an inherent part of who I am, but it is also an invaluable tool in making successful political art and activism. People put up a guard against anything overtly political. They make a snap decision of weather they agree or not and are unlikely to be swayed from their stance. The trick is to delay the decisive moment until after they are engaged. You want to reach the people that don’t automatically agree with you. If you can make them laugh and enjoy themselves before the content seeps in, then they are on less sure footing and may give your ideas some consideration, which is what I shoot for. It would also be very depressing without the humor.

Many of your works tell the story of chaos and destruction, a rise in entropy which sometimes ushers in a post-apocalyptic return to nature. In Business Reply Pamphlet (2006), for instance, we see a workplace devolve into a community of hunter-gatherers living in a broken office partially reclaimed by trees. It’s hard to tell if this is a utopian or dystopian future. Are these hopeful predictions, dire warnings, or something else entirely? Do you want these works to be read as a kind of environmental activism?

PJ: I think this work resonates with people because we all wonder, at one time or another, “what if we could tear all of this down and just start over.” I think it is important to have thought experiments in order to loosen up our thinking about what is possible. What do we really want? A return to primitive living has great appeal at a time when our luxuries are destroying us. Our current lifestyle is unsustainable. We need to open our minds and radically rethink the way we live. Naked, I propose.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

PJ: I’m always interested in the personal psychology and political policy that leads us to the decisions that we make as a civilization. I tend to focus on those actions that impact people and the environment in negative ways. I’m particularly concerned about global warming and the great oceanic “garbage patch gyres,” which are the subject of this comic. The volume of plastic in the ocean (and inside fish) is staggering and continues to grow at an alarming rate. Considering how much damage plastic has done in the short time it has been around, I believe it has the potential to be our next doomsday scenario if we somehow adapt to or dodge global warming. The shocking thing is how few people I talk to know about it. Basically, there are giant swirling ocean currents collecting millions of pounds of plastic. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is made up of two of the gyres combined, is twice the size of Texas. The ocean currents flow in such a way as to collect our plastic in these giant eddies. Sorry to be the one to tell you.

Here is one of the many descriptions you can find on the web:
science.howstuffworks.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch.htm