antfarm
Once Underground, Ant Farm Burrows Out
By MICHAEL RUSH
NYT Published: January 25, 2004
Did you know that Buckminster Fuller was once kidnapped by a bunch of radical hippie architects? In 1969, Fuller was invited to lecture at the University of Houston's engineering school. When the young rads at the college of architecture heard about this godly visitation they decided Fuller was better off in their hands, so one of them called the engineering school and, posing as Fuller's assistant, said his plane had been canceled, that he'd be on a later one, and please don't send anyone to pick him up.
When Fuller arrived, on schedule, Doug Michels, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, an architecture collective that called itself Ant Farm, met him in a rented Cadillac limousine and whisked him away to an exhibition at Rice University that featured his Dymaxion car, a futuristic three-wheel vehicle that he had designed 30 years before.
"We were totally involved with popular culture, especially through the lens of America's fixation with the automobile," recalled Mr. Lord, 59, who, along with Mr. Michels (deceased) had founded the group the previous year. This cultural intervention set the tone for Ant Farm's decadelong practice of activist installations and videos, including "Cadillac Ranch Show" (1974), "Media Burn" and "The Eternal Frame" (both 1975), which rank among the most poignant examples of early video art.
Activist video might have dominated the history of video art if it had been absorbed into museum culture the way more conceptual videoworks by artists like Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Vito Acconci were. Instead it was mainstream television news that took up the genre's freestyle camerawork, in-your-face interviewing techniques and up-to-the-minute reality feeling. Only now is Ant Farm getting museum recognition for its widespread cultural impact, in a full-dress retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive through April 25.
In 1968, while the nation grappled with war and protest, artistic disciplines were melting into one another: painters and sculptors were dancing with, and designing sets for, experimental choreographers; writers and filmmakers were creating nonnarrative dramas; and everyone was participating in some way, passively or actively, in television, which for a decade had been in 90 percent of American homes. Ant Farm, though rooted in architecture, was devoted to cultural critique in different forms. Video seemed a natural realm for them to explore. "Video enabled us to realize ideas in a more immediate way," Mr. Lord said. "Architecture took too long."
Ant Farm started in the mecca of utopian collectives, San Francisco. Mr. Lord moved there after graduation from Tulane University to attend the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Workshop, a prototypical center for intermedia ventures in which architects, artists and dancers created work based on shared interests. Mr. Schreier arrived from the Rhode Island School of Design to work in Mr. Halprin's landscape architecture office. Mr. Michels, who died last year at 59 in an accident during a trip to Australia, was a Yale School of Architecture graduate who met Mr. Lord while lecturing at Tulane. He moved west at the same time as the others, where they decided to form an underground architectural group similar in spirit to the so-called underground newspapers and movies of the day. "Oh, like an ant farm," said a friend of Mr. Schreier's.
"That's all it took," Mr. Michels said in an interview with the exhibition's curator, Constance Lewallen, several months before his death. "It was very Ant Farm. The founding of the name was indicative of how Ant Farm worked: the right idea comes, everybody acknowledges it is the right idea and instantly adopts it."
Ant Farm's early work was a reaction to the dominant trends of the time, which included the Brutalist architecture of Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and others. In opposition to the masses of concrete required for a Kahn building, Ant Farm made inflatables, lightweight, mobile structures, which provided temporary, cheap and environmentally friendly shelter. They even designed a city that would erect itself during a rock 'n' roll concert. Mr. Lord describes it as "a vinyl inflatable with a nylon strapping system over the top of it to keep it from blowing away." In the spirit of "The Whole Earth Catalogue," Ant Farm self-published the "Inflatocookbook," a do-it-yourself booklet on making these blowups, in 1971.
Frustrated by the impermanence of the inflatables, Ant Farm accepted a commission to build what they came to call "The House of the Century" in a swampy area outside Houston. Marilyn and Alvin Lubetkin, contemporary-art patrons, wanted a special country house on their property on Mojo Lake. They got one. Featuring a sleek, white shell built with ferro-cement (a malleable combination of sand and cement used in boat building) the house looks like a bulging-eyed, high-backed beetle. It won a Progressive Architecture Design Award in 1973, and though abandoned after flooding in 1985, it still stands as a moss-covered monument to avant-garde design.
Ant Farm's most enduring legacy, however, is their media works. In 1973, the art enthusiast Stanley Marsh invited Ant Farm to create a work on his ranch in the Texas Panhandle, where Robert Smithson and John Chamberlain had already made sculptures. Ant Farm proposed a mock homage to the Cadillac tailfin, though history has viewed it as more of a funeral for a way of life than a celebration. Working with a $3,000 budget, the Farmers purchased 10 Cadillacs made between 1949 and 1964. They dug 10 holes in the land (right off route 66 in Amarillo) and drove the cars into them, leaving the back portions sticking up in the air. The video "Cadillac Ranch Show" documents the semiburial and caricatures the fetishized tailfin with cuts from Cadillac television commercials. Over the years, organizations and celebrities as diverse as Time, Newsweek, the Hard Rock Cafe and Bruce Springsteen have used the image of "Cadillac Ranch" in some way, which led the group, in very unhippielike fashion, to hire a copyright lawyer who remains active on their behalf.
Two years later, on July 4, 1975, Ant Farm produced "Media Burn," an elaborately staged videotaped performance that involved driving a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz through a wall of burning television sets. In the parking lot of the Cow Palace near San Francisco, performers, including one called the Artist-President, enacted a poignant and hilarious rebuff to the age of media. "Who can deny we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media," proclaimed the Artist-President to a cheering crowd. "Now I ask you, my fellow Americans, haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?"
"The Eternal Frame," a 1975 video collaboration with another Bay Area media collective, T. R. Uthco, was a re-enactment of President John F. Kennedy's assassination as filmed by Abraham Zapruder. Interested in the hyperreality as well as the mythology of the Zapruder film, which they had seen in a boot-legged copy, they thought a re-enactment might serve both to reclaim that moment and to minimize the power of the gory still images that had been published. So they went to Dallas early one Sunday morning, intending to work fast. Tourists started to arrive on the scene, however, and, seizing the moment, the artists interviewed them and incorporated their reactions in the final video.
The resulting work might now be described as a serious mockumentary. In it, Doug Hall (a T. R. Uthco founder) plays President Kennedy, Mr. Michels in drag plays Jacqueline Kennedy and two other wigged actors play Gov. John B. Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the assassination is dramatized, however, bystanders begin to cry and express shock as if it were all happening again. What started as a sendup became a multilayered work, complete with frequent repetition of scenes (à la Jean-Luc Godard), reactions from the public and postassassination interviews with Kennedy, who tells the camera, "I am in reality only another image on your screen." This and other Ant Farm videos are available at Electronic Arts Intermix (www.eai.org).
Ant Farm's headquarters on Pier 40 in San Francisco burned down on August 7, 1978, officially marking the end of the collective. They were an essential part of the "alternative television" movement of the 1970's that included groups like Raindance, Videofreex and TVTV, among others. A remnant from the era, Paper Tiger TV, can still be seen on some cable stations.
Today only a few artists (Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Christoph Draeger, the group RTMark among them) engage media and politics with such wit and force. The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore ("Bowling for Columbine") and moments of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," "Mad TV" and "Saturday Night Live" come close. A few emerging groups (Big Noise Productions, Video Active, Whispered Media) show promise.
The Farmers knew the power of the image. They poked fun at it and challenged it, cleverly and bitingly, but not just for laughs. Theirs was a serious enterprise. They thought they could change the world.
Michael Rush is the director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent book is "Video Art" (Thames & Hudson).
(sigh)
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antfarm
- bill 1-28-2004 12:16 am
Once Underground, Ant Farm Burrows Out
By MICHAEL RUSH
NYT Published: January 25, 2004
Did you know that Buckminster Fuller was once kidnapped by a bunch of radical hippie architects? In 1969, Fuller was invited to lecture at the University of Houston's engineering school. When the young rads at the college of architecture heard about this godly visitation they decided Fuller was better off in their hands, so one of them called the engineering school and, posing as Fuller's assistant, said his plane had been canceled, that he'd be on a later one, and please don't send anyone to pick him up.
When Fuller arrived, on schedule, Doug Michels, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, an architecture collective that called itself Ant Farm, met him in a rented Cadillac limousine and whisked him away to an exhibition at Rice University that featured his Dymaxion car, a futuristic three-wheel vehicle that he had designed 30 years before.
"We were totally involved with popular culture, especially through the lens of America's fixation with the automobile," recalled Mr. Lord, 59, who, along with Mr. Michels (deceased) had founded the group the previous year. This cultural intervention set the tone for Ant Farm's decadelong practice of activist installations and videos, including "Cadillac Ranch Show" (1974), "Media Burn" and "The Eternal Frame" (both 1975), which rank among the most poignant examples of early video art.
Activist video might have dominated the history of video art if it had been absorbed into museum culture the way more conceptual videoworks by artists like Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Vito Acconci were. Instead it was mainstream television news that took up the genre's freestyle camerawork, in-your-face interviewing techniques and up-to-the-minute reality feeling. Only now is Ant Farm getting museum recognition for its widespread cultural impact, in a full-dress retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive through April 25.
In 1968, while the nation grappled with war and protest, artistic disciplines were melting into one another: painters and sculptors were dancing with, and designing sets for, experimental choreographers; writers and filmmakers were creating nonnarrative dramas; and everyone was participating in some way, passively or actively, in television, which for a decade had been in 90 percent of American homes. Ant Farm, though rooted in architecture, was devoted to cultural critique in different forms. Video seemed a natural realm for them to explore. "Video enabled us to realize ideas in a more immediate way," Mr. Lord said. "Architecture took too long."
Ant Farm started in the mecca of utopian collectives, San Francisco. Mr. Lord moved there after graduation from Tulane University to attend the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Workshop, a prototypical center for intermedia ventures in which architects, artists and dancers created work based on shared interests. Mr. Schreier arrived from the Rhode Island School of Design to work in Mr. Halprin's landscape architecture office. Mr. Michels, who died last year at 59 in an accident during a trip to Australia, was a Yale School of Architecture graduate who met Mr. Lord while lecturing at Tulane. He moved west at the same time as the others, where they decided to form an underground architectural group similar in spirit to the so-called underground newspapers and movies of the day. "Oh, like an ant farm," said a friend of Mr. Schreier's.
"That's all it took," Mr. Michels said in an interview with the exhibition's curator, Constance Lewallen, several months before his death. "It was very Ant Farm. The founding of the name was indicative of how Ant Farm worked: the right idea comes, everybody acknowledges it is the right idea and instantly adopts it."
Ant Farm's early work was a reaction to the dominant trends of the time, which included the Brutalist architecture of Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and others. In opposition to the masses of concrete required for a Kahn building, Ant Farm made inflatables, lightweight, mobile structures, which provided temporary, cheap and environmentally friendly shelter. They even designed a city that would erect itself during a rock 'n' roll concert. Mr. Lord describes it as "a vinyl inflatable with a nylon strapping system over the top of it to keep it from blowing away." In the spirit of "The Whole Earth Catalogue," Ant Farm self-published the "Inflatocookbook," a do-it-yourself booklet on making these blowups, in 1971.
Frustrated by the impermanence of the inflatables, Ant Farm accepted a commission to build what they came to call "The House of the Century" in a swampy area outside Houston. Marilyn and Alvin Lubetkin, contemporary-art patrons, wanted a special country house on their property on Mojo Lake. They got one. Featuring a sleek, white shell built with ferro-cement (a malleable combination of sand and cement used in boat building) the house looks like a bulging-eyed, high-backed beetle. It won a Progressive Architecture Design Award in 1973, and though abandoned after flooding in 1985, it still stands as a moss-covered monument to avant-garde design.
Ant Farm's most enduring legacy, however, is their media works. In 1973, the art enthusiast Stanley Marsh invited Ant Farm to create a work on his ranch in the Texas Panhandle, where Robert Smithson and John Chamberlain had already made sculptures. Ant Farm proposed a mock homage to the Cadillac tailfin, though history has viewed it as more of a funeral for a way of life than a celebration. Working with a $3,000 budget, the Farmers purchased 10 Cadillacs made between 1949 and 1964. They dug 10 holes in the land (right off route 66 in Amarillo) and drove the cars into them, leaving the back portions sticking up in the air. The video "Cadillac Ranch Show" documents the semiburial and caricatures the fetishized tailfin with cuts from Cadillac television commercials. Over the years, organizations and celebrities as diverse as Time, Newsweek, the Hard Rock Cafe and Bruce Springsteen have used the image of "Cadillac Ranch" in some way, which led the group, in very unhippielike fashion, to hire a copyright lawyer who remains active on their behalf.
Two years later, on July 4, 1975, Ant Farm produced "Media Burn," an elaborately staged videotaped performance that involved driving a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz through a wall of burning television sets. In the parking lot of the Cow Palace near San Francisco, performers, including one called the Artist-President, enacted a poignant and hilarious rebuff to the age of media. "Who can deny we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media," proclaimed the Artist-President to a cheering crowd. "Now I ask you, my fellow Americans, haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?"
"The Eternal Frame," a 1975 video collaboration with another Bay Area media collective, T. R. Uthco, was a re-enactment of President John F. Kennedy's assassination as filmed by Abraham Zapruder. Interested in the hyperreality as well as the mythology of the Zapruder film, which they had seen in a boot-legged copy, they thought a re-enactment might serve both to reclaim that moment and to minimize the power of the gory still images that had been published. So they went to Dallas early one Sunday morning, intending to work fast. Tourists started to arrive on the scene, however, and, seizing the moment, the artists interviewed them and incorporated their reactions in the final video.
The resulting work might now be described as a serious mockumentary. In it, Doug Hall (a T. R. Uthco founder) plays President Kennedy, Mr. Michels in drag plays Jacqueline Kennedy and two other wigged actors play Gov. John B. Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the assassination is dramatized, however, bystanders begin to cry and express shock as if it were all happening again. What started as a sendup became a multilayered work, complete with frequent repetition of scenes (à la Jean-Luc Godard), reactions from the public and postassassination interviews with Kennedy, who tells the camera, "I am in reality only another image on your screen." This and other Ant Farm videos are available at Electronic Arts Intermix (www.eai.org).
Ant Farm's headquarters on Pier 40 in San Francisco burned down on August 7, 1978, officially marking the end of the collective. They were an essential part of the "alternative television" movement of the 1970's that included groups like Raindance, Videofreex and TVTV, among others. A remnant from the era, Paper Tiger TV, can still be seen on some cable stations.
Today only a few artists (Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Christoph Draeger, the group RTMark among them) engage media and politics with such wit and force. The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore ("Bowling for Columbine") and moments of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," "Mad TV" and "Saturday Night Live" come close. A few emerging groups (Big Noise Productions, Video Active, Whispered Media) show promise.
The Farmers knew the power of the image. They poked fun at it and challenged it, cleverly and bitingly, but not just for laughs. Theirs was a serious enterprise. They thought they could change the world.
Michael Rush is the director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. His most recent book is "Video Art" (Thames & Hudson).
- bill 1-28-2004 12:17 am [add a comment]
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