November 4-10, 2004

art

Pop Arch

Media Burn, July 4, 1975, performance at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, CA. Photo By: John F. Turner

The ICA looks back at Bay Area pop-art/architecture collective Ant Farm.

by Susan Hagen

A 1978 fire ripped through the San Francisco studio of the legendary art, architecture and culture collective Ant Farm, destroying much of the group's work and effectively ending a collaboration between dozens of people that functioned more like a commune or a rock band than a typical architecture firm. Ant Farm—founded in 1968 by architects Chip Lord and Doug Michels—opposed the Brutalist architecture of the period and was more interested in the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri and Archigram. The collective (operating in the Bay Area and Houston) was voracious in its taste for American pop culture and produced theoretical projects, installations, videos, performance art and even a couple of buildings. A quarter century later, Ant Farm's spirit lives on, as numerous cooperatives and collectives have flourished in cities across the U.S. So perhaps the time is right to look back.

This exhibition, which has been touring the U.S. and Europe, was assembled out of the hundreds of documents, photographs, sketchbooks, T-shirts, videotapes, drawings, customized envelopes and letters that survived the fire. It's installed in the form of a graphic timeline created by the group, interspersed with political and social events for context. Early Ant Farm projects include temporary spaces made of inflated polyethylene or vinyl. Photographs of their 1972 Air Emergency project on the campus of Berkeley show collaborators dressed in hazard outfits and gas masks as they attempt to herd people into a large "inflatable" filled with "clean" air and affix stickers to the foreheads of those who didn't enter. Pages from their Inflatocookbook give directions for making inflatables and useful addresses for ordering materials.

Meanwhile, Ant Farm started to explore America's obsession with the automobile. They created a high-tech "Media Van" and designed a truck stop network across the country for Nomadic Truckitecture. In 1974, they built one of their best-known works, Cadillac Ranch, along Route 66 west of Amarillo, Tex. It consisted of 10 Cadillacs from 1949 through 1963 buried nose-first in a row on the edge of a wheat field. They demonstrate the evolution of the tail fin as they rise like dolphins out of the vast Texas plains. To many in my generation of art students in the Midwest, Cadillac Ranch was the perfect blend of earth art, fetishism and iconoclasm. The piece is now a famous roadside attraction that is ritualistically graffitied by many visitors.

In 1974, Ant Farm also created Media Burn, a performance and video piece in which they crashed a souped-up 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible through a wall of burning televisions. The stunt was theatrical, risky and gloriously photogenic. Media Burn relates to the socio-political performance art of Josef Beuys and Chris Burden, but the inspiration probably came from Americana—circus acts, demolition derbies and stunt masters like Evel Knievel. The group was always interested in new technology and was among the first to experiment with video art. Ironically, the video included an interview with Doug Michels with the appeal: "If everyone in America would burn just one TV ."

In 1975 the group re-enacted the JFK assassination in Eternal Frame, a performance and video piece that pushed the limits of taste and decorum to explore America's obsession with the event. Like the 9/11 video, the Zapruder film was shown repeatedly on television and carried deep emotional and cultural meaning. The documents include makeup charts for Doug Hall (who played Kennedy) and Doug Michels (who played Jackie). Later Ant Farm projects include the design of a Dolphin Embassy for civilized communication with dolphins and an opera, CARmen, performed by cars and their drivers using the sounds of windshield wipers, horns and doors slamming.

In the end, Ant Farm may not have produced great architecture, but its collaborative structure and innovative processes have had lasting impact on the art world. Ant Farm's best work functions as social commentary—exploring problems such as the oil crisis, pollution and television as they were emerging within American political consciousness—revealing a true passion and understanding of American culture.

Ant Farm: 1968-1978 through Dec. 12, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th St., 215-898-7108.