Ant Farm, 1968-1978

Ant Farm, 1968-1978

Author: Constance Lewallen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780520240308

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The Present is the Form of All Life

The Present is the Form of All Life

Author: Liz Flyntz

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781945711015

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Perhaps best known for the iconic desert monolith "Cadillac Ranch" and stunts like "Media Burn," the radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm created an abundance of works across disciplines--including video, publications, built environments and performances. Throughout their career (1968-79), Ant Farm conceived a series of time capsules that focused not on the eternal but rather on the fleeting aspects of postwar American culture: consumer goods, media archives and tchotchkes. For various reasons, all of Ant Farm's time capsules failed to function, that is, to be opened at the allotted future time and the intact contents examined. Ant Farm's successor group, LST, has taken up the project with their contemporary work "Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule]" (2008). This work not only functions but updates the original's line of questioning, exploring notions of the time capsule in the digital age. The Present Is the Form of All Life represents the first comprehensive documentation of these overlooked ephemeral works. Including many previously unpublished images, this publication also boasts essays by Constance M. Lewallen, Steve Seid and Gabriella Giannachi, and a discussion between curator Rudolf Frieling and LST.


State of Mind

State of Mind

Author: Constance Lewallen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-10-31

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0520270614

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"There is not a trace of the provincial nor the apologetic in the tone of the State of Mind texts. Rather there is a justified claim for the sophisticated originality of this Californian art—sophisticated because the authors have convincingly argued that the artists, for the most part, had many conscious connections and familiarity with art from the rest of the country and Europe, yet were driven by a desire to be independent and different." —Moira Roth, editor and contributor, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980 "State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is an essential overview of the rich and complex moment when California assumed its role as a leading center for the making and exhibition of the kind of adventurous and progressive art that immediately fascinated the world, and over the years has come to define a generation and a region. An unmatched source of hard-to-find primary images combined with thought-provoking critical essays, this book can easily function as a standard text on this subject.” —David Ross, former director of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and currently Chairman of the MFA program in Art Practice at The School of Visual Arts


ANT FARM: LIVING ARCHIVE 7

ANT FARM: LIVING ARCHIVE 7

Author: Felicity Scott

Publisher: Actar D, Inc.

Published: 2021-04-29

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1638409404

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Felicity D. Scott revisits the architectural, art, video, and intermedia practices of the experimental collective Ant Farm, self-described ¨super-radical activist environmentalists.¨ Drawing together archival material on their extended fields of practice, Ant Farm features the first full-color publication of the complete Ant Farm Timeline, as well as Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout (1969) and an archival dossier on Ant Farm's Truckstop Network (1970-1972). The Ant Farm architects produced experimental works on the "fringe of architecture" (1968-1978) and were influential video artists. Felicity D. Scott is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and a founding editor of Grey Room.


Burnt Offerings: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

Burnt Offerings: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

Author: Steve Seid

Publisher: Inventory Press

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781941753354

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A detailed account of Ant Farm's 1975 Media Burn performance, a legendary act of consumerist critique This book examines the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing Ant Farm's seminal 1975 performance Media Burn in which a customized Cadillac, dubbed the Phantom Dream Car, was driven through a wall of burning television sets. Originally conceived as a conceptual architectural practice, Ant Farm evolved into a full-service art collaborative, culminating in such notable works as House of the Century (1971-73), Cadillac Ranch (1974) and The Eternal Frame (1975). In Media Burn the artists flourished in a rich tumult of ideas that engaged contemporary media theory, an oddly complicated aesthetic spectacle, textual appropriation and an all-encompassing branding effort. Written by Steve Seid (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive), and drawing upon a rich visual documentation, this book delves into the little-known critical backstory to this influential performance (and video work) involving a massive effort to mount a subversive critique of media hegemony while continually re-imagining the crux of the performance itself.


500 Capp Street

500 Capp Street

Author: Constance Lewallen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 0520280288

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500 Capp Street tells the story of David IrelandÕs house, a rundown Victorian in the Mission District of San Francisco that the artist transformed into an environmental artwork, taking the detritus of his restoration labors as well as objects left behind by previous owners and refashioning them into sculptures. Constance M. Lewallen begins by recounting the history of the house from 1886, when it was built, until Ireland acquired it in 1975. She then details IrelandÕs renovation and continuing engagement with the site that served simultaneously as his residence, studio, and evolving artwork; the houseÕs influence on his own work and that of artists who followed him; and its relationship to other house museums. An introduction by Jock Reynolds, who was close to the artist for many years, chronicles the social scene that developed around 500 Capp Street in the 1980s. The book also includes a 1983 article on the house by renowned poet John Ashbery. Illustrated with a generous selection of photographs taken over the years by the artist and his many visitors, this is an invaluable and intimate record of IrelandÕs best-known work. 500 Capp Street is essential reading for anyone interested in the artistic and cultural history of the San Francisco Bay Area and the California conceptual art movement.


To Life!

To Life!

Author: Linda Weintraub

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0520273613

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This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.


A Rose Has No Teeth

A Rose Has No Teeth

Author: Constance Lewallen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-01-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California. This text explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s.


A Prehistory of the Cloud

A Prehistory of the Cloud

Author: Tung-Hui Hu

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-08-21

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0262330105

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The militarized legacy of the digital cloud: how the cloud grew out of older network technologies and politics. We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence. In this book, Tung-Hui Hu examines the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud. Hu shows that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits. He describes key moments in the prehistory of the cloud, from the game “Spacewar” as exemplar of time-sharing computers to Cold War bunkers that were later reused as data centers. Countering the popular perception of a new “cloudlike” political power that is dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts digital technologies onto older ways of exerting power over a population. But because we invest the cloud with cultural fantasies about security and participation, we fail to recognize its militarized origins and ideology. Moving between the materiality of the technology itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu's account offers a set of new tools for rethinking the contemporary digital environment.


West of Center

West of Center

Author: Elissa Auther

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0816677255

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Recovering the art and lifestyle of the counterculture in the American West in the 1960s and '70s