The Present Is the Form of All Life The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST by Gabriel Florenz and Liz Flyntz (review)

Figure 1.

LST, "Time Capsule Triptych" (2009). Photograph by author.

Courtesy of LST.

Preservation is an act that fixes some small portion of society's attention on an artifact and then keeps it there, perhaps for centuries. Art is most often discussed as an object of preservation, but insofar as art also serves to direct attention, it serves as an effective analogy for preservation and a means of extracting ideologies from beneath preservation's mundane operations. The art collective Ant Farm (1968–78) and its successor LST (2007–) are no strangers to attention-fixing or even attention-grabbing art projects; their early work—Media Burn, for instance—offered gathered crowds a Cadillac-turned-tank plowing through a pyramid of flaming television sets. Ant Farm was a critical voice of America's manias, from TV to car culture to popular media, and LST's new project and latest exhibition address our mania for collecting and our relationship to the future. Pioneer Works introduces the exhibition:

The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST explores the time capsule projects of seminal media art and architecture group Ant Farm and their contemporary successors, LST. Tracing the time capsule's evolution from analog archive to digital database, the exhibition examines the mutable nature of time perception, rapidly accelerating media obsolescence, and our shifting cultural attitudes toward preservation and privacy.¹

When Ant Farm's earliest time-capsule projects were created, the form of the time capsule was already a throwback to a time when American's dreams of the future were fueled by the sometimes naïve and tainted utopianism of Modernism. Framing this new exhibition and recent projects with time capsules seems intended to disturb the dreamless sleep of contemporary America, stirring us to refill the capsules with something new. The exhibition—at the cusp of opening old capsules and sealing new ones—also asks the viewer to consider whether what goes in is the same as what comes out. Preservation is often presented as an objective science, but the use of these affective objects suggests that preservation is social and that social memory is neither neutral nor static.

Figure 2.

LST, detail "Time Capsule Triptych" (2009). Photograph by author.

Courtesy of LST.

Citizen's Time Capsule is an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser filled with suitcases full of the detritus of popular culture, from magazines to cigarettes to condoms. Ant Farm buried this time capsule in 1975 and planned to unearth it in 2000; however, in the meantime, state agencies have declared that the ground around the car is too toxic to disturb, thus consigning the project to limbo. At the opening reception and artist panel for this exhibition, LST members playfully remarked that all of their time capsules to date have failed due to unexpected events. Bruce Tomb said that, rather than try to preserve these works, it might be more effective to keep them alive somehow. This dilemma is familiar to those in professional preservation circles. It is one thing to preserve an artifact in question but another to preserve metadata about that object, metadata that actively circulates to keep our attention fixed even when the object is buried and out of site. This project has an outsized parallel in the preservation of superfund sites where nuclear waste is buried. Nuclear waste is similarly too toxic to disturb and will remain so for the next ten thousand years. The Department of Energy has engaged experts around the globe to address the problem of how to create and maintain signage (metadata) on these sites to warn future generations and how to disseminate maps (more metadata) about the location of other sites. Solutions have been offered, but, in...