The Ant Farm Collective was a group of radical architects, performance artists and video enthusiasts who took the embryonic medium of video and created art with a punishing and hilarious social commentary during the sixties and seventies. For many years their work and images have circulated in the mass media, disembodied from their original artistic intent. A recently released DVD with a selection of their better known pieces has been produced by Chip Lord, one of the founding members. The images are now living in their original artistic contexts. The DVD features short films, “Cadillac Ranch 1974/94”, “Media Burn,” “Dirty Dishes” and others.
“The world may never understand, but the image will never be forgotten,” so concludes [artist-]President JFK, the guest speaker in Ant Farm’s “Media Burn” video performance/document just prior to the collective’s famous happening. This happening offers a tail finned Cadillac Eldorado (phantom-dream car) crashing through a wall of TV’s. It is 1975 and they are breaking the TV barrier.
I believe the image of a tail finned Cadillac crashing through a wall of TVs has been used repeatedly on MTV and other corporate imaging media outlets. What was once intended as criticism of TV was eventually co-opted by TV to reflect it’s own self-created counter culture values. Corporations will posture as radical to attract dissatisfied and bored viewers/purchasers as well as subvert the ideas that assault corporate well being. Co-opt: to choose or elect into a body or group as a fellow member, etc. (Webster). This is a phenomenon to be attentive to while viewing images, as the Ant Farm Collective again and again creatively demonstrate.
The DVD features other Ant Farm videos, some less interesting than others, but they have a certain historical value if not artistic experience. During “Dirty Dishes” the collective places a camera on a lazy susan in the middle of the kitchen table and swirl it around the room, creating an improvisational video experience. During Nixon’s daughter’s wedding, which occurs during lunch, the TV commentator announces that these images will be the last broadcast from the wedding. The images are of Nixon and his daughter walking towards the altar. The ring ceremony is not shown. One of the Ant Farmer’s shouts out they don’t want to corrupt the wedding. To think there was a time when cameras were thought to have negative influences or at the very least ought not invade the private spheres is nearly heresy today. A cameraman at a rally for Bobby Kennedy turned off the camera when it was announced that he had been killed. It wasn’t appropriate to record such intimacies.
The JFK speech from “Media Burn” was taken from a George McGovern speech reprinted in Rolling Stone, some of which is worth considering. Here are a few excerpts: “The American spirit is uncertain, in this decade we have seen an unworthy war, political scandal and now we are seeing economic turmoil. From these have come not only the dangerous conditions of our country but a pervasive doubt. What has gone wrong with America is not a random visitation of fate. It is the result of forces which have assumed control of the American system … these forces are Militarism, Monopoly and the Mass Media…Mass Media controls people by their control of information. It is impossible to escape the influence of advertising.” The media co-opts our emotions in advertising and replays them back to us 24-7, manipulating our spectrum of emotions based on the media’s need to sell products. I understand this is a simplistic conception of a complicated process. It is here that the Ant Farm Collective is helpful. They lay it out in blatant and humorous terms. They are also willing to have their own creations co-opted by the institutions they deplore. That is artistic courage and resistance.
Ant Farm Video:
running time, 127 minutes executive producer, Chip Lord Ant Farm 1968 1978 exhibition www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Re-release on DVD 2003.