Pioneer Works
Go back to the future with Anna Scime and Liz Flyntz to see what we can learn from activist media makers of the past. Igor Vamos also weighs in on performance artists versus protestors, and the role of mischief in media making.
One way to think of Ant Farm, the subject of a recent exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, is as the art-world equivalent of an underground music act. They were founded in San Francisco in 1968, against the backdrop of psychedelic counterculture. Despite their impressive back catalogue, they are remembered mainly for two smash hits—Cadillac Ranch, 1974, and Media Burn, 1975. And like so many bands, they have recently reunited, with a slightly different lineup.
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The visual records on view alone make clear that time capsule creations for the group served more as occasions to consider the present-day in the present rather than to eventually communicate it to the future.
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Founded as an “underground architecture” practice in 1968, Ant Farm explored the design of modern life itself. Drawing inspiration from Stewart Brand’s counterculture Whole Earth Catalog and experimental architecture from Europe, the group began to design and manufacture inflatable structures — makeshift and multi-use bubble buildings — and eventually published its own how-to handbook, 1971’s Inflatocookbook. Always inflected with their distinctive political sensibility, a taste for nomadism, and a goofy sense of humor, their practice evolved into a kind of multimedia guerrilla performance art, especially when affordable video technology allowed them to begin documenting their work as they toured the country in jury-rigged “media vans.”
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Sarah Cowan, “Alternative Media: Software and Video in 1970s Counterculture”, Hyperallergic, November 13, 2014
https://hyperallergic.com/162314/alternative-media-software-and-video-in-1970s-counterculture/