The Brooklyn Rail

On July 4, 1975—two weeks before the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws—a group of renegade architects called Ant Farm convened an event on the vast parking lot of San Francisco’s Cow Palace. The Houston-based group consisted of Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier and included a revolving roster of additional collaborators.

Their event had two main components; the first was a patriotic benediction delivered by the “artist-president” cosplayed by Doug Hall as a reanimated John F. Kennedy. The benediction was loosely adapted from an article by former presidential candidate George McGovern published in the March 1975 issue of Rolling Stone magazine and delivered in a stunningly exaggerated Boston accent. It was made more impressive by a retinue of characters dressed as Secret Service agents surrounding the artist-president, all delivered to a makeshift podium in a black Lincoln Continental convertible.

The second component featured another vehicle called the Phantom Dream Car, a modified 1959 Cadillac Eldorado that was one of about fifteen Dream Cars that Ant Farm developed in the early 1970s. Its steering mechanism was elongated to make driving the vehicle from the back seat possible, the pilot, co-pilot, and a videographer sheltered by fiberglass fighter jet canopies for added protection. An additional video camera was mounted atop a single, eight-foot-tall tailfin, itself an ostentatious homage to the age of giant gas guzzling motor vehicles that had suddenly been made obsolete by the 1974 OPEC oil embargo and the recession it caused. At an appointed hour, two passengers dressed like Apollo-era astronauts entered the car, proceeding to drive it through a tall pyramid of flaming television sets before finally exiting the car waving like triumphant space travelers after a successful splashdown. Local news media covered the event with a mix of fascination and befuddlement. A half dozen documentary videographers captured the crash from every conceivable angle, creating a moment of a Baudrillardian spectacle.

All of this is recounted in a 1975 documentary film made by Ant Farm that was notable for its retrotech DIY editing, including track lines aplenty. A recent digitization of the film was projected in the upstairs salon of the 500 Capp Street space, looking surprisingly slick since it had been subjected to a software package called Topaz, which uses an AI feature to homogenize the roughness of original video, creating a greater clarity at the expense of the anarchic texture of the original moment. The viewing area itself was a casual recreation of another Ant Farm project titled Living Room of the Future (1974), while other spaces at 500 Capp Street had some working drawings and archival documents from Media Burn (1975). This collection seemed sparse in relation to what was presented more than twenty years ago at the more comprehensive Ant Farm retrospective organized by Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in 2004.

As outside-of-the-box as Media Burn (1975) was, it still pointed to some important precedents. Two of the members of Ant Farm viewed Pontus Hultén’s MoMA exhibition titled The Machine as Seen at the End of the Machine Age when it traveled to Rice University in 1969. One of the notable features of that exhibition was the inclusion of works by Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, who gained international attention for making self-destructing machine sculptures. Another precedent was the work of choreographer Anna Halprin, whose San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop staged elaborate performances in public and semi-public spaces throughout the city, allegedly influencing Allan Kaprow’s development of Happenings in New York. Ant Farm member Curtis Schreier worked for Halprin’s husband Lawrence and worked on some of Anna Halprin’s projects in the early 1960s. Other more distant influences might include the visionary work of the British architectural collective Archigram and the London-based interdisciplinary collective Independent Group.

Media Burn (1975) also had a great impact in Northern California. It certainly can be seen as an early influence on Mark Pauline’s machine performances developed with Survival Research Lab since 1978. At the end of the Media Burn (1975) documentary, we see a gleeful Gary Warne wielding a sledgehammer upon the wreckage of smoldering television sets. (Warne has been called the Johnny Appleseed of northern California artistic anarchy.) In 1977, he founded a group called the Suicide Club, which morphed into other groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front and the Cacophony Society, the latter being crucially important to the early iterations of the annual Burning Man event that continues to take place in northwestern Nevada. From this abbreviated account, we can see that Media Burn (1975) represented a historical pivot point with ramifications that reached far beyond its immediate staging. It brought multi-participatory performance activity back into focus at a time when NEA-sanctioned singular performance artists had just gained a post-Beuysian ascendency into the art world’s limelight.