Packard Jennings

A few years ago I saw (must have been in Adbusters or somewhere I can't recall), a cartoon strip called "Business Reply". It is a culture jam piece, intended to be printed en masse and mailed in the Business Reply envelopes that typically accompany junk mail. It depicts, in a visual style reminiscent of airplane evacuation guides, a bored office drone opening the envelope, then flipping over his desk and inciting an all-out rebellion by his fellow workers against the office, destroying security cameras, barricading themselves inside, and eventually forming some kind of polyamorous anarcho-primitivist commune inside the decaying husk of the office tower.

At the time, I saw that and loved it, but didn't know it was part of a large body of work by someone. Recently, I read in one of the local alt-weeklies about an artist named Packard Jennings, who does culture-jamming work and recently hand-carved an "Anarchist Action Figure" (pictured above), surreptitiously placed it on the shelf of the toy section at a local Target store, and then used a hidden camera to film himself trying to purchase it!



The rest of his website includes his other works, as well as the hidden camera video from the Target action.