Secretary Interview II

Ryan Griffis from Furtherfield recently interviewed me for the on-line new media journal.

For the next few entries, I will post excerpts from the interview.

RG: Your art and writing (and from what i gather, your teaching as well) often addresses the ever-expanding 'totalizing' effect of what is called 'multimedia.' There's both a utopic and dystopic side present to notions of singularity. What kinds of relationships do you see between Virilio's Total War and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk?

RP: The totalizing properties of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork) have driven my own research and artistic production over the past 15 years. I was fascinated early on by Wagner's approach to the theater, he could not fully realize his work until he had completely overhauled the "platform" of the opera house, creating a medium for immersing and directing the full attention of the viewer on the illusionary or 'virtual' space of the theatrical stage.

With US DAT, I was thinking about the total collapse of the fourth wall, that imaginary line between audience and the stage (still sacred in Wagner's theater), in order to extrude the work from the stage into the space of the "real world," to dissolve the distinction between the two. This is to me is a further implementation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the totalization of the experience of art is one in which the "real world" is transformed using techniques of media and illusion. (Regarding Virilio, you could say that war as theater constitutes the ultimate transformation of the physical space.)

I was invited to speak at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin in 2002 as the Secretary of US DAT for their opening ceremonies, alongside several politicians and diplomats. No one was told I was a fake but there was great confusion in the air. It was arranged that I was to be introduced by an actual government official, the Cultural Attaché of the US Embassy in Berlin. Now if there really were a Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology, this would be the protocol. And so he played it completely straight. He gave a stirring introduction, indicating that the US Government was now embracing a significant role for the arts. I couldn't have said it better myself.

My speech, delivered to an audience of over 1,000, was a dadaesque collage of President Harry Truman's address to the United Nation's in 1945, mixed with texts appropriated from the Futurists, Berlin Dadaists, and even some of the hyper-utopian descriptions of artist works presented at Transmediale. The conclusion of the speech ended, appropriately with the following line, taken from the famous words of President Kennedy, "In this city of dada, decadence and indulgence, ich bin ein Berliner, Kunstler!). Most everyone recognized by this point it was a performance, except for one rather confused media critic whom I won't mention by name, but who thought I was an American government official posing as an artist. I found this reversal most delicious.

Randall M. Packer