Shopdropping With Packard Jennings: Political Art Interventions Can Be Fun(ny)

art by Packard Jennings
One of my biggest motivations for making art is delving into things which I feel are disturbingly repulsive...
—Packard Jennings

I have ambivalent feelings toward peaceful protest as of late, and likewise what passes for self-described political artwork. By political artwork I’m speaking of straightjackets made out of American flags and recreations of the White House made out of feces. In general, artwork this heavy-handed might buy an artist admittance into a clubhouse of other like-minded artists—and really, I’m sure they’re all feeling each other, and that’s super for them—but it falls flat in regards to intent: It doesn’t communicate to an audience that doesn’t already agree with the artist, and it doesn’t forward any conversation about how, or even why, we should approach current social and political problems. Artwork this political and self-satisfied makes me want to become apolitical.

This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in activism or art’s ability to address social or political content, but it’s a fine line to walk—to create political artwork that’s not too didactic, but also not so ambiguous that it fails to communicate to a broad audience. The political artworks (and forms of activism) I appreciate are often built from small, humble gestures, or grounded in specific locations. However, it’s rare that I run across politicized artwork that doesn’t make me feel like I’m suffering through someone else’s self-satisfied lecture, and rarer still that I run across a piece of artwork that might make both me and my super-Republican family bust a gut.

Coming to a Bus Stop Near You

Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland is a Vegas strip of offensive billboards and bus-stop ads. For his latest project, Bus Project Advertising (2006), Oakland-based artist Packard Jennings has decided to focus on replacing bus-stop ads with his own alternative designs. With help from Steve Lambert of the Anti-Advertising Agency, 22 bus benches in Oakland were targeted as potential sites, and surveys were given to residents within a one-block radius of the benches to determine what types of bus advertisements they were most concerned with, and likewise, what the subject matter of the covertly installed replacement images would be.

To encourage residents to fill out the survey, Jennings would stop people in the neighborhood and try to talk to them, with some interesting results. “People at first would be like ‘I don’t have any problems with them, I don’t mind...’ and then once you started talking to them, everyone just has all these opinions... everybody hates [the ads].”

Replacing the ads with more images became the most difficult part of the project for Jennings. “Because of the nature of the project, I really didn’t want to make satirical advertisements; I wanted to somehow not just do a commentary on ads, but nullify [them] ... which is really hard.”

For the bench that deals with saturation and proliferation of advertising, Jennings has chosen to replace the original ad with a hand-drawn image of a green meadow with a mountain behind it. His rendering looks a bit psychedelic and disconcerting, because of the neon colors and graphic, cartoony nature of the drawing. Nothing about this image is terribly out of the ordinary, but placed in the context of a bus bench in Oakland with no explanation for the viewer, it seems warped and comes off a bit deadpan. Some of the bus images (one features black astronauts floating in outer space, another presents burqa-adorned women picnicking in a scenic park) are more or less effective at addressing concerns about advertising, but all are an admirable attempt to remain somewhat ambiguous while not alienating the true audience of the project—the residents who live around the benches.

Made by Children, for Children

One of my first encounters with Jennings’ work was in a show at the now-defunct Pond Gallery in San Francisco called Shopdropping. The show focused on art objects that were created as doppelgängers to mass-produced commodities, often with the intent of being placed in actual stores, a sort of “reverse shoplifting” technique. Jennings’ pieces were surreptitiously placed in Wal-Mart stores around western New York and Minnesota.

One piece on display in the show, “Il Duce Action Figure” (2000), was a detailed Benito Mussolini action figure, complete with Wal-Martesque packaging (the back of which advertises other figures in the series, including Pope John Paul II and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and features the line “made by children, for children” in tiny print). On display with the piece was a receipt for its purchase, and a five-minute video clip (recorded via hidden camera) documenting the artist’s attempt to purchase the Mussolini at Wal-Mart. (It was finally sold to him for five dollars.)

A second Jennings work (not present at that show) entitled “Fallen Rapper Series: Prototypes” (2001), similarly documents the artist’s attempt to pitch a line of Pez candy dispensers depicting Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G.) to Pez Candy Inc., and can be found on his website (centennialsociety.com) complete with a series of earnest and increasingly ridiculous letters he sent to the company over the course of two years.

Both of these projects, along with the bus-stop ads, are not exactly earth-shattering acts of activism—but they raise questions, and more importantly, address a particular audience, one that may never set foot inside a more traditional commercial gallery. Jennings fully understands this, even though he doubts the impact such a small gesture can have. “I would definitely say that I’m not making any sort of large change... but at least I know that maybe there are a couple hundred people who will never shop at Wal-Mart again because of my Wal-Mart projects.” The reason that these art pieces work, for me and maybe for those ex-Wal-Mart shoppers as well, might have something to do with the fact that they’re almost too funny to be taken seriously.

Sophisticated Slapstick

Despite having his work criticized for being overly “sophomoric and slapstick,” Jennings understands that if you’re going to make interactive art for the public realm, you have to find a way to make people comfortable engaging with the work. He recognizes that “humor is a very powerful tool... I think it’s really hard to make overtly political work without turning people off, or being overly didactic or heavy-handed... humor provides an entry point.

“In general, [humor] really has pretty amazing properties in artwork; you can talk about very serious issues and people will still listen to you. ... It lowers the viewer’s guard and actually encourages conversation where people at first are just kind of laughing.” Jennings’ work is sophomoric and slapstick, so much so that it almost seems out of place in a gallery. However, his work functions differently in the gallery space than in public—in effect it’s presented in a more serious manner. It would be too easy to dismiss his public installations and interventions as sophomoric, when it’s their irreverent nature that makes them accessible to a broader audience. But, just as comedians are not taken as seriously as actors, so too Jennings’ pieces may not be taken seriously as artwork. And with all the self-regard and inaccessibility often associated with the ‘A’rt world, that actually makes his work seem like a necessarily light-hearted dose of activism.

Packard Jennings’ work will be on view at the Illegal Art Show,ng August 28 in Portland, Oregon, and online at centennialsociety.com. If you’d like to lend a hand, he needs business reply envelopes for his current office pamphlet project.

Tara Goe made fake greeting cards and placed them in local drugstores after getting inspired by the Shopdropping show.