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  • Between Reception and InterpretationThe Historical Practice of Ant Farm
  • M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska (bio)

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Figure 1.

Ant Farm: New Videotape Release from Electronic Arts Intermix, Media Burn (1975). University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Purchase made possible through a bequest of Thérèse Bonney by exchange, a partial gift of Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier and gifts from an anonymous donor and Harrison Fraker.

a "happening" in san francisco

On July 4, 1975, upon the invitation of local art collective Ant Farm, a crowd assembled in the parking [End Page 167] lot of San Francisco's Cow Palace, decorated for the occasion with festive bunting, American flags, and other patriotic ephemera. Local broadcasters had been specially invited to the festivities in order to generate footage that would be used later in the video piece Media Burn (1975), which documented both the event and its coverage.1 Vendors sold souvenirs of T-shirts, postcards, decals, and pamphlets emblazoned with the name of the event: Media Burn.2 After a speech given by a John F. Kennedy impersonator (artist doug hall ), the audience watched as two of Ant Farm's members drove a modified 1959 Cadillac Biarritz (which the collective had named the "Phantom Dream Car") through a burning pile of television sets. It all culminated with an abbreviated ticker-tape parade, featuring Hall's "Artist-President" and the triumphant drivers.3

Ant Farm was an interdisciplinary collective formed in 1968 by two architects, Doug Michels and Chip Lord, who were soon joined by a rotating cast of collaborators including, most prominently, Curtis Schreier and Hudson Marquez. The group, active for just ten years (1968–1978), began with the creation of temporary and sometimes absurdist structures, but by the early 1970s, it had moved on to installations, conceptual art, and video projects. It is this latter phase—in which the collective generated artworks that grappled with issues of mediation and memorialization—that has gained the most attention. The scholarship around Ant Farm's work can be grouped into roughly two categories: art and architectural historians who are interested in Ant Farm's aesthetic sensibilities and countercultural postmodernism, and media scholars who locate the collective's video work as an important part of the early historiography of video activism. It is worth noting that the former followed the latter: Ant Farm found recognition as video activists before they did as artists.4 Together, these phases of recognition have yielded an important body of scholarship that has analyzed the collective alongside contemporaneous cultural producers such as Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, and Michael Shamberg, and with guerrilla TV collectives such as Videofreex, Raindance, and TVTV (with whom Ant Farm collaborated).5

Critics have overwhelmingly tended to cast Ant Farm in the role of countercultural iconoclasts whose work stands in opposition to mainstream U.S. [End Page 168] culture of the Cold War era. I am not disputing the central tenets of this claim. However, I do believe that this framing has tended to obscure the ways in which Ant Farm's art reflects a broader cultural shift in American culture during this period. In what follows, I emphasize the ways in which Ant Farm's work illuminates (rather than challenges) modes of thinking about memory and history that were ascendant in the 1970s. Specifically, I want to argue that when we look at the history of the reception of Ant Farm's work, we see that its audiences were not always shocked or scandalized, as one might expect, particularly given the collective's countercultural milieu. Just as often, audiences found this work to confirm ways of thinking about the past with which they were already quite comfortable. When placed within its contemporary cultural context, Ant Farm's body of work can help us think through the changing nature of popular memory and the complex ways in which Ant Farm was working with and within this shift.

In light of the way that audiences—both symbolic consumers of popular culture, and the actual audiences the collective painstakingly documents—figure prominently in Ant Farm's work, these conditions of reception deserve critical attention. In...

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