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Archive Fever: Ant Farm's Media Burn

By Peggy Roalf   Monday April 23, 2018

A media event is something that happens only because someone made it happen. Today, the top producer of media events is arguably Donald J. Trump. But between 1968 and 1978, the Bay Area artists’ collective known as Ant Farm used performance art as a platform to publicly announce their disenfranchised view of consumptive culture and media.

For their 1975 piece, Media Burn, performed in the parking lot of San Francisco’s Cow Palace, they satirized TV news and car culture, which were deeply entwined through highly produced TV commercials. 


Although the actual event, in which a hybrid Cadillac called the Phantom Dream Car is driven through a wall of televisions set ablaze with kerosene, only lasted a few minutes, the entire work consisted of the elaborate staging of the event, with press invites, media attendees, hired security guards [off-duty police] and the general public, all of which is documented in Media Burn, the resulting video. 


The tape includes interviews with invited guests, a speech given by fellow media artist Doug Hall as President John F. Kennedy [left] explaining the message of Media Burn [''Now I ask you, my fellow Americans, haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?”],the dramatic unveiling of the Phantom Dream Car, several sequences of the car smashing through the TV sets, and its triumphant return from the end of the Cow Palace parking lot.

What started as a radical tongue-in-cheek sendup became a multilayered work, complete with frequent repetition of scenes (à la French New Wave cinema), reactions from the public and postassassination interviews with Kennedy, who tells the camera, ''I am in reality only another image on your screen.'' This and other Ant Farm videos are available at Electronic Arts Intermix (www.eai.org).
View clips of Media Burn here and here
S
ee video about Ant Farm, Space, Land and Time by Beth Federici here


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