| One Nation Under Media Art professor Randall Packer tackles politics with multimedia BY MATT GETTY 
Photo by Jeff Watts
America is dead. Randall Packer buried it about a year ago. Not Randall Packer the AU multimedia professor, but Randall Packer the secretary-at-large of the U.S. Department of Art and Technology. He laid the nation to rest beneath an eight-by-five-foot mound of dirt studded with six TVs running clips of televangelists, White House press conferences, and The O’Reilly Factor. This week he’ll deliver America’s eulogy, but the words won’t be his. They’ll come from President Bush’s post–9/11 speech cut and pasted into a chillingly bureaucratic account of the nation’s decline.  Courtesy of Randall Packer
Packer’s America’s Grave will appear at Multimediale: Capturing the Capital (www.multimedialedc.org) this weekend.
Courtesy of Randall Packer
Above, an “official” photo of Packer as the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Art and Technology, complete with the Capitol dome and the department’s seal. Below, through the magic of Photoshop, Packer transformed the U.S. Department of the Interior building into his headquarters.
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Confused? That’s exactly what Packer wants. Not Packer the secretary-at-large this time, but Packer the AU multimedia professor and artist. His latest multimedia works, America’s Grave and Eulogy for the Nation, which appear in the Multimediale festival cosponsored by AU this week, mix political reality with dark fantasy to create an artistic statement that’s as disorienting as it is distinctly Washington. “I’m interested in the relationship between politics and art because both are concerned with using media and illusion to create an ideology,” he explains. “I’m trying to blur the line between the politician and the artist.” Having buried the nation, toured the Bible belt as the head of a government agency that doesn’t exist, remixed presidential speeches with a Richard Wagner opera, and photoshopped himself into the Oval Office, Packer has danced all over that line in an ongoing multimedia art project titled “A Season in Hell.” But as outlandish as the art might seem, Packer doesn’t see it as that far removed from what actually goes on in the nation’s capital. To see his point, you need only trace the story of the country’s death back to its origin, Packer’s move from California to D.C. eight years ago. Standing on the National Mall one afternoon, Packer looked from the Washington Monument to the Capitol dome, to the government buildings thronging him on either side, and it hit him. D.C. is more than the nation’s capital—it’s the nation’s set. “I think that anyone who comes here from California can’t help but look at D.C. as a kind of movie set for America,” says Packer. “People come here from all over the world to get a snapshot of everything that is America. All of its ideas and ideologies . . . the whole mythmaking apparatus is constructed right here.” The problem, according to Packer, is that artists—the county’s most qualified mythmakers—have had little to do with that apparatus. “If you go to Europe, artists play a much more important role,” says Packer. “You see sculptures in public monuments created by artists all over European cities, whereas in Washington, even the Vietnam memorial, which is a wonderful example of that, isn’t really seen as a work of art.” That realization prompted what has become the central question of Packer’s work: “What would it be like if the artist had an active role on the national political stage?” The answer came in the form of the U.S. Department of Art and Technology, which he imagined into existence in 2001. Complete with an extensive Web site (www.usdat.us), official seal, and doctored photographs of Packer shaking hands with Bush during his nomination as secretary, the department plays out that scenario with dark humor and keen insight. As the secretary, and then the secretary-at-large following his falling out with the administration, Packer has highlighted the theatrical nature of politics by editing clips of Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address over Wagner’s “Liebestod,” chronicling political scandals online, and delivering parodies of political speeches to audiences who aren’t always in on the joke. During a Berlin media festival in 2002, for instance, organizers agreed to go along with Packer’s imagined identity without tipping off participants. Speaking alongside real government officials, he interspersed excerpts of Harry Truman’s 1945 speech to the U.N. with radical quotes from avant garde artists and futurists, undercutting the validity of the festival’s other speakers. “People didn’t really know what was going on,” he recalls. “What was funny was that they began to question the authenticity of the real government officials.” Packer kicked off the final phase of the project last year by collaborating with SOC adjunct professor John Anderson to construct a grave that buries America’s corpse beneath the media. “In a sense, all that is left of America is the media,” says Packer. “It’s sort of the remains of America. Our construction of reality has been made by the media, and now that’s all there is.” Combining video, live performance, narrative, music, and even sculpture (Packer had a headstone carved for America’s Grave), “A Season in Hell” makes its statements through nearly every art form available, an approach that Packer says perfectly fits his subject. “Multimedia [art] is well suited to engage politics, because it uses the same ideas, tools, and strategies,” he explains. “Media is our language, and media is the language of politics.” That attitude lies at the heart of the Multimediale festival Packer organized with International Curators Program codirector Niels Van Tomme. Subtitled “Capturing the Capital,” the festival focuses on the state of political multimedia art in Washington. It kicks off Thursday, Apr. 21, with a keynote speech on art as a tool for democratization and social awareness by renowned Turkish art critic Beral Madra in the Abramson Family Recital Hall. In addition to Packer’s works, the festival features a dozen multimedia exhibits and performances at the Provisions Library in Northwest D.C. through the weekend. “Even though Washington is the home of the government, the art scene here always seemed very apolitical to me,” says Packer. “As a festival of art, politics, and the media, this will show that there actually is an active scene here for political art, that artists are responding to this question of what does it mean to be an artist in a political environment?” Having joined the AU’s art department in 2005 (the multimedia program was originally part of the Department of Computer Science, Audio Technology, and Physics), Packer hopes that the multimedia program can help AU art students answer that same question. As he works to redesign the program to teach multimedia aesthetics and history alongside multimedia techniques, he sees the program as a key part of the art department’s interdisciplinary approach. “The Katzen Center was conceived as an interdisciplinary entity bringing visual arts together with performing arts,” he says. “I’d like to see that interdisciplinary approach go even beyond the arts and incorporate technology, political science, communication, and international relations.” So while D.C.’s political focus may have inspired Packer to bury the nation with multimedia art, he’s hoping that political focus can help multimedia art thrive here. 
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