Media Burn by 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. T.R. Uthco was a multi-media performance art collective that engaged in satirical critiques of mass media images and cultural myths, using irony, theatricality, and spectacle as its primary strategies. Founded by Doug Hall, Diane Andrews Hall, and Jody Procter in 1970.
Ant Farm also created the fabled Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, TX. Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation and sculpture created in 1974 by Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels, who
were a part of the art group Ant Farm, and it consists of what were (when
originally installed during 1974) either older running used or junk Cadillac automobiles,
representing a number of evolutions of the car line (most notably the birth and
death of the defining feature of early Cadillacs; the tail fin) from 1949 to
1963, half-buried nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that
of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, The piece is a statement about the
paradoxical simultaneous American fascinations with both a "sense of
place" — and
roadside attractions, such as The Ranch itself — and the mobility and
freedom of the automobile. [from Wikipedia]
Reach the Cadillac Ranch website by CLICKING HERE.
Just west of Plant City, Florida, on I-4 near the bustling metropolis of Thanotosassa is this incarnation of the same theme photographed by Bill:
