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Cadillac Ranch/Media Burn

Ant Farm

1975 00:37:00 United StatesEnglishB&W and ColorMono

Description

"We buried ten Cadillacs in a row alongside Interstate 40 (the old Route 66), just west of Amarillo, Texas; each car represented a model change in the evolution of the tail fin. This was clearly a sculptural act, but with a minimal amount of formal manipulation. Media Burn, created a year later in San Francisco, was a live performance. It was a spectacle staged for the camera culminating in the 4,000 pound Phantom Dream Car crashing through a pyramid of TV sets to the cheers of the audience of 400. This image and the videotape have become classics of the first decade of video art."

— Chip Lord, 1988

About Ant Farm

A San Francisco-based collective of artists and architects working from 1968 to 1978, Ant Farm’s activity was distinctly interdisciplinary—combining architecture, performance, media, happenings, sculpture, and graphic design. With works that functioned as art, social critique, and pop anthropology, Ant Farm tore into the cultural fabric of post-World War II, Vietnam-era America and became one of the first groups to address television’s pervasive presence in everyday life. As graphic artists, Ant Farm contributed to numerous underground publications, including Radical Software, and designed Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television (1971).

Ant Farm members included Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Hudson Marquez, and Curtis Schreier.