Ant Farm: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The picture that rise s from the Berkeley Art Museum's fascinating retrospective of Ant Farm, the experimental architecture collective baseed by Chip Lord and Doug Michels in 1968 is single of relentless flatness. Co-organized by means of Constance Lewallen, senior curator of exhibitions, and Steve Seid, video curator at the Pacific Film Archive, the present to view overwhelms as an endless horizon of two-dimensional stuff: All matter of ephemera, expansive wall body s and publicity material test the audience's readerly skills as plenteous as their visual inclinations. This quite literally superficial gestalt may at first have the appearance at odds with the group's subterraneous ambitions. Ant Farm, after all, appropriated for its collective identity the subterranean metaphor of an insect colony tunneling beneath the earth; and in the group's repeated exchanges with the counterculture's techno-literati--among them Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, the bard bard of Whole Earth Catalog fame--they might appear your prototypical hippie jeopardy hostile to the advances of Spectacle and insistently digging beneath the surface of things.

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A quick glance at a certain number of of the group's documentation have the appearances to bear this reading out: No doubt the keep-on-truckin' etho of the 1960 and early '70 set shaggy, psychedelic expression in Ant Farm's designs for living, varied performances, and witty media critiques. However, individual of the show's many powers is that it reveals that Ant Farm's works cannot be reduc to shopworn cliches about the ear's wholly subversive (read: underground) strategies on the other hand provides a far more composite image of such practices--practices that the pair lambaste and gently affirm American popular tillage By appealing to the collective's larger historical throw the exhibition demonstrates how the architectural and, through extension, spatial concerns of the emerging information age were reimagined as utopian planes of communication.

At first take--an erroneous take, it extremitys be said--the exhibition's design present the appearances somewhat artless, as if organizing the exhibit amounted to little more than emptying without the contents of a file cabinet. Clusters of vitrines are filled to bursting with alphabetic characters drawings, photographs, posters, books, stickers, and twig lithographs, while flat-panel screens showcase performance circumstances and architectural sites. A continuous time line, designed through the group, wraps around the main gallery and provides a useful chronological overview for the diversity of their investigations. It's telling that the time line registers sustained forays into the world of graphic design, since the couple Lord and Michels played significant parts in the evolution of supergraphics, the monumentalizing of graphic design to architectural scale in like manner popular in the 1960 and '70 Indeed, save for the Phantom Dream Car from their famous video Media consume 1975, which is stationed in the museum lobby and an inflatable architectural original at the front of the gallery, the exhibit itself resembles an exploded supergraphic.

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You could claim that the absence of more object-based material is the flow of the fire that gutt Ant Farm's San Francisco warehouse in 1978 destroying abundant of their work and ultimately leading to the group's disbanding. In actuality, although the appearance of flatness dramatizes a long-standing inquiry into the spaces of communication and the historical press surrounding notions of collective identity in the new-media age. Think of Ant Farm's architectural and media efforts as an attempt to network communities inflected by means of the ascendance of television, video, and computer in the 1960 These shoot forwards entail not only a profoundly disparate use of media (which remind ofs the cultural ferment around the linking of communications technologies at the time) on the other hand also the distribution of of the like kind information in both printed matter and time-based documentation, as well as performances that self-consciously internalize media strategies. Ant Farm's practice cannot be described as purely pluralistic or profligate for this reason. upon the contrary, its visual range demonstrates the systematic nature of their explorations across the media spectrum

The exhibition makes these affects explicit in at least sum of two units ways, identifiable by the twinned limits of the "pneumatic" and the "nomadic." The neighborhood of inflatables in the present to view (or more accurately, the documentation of like structures) positions the group as individual of a number of collectives in the 1960 courting the potential of pneumatic architecture (their Italian parallels would include Archigram and Superstudio, whom Ant Farm claimed as decisive influences). Early works of that kind as 50 X 50' Pillow, 1969 created as a production studio for a appendix to the Whole Earth Catalog, saw the cluster staging temporary installations across California. An enlarged version of Pillow met its extremity at the notorious, ill-fated stone concert at Altamont, where it serv as the concert's medical center or what Chip Lord called the "bad-trips pavilion." Photographs of these and related works typically picture massive translucent makes shaped like their namesake pillows, station in remote sun-baked landscapes. The vicinity of bare-chested or naked longhairs cavorting in their interiors and across their surfaces infuse these images with the apposite period flavor.