Ant Farm: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The picture that emerges from the Berkeley Art Museum's fascinating retrospective of Ant Farm, the experimental architecture collective founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels in 1968, is one of relentless flatness. Co-organized by Constance Lewallen, senior curator of exhibitions, and Steve Seid, video curator at the Pacific Film Archive, the show overwhelms as an endless horizon of two-dimensional stuff: All matter of ephemera, expansive wall texts, and publicity material test the audience's readerly skills as much as their visual inclinations. This quite literally superficial gestalt may at first seem at odds with the group's underground ambitions. Ant Farm, after all, appropriated for its collective identity the subterranean metaphor of an insect colony tunneling beneath the earth; and in the group's repeated exchanges with the counterculture's techno-literati--among them Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, the poet bard of Whole Earth Catalog fame--they might appear your prototypical hippie venture, hostile to the advances of Spectacle and insistently digging beneath the surface of things.

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A quick glance at some of the group's documentation seems to bear this reading out: No doubt the keep-on-truckin' ethos of the 1960s and early '70s found shaggy, psychedelic expression in Ant Farm's designs for living, varied performances, and witty media critiques. However, one of the show's many strengths is that it reveals that Ant Farm's works cannot be reduced to shopworn cliches about the ear's wholly subversive (read: underground) strategies but provides a far more complex image of such practices--practices that both lambaste and gently affirm American popular culture. By appealing to the collective's larger historical project, the exhibition demonstrates how the architectural and, by extension, spatial concerns of the emerging information age were reimagined as utopian planes of communication.

At first take--an erroneous take, it needs be said--the exhibition's design seems somewhat artless, as if organizing the show amounted to little more than emptying out the contents of a file cabinet. Clusters of vitrines are filled to bursting with letters, drawings, photographs, posters, books, stickers, and offset lithographs, while flat-panel screens showcase performance events and architectural sites. A continuous time line, designed by the group, wraps around the main gallery and provides a useful chronological overview for the diversity of their investigations. It's telling that the time line registers sustained forays into the world of graphic design, since both Lord and Michels played significant roles in the evolution of supergraphics, the monumentalizing of graphic design to architectural scale so popular in the 1960 and '70s. Indeed, save for the Phantom Dream Car from their famous video Media Burn, 1975, which is stationed in the museum lobby, and an inflatable architectural model at the front of the gallery, the show itself resembles an exploded supergraphic.

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You could claim that the absence of more object-based material is the result of the fire that gutted Ant Farm's San Francisco warehouse in 1978, destroying much of their work and ultimately leading to the group's disbanding. In actuality, though, the appearance of flatness dramatizes a long-standing inquiry into the spaces of communication and the historical urgency surrounding notions of collective identity in the new-media age. Think of Ant Farm's architectural and media efforts as an attempt to network communities inflected by the ascendance of television, video, and computers in the 1960s. These projects entail not only a profoundly disparate use of media (which suggests the cultural ferment around the linking of communications technologies at the time) but also the distribution of such information in both printed matter and time-based documentation, as well as performances that self-consciously internalize media strategies. Ant Farm's practice cannot be described as merely pluralistic or profligate for this reason. On the contrary, its visual range demonstrates the systematic nature of their explorations across the media spectrum.

The exhibition makes these concerns explicit in at least two ways, identifiable by the twinned terms of the "pneumatic" and the "nomadic." The presence of inflatables in the show (or more accurately, the documentation of such structures) positions the group as one of a number of collectives in the 1960s courting the potential of pneumatic architecture (their Italian parallels would include Archigram and Superstudio, whom Ant Farm claimed as decisive influences). Early works such as 50 X 50' Pillow, 1969, created as a production studio for a supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, saw the group staging temporary installations across California. An enlarged version of Pillow met its end at the notorious, ill-fated rock concert at Altamont, where it served as the concert's medical center, or what Chip Lord called the "bad-trips pavilion." Photographs of these and related works typically picture massive translucent structures, shaped like their namesake pillows, set in remote sun-baked landscapes. The presence of bare-chested or naked longhairs cavorting in their interiors and across their surfaces infuse these images with the apposite period flavor.