Ant Farm speaks

Chip Lord, one of the founders of Ant Farm, will make a presentation on the work of this American collective, and thereafter discuss with Bart Rutten (Montevideo). ‘Media Burn’ and ‘Eternal Frame’ will be shown in continuous presentations all day Tuesday in Club 11.

Ant Farm (1968-1978) can be considered the American equivalent of experimental architects’ and artists’ collectives such as Superstudio and Archigram. But more than for its visionary architecture, which included inflatable structures, Ant Farm is particularly known for its performances in the mid-1970s. These were recorded in films that belong to the absolute high points in the development of video art.

Ant Farm emerged as commentators on American consumer and television culture. As nomadic and communal concepts, their proposals for ‘inflatables’ in the late 1960s were a critical prelude to the ‘gated communities’ to come. With the requisite sophistication, performances such as Media Burn and the film Eternal Frame (1975) poked the sore spot of television’s all-defining influence on how people perceive important events. In Media Burn a ‘stand-in’ artist drives through a wall of flaming television sets in a futuristically modified Cadillac. It was an early example in which artists used spectacle as a pure media event; the work was entirely subservient to that one goal. The film Eternal Frame went still further: the film is a re-enactment of the assassination of Kennedy as we know it exclusively from the images in the famous Zapruder film. In the hilarious rerun by Ant Farm, the charged event is treated purely as media amusement, and the actual killing disappears entirely into the background.

The collective also produced the installation Cadillac Ranch (1974), in a public space in rural Texas, comprised of a row of five half-buried Cadillacs from successive years. The varied fins sticking up out of the ground, reflecting the fast-changing vagaries of fashion in auto design, became a monument to consumer society. With these actions, the Cadillac and the television became the most important material for Ant Farm, until the studio they shared burned down in 1978 and the collective wound itself up.

This evening is organised as a presentation of SMCS, in collaboration with the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA.

Ant Farm  speaks / Diskussion