Ant Farm

Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice, founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (1943–2003). Ant Farm's work often made use of popular icons in the United States, as a strategy to redefine the way those were conceived within the country's imagination. Their best-known work is the Cadillac Ranch installation outside of Amarillo, Texas.

The group

Doug Michels and Chip Lord initially met in 1968, when Michels gave a guest lecture at Tulane University, where Lord was attending school. The two met again in August 1968 at an architecture workshop directed by Lawrence Halprin in San Francisco, and It was here where the two founded Ant Farm.

We wanted to be an architecture group that was more like a rock band. We were telling Sharon [a friend] that we would be doing underground architecture, like underground newspapers and underground movies, and she said, 'Oh, you mean like an Ant Farm?' and that's all it took. It was very Ant Farm. The founding of the name was indicative of how Ant Farm worked: the right idea comes, everybody acknowledges it is the right idea and instantly adopts it.

The group's initial goal was to reform education, but with little funding, Michels and Lord relocated to Houston, Texas, where they both became visiting professors at the University of Houston. It was in Houston where the group first began putting on performances, including their "inflatables." Eventually, Lord and Michels were joined by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier.

The group was a self-described "art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural introspection." In addition to their architecture works, the collective was well known for their counter-cultural performances and media events, such as Media Burn. Their installation, Cadillac Ranch, remains an icon of American popular culture. Ant Farm disbanded in 1978 when a fire destroyed their San Francisco studio. Doug Michels went on to design the unbuilt statue The Spirit of Houston.

Chip Lord retired from teaching in 2010. Although he is retired, Lord is continuing his work in film and digital media. Doug Michels died on June 12, 2003, at Eden Bay near Sydney, Australia due to an unfortunate accident—just 17 days before what would have been his 60th birthday.

Historical context

The free speech movement and the antiwar demonstrations in San Francisco heavily influenced the group Ant Farm. In 1967, the group partook in the Summer of Love in San Francisco. They embraced the youth cultures' communal living, sexual freedom, hallucinogenic drugs, and utopian ideals. In addition, they adapted the do-it-yourself ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog in their work.

The Bay Area became the center of new art forms, such as performance and video. Ant Farm gravitated to these new forms and began incorporated it into their work. Like many other avant-garde artists, the group was determined to build outside of the conventional architecture. In the early years of their collaboration, Ant Farm sought out to create an alternative architecture suited to a nomadic lifestyle. The architects Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and utopian Archigram inspired their early works of the giant inflatable structures.

Projects

Inflatables, 1971

Ant Farm traveled America with a tour of "architectural performances" during which the group unfurled its anti-architectural Inflatables – inexpensive, portable shelters made of vinyl that provided the stage for lectures and "happenings." Anyone who wanted to make an inflatable could buy Ant Farm's Inflatocookbook.

The inflatables expressed the Ant Farm's ideals for fluidity and freedom. Their "aim was to develop the perception of the body in space while working through the pleasurable and anxious feelings prompted by social interaction"

House of the Century, 1972

In collaboration with architect Richard Jost, Ant Farm designed and built a Futurist ferro-cement residence. The house is noted for its curvilinear and organic shapes, inspired by the Apollo 11 lunar landing. In 2004, the group described the house as "a ruin", and in 2006, Dwell architecture magazine stated that the house was "partially submerged in a Texas swamp", but Chip Lord corresponded that it was not, but was "undergoing a renovation supervised by Richard Jost, working with the owner". As of 2009 it was still a private residence, reported as being somewhat overgrown, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence.

Cadillac Ranch, 1974

In Amarillo, Texas, Ant Farm half-buried a row of 10 used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The installation is set up to the west of Amarillo near Interstate I-40 on the famous former Route 66.

Media Burn, 1975

Ant Farm began planning Media Burn while in Houston. Michels and Lord were interested in having the event sponsored, and first proposed Media Burn to the Walker Art Center; however, the art center did not want to sponsor the event, nor did any one else that they asked, so Michels and Lord began selling merchandise to support the event, in order to "[use] capitalism to smash capitalism," as described by Michels. Planning for Media Burn lasted six months, because the duo wanted it to be "more than a spectacle." It was on July 4, 1975, when Ant Farm performed their "ultimate media event." This event involved crashing a modified 1959 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible—it sported Eldorado side trim, hence it is routinely mistaken for an Eldorado Biarritz—known as their "Phantom Dream Car," through a pyramid of televisions in the parking lot of the Cow Palace in Daly City, bordering San Francisco.

Prior to the main event of crashing the car through the stacked televisions, Doug Hall, presented as President John F. Kennedy, gave a speech in which he presented the "Phantom Dream Car." Lord and Michels designed the Phantom Dream Car to appear futuristic, and have an "Apollo element," meaning that they could enter the vehicle's cockpit only by crawling in, and their communication would be controlled by radio.……

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Ant Farm (group)」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。