Ant Farm: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Pamela M. Lee

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It's little wonder, then, that Ant Farm's most famous videos, Media Burn and The Eternal Frame, 1975, feature cars so prominently. Indeed, the bright yellow Phantom Dream Car--part NASA prototype, part souped-up '50s roadster--quite literally collapses a car with media. An iconic work of video art from the 1970s, Media Burn shows the futuristic car crashing into a monolithic wall of television sets, setting off a dazzling explosion worthy of the period's action flicks. In The Eternal Frame, a Zapruder-like reenactment of JFK's assassination, a Lincoln Continental limo plays as much of a starring role as the artists outfitted in presidential (and First Lady) drag. The Eternal Frame is generally upheld as a critique of the media, a simulacrum in advance of Baudrillard. But given its historic and conceptual proximity to Media Burn (the performance was staged in Dallas only a month after the earlier video was shot in San Francisco), it's not too far off the mark to suggest that a doubled-edged commentary of car culture is also on offer, both in the collective desire for such machinery as represented in the media and its peculiar associations of violence as implied in the Zapruder fim. For Ant Farm, the car is itself a metaphor for communication on the move; and in this analogy lies the car's promise--and its threat.

Undoubtedly the single work of art thought to best emblematize Ant Farm is the site-specific Cadillac Ranch, 1974. Described as a modern-day Stonehenge dedicated to the cult of the automobile, it features ten partially buried Cadillacs, tail fins upended, along Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas. Maybe we think we know the piece a little too well. Mention of Cadillac Ranch typically inspires bad Bruce Springsteen imitations or, far worse, flashbacks of car commercials, which have mainstreamed the work's playful stab on planned obsolescence for the blandishments of roadside Americana. In the context of the Ant Farm retrospective, however, the work begins to read a little differently, confirming the continued relevance of the group's futuristic prognostications. If Cadillac Ranch stands as an ersatz memorial to the Big Three era--both a tribute and a critique--perhaps it also anticipated the post-Fordist age, in which new communications technologies little need the wheels of industry to make them run.

"Ant Farm" is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through April 25: travels to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, July 2-Aug. 14: ICA, Philadelphia, Sept. 10-Dec. 12; Blaffer Art Gallery, Houston, Jan. 15-Mar. 13, 2003; ZKM, Karlsrube, Germany, Apr. 30-July 24, 2005; Yale University School of Architecture Gallery, New Haven, CT, Aug. 29-Nov. 4, 2005.

Pamela M. Lee is associate professor of art history at Stanford University.