January 15-March 5, 2005

Ant Farm was formed in 1968 in San Francisco by two renegade young architects, Doug Michels and Chip Lord, who were eager to find alternatives to the styles and practices of their day, approaches that were more in synch with the revolutionary spirit of the times. A friend compared their aspirations to a toy Ant Farm, ubiquitous in the sixties, where frenetic activity takes place below the surface and collectivity is a way of life. Recognizing the aptness of this comparison, Michels and Lord adopted the name immediately and it stuck. Ant Farm grew into a loose collective of architects and artists, among them Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Hurr who would join the underground activities of the group in one project or another over the course of the ten years of its existence. Originally operating out of San Francisco, Ant Farm's activities eventually oscillated between that Bay Area city and Houston, with Michels, Lord, and Schreier as the three principals.

Idealistic to the core, Ant Farm embraced the youth culture's communal living, sexual liberation, mind-altering drugs, and utopian ideals. Determined to work outside of traditional architecture and its 1960s Brutalist manifestations, and inspired by Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Solari as well as the utopian European architecture group Archigram, Ant Farm set out to create an architecture suited to a nomadic lifestyle, developing giant inflatable structures that were easy and cheap to build and transport. Touring colleges and universities in their Media Van, a modified Chevrolet van, and using the ICE-9, an inflatable prototype, they staged architectural happenings and how-to workshops of legendary stature.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their revolutionary stance, Ant Farm was eventually commissioned to build three architectural projects, including the 1973 award-winning House of the Century in Angleton, Texas, commissioned by Houston collectors Marilyn and Alvin Lubetkin. Designed to look like a futuristic machine inspired by the car and space culture, it was built in fourteen months by three Ant Farm members. After flooding in 1985, all that is left today is a ruin; fortunately photographs and drawings remain to document its visionary quality. Unbuilt projects include a shopping mall for teenagers, a state-of-the-art facility for political conventions, and a sea station where humans and dolphins could communicate.

It quickly became clear that a single discipline would not satisfy the group's wide-ranging interests. Early on they gravitated to new art forms such as performance and video, then emerging in the Bay Area, especially in Anna and Lawrence Halprin's workshop for dancers and architects, of which Lord had firsthand experience. As soon as the first Sony Portapak video cameras became commercially available, Ant Farm not only started documenting their happenings but also soon began to explore the expressive potential of video itself, creating some of the first and most iconic works in these disciplines. The best known is Media Burn, a performance turned video image, originating on July 4, 1975, in the parking lot of San Francisco's Cow Palace. In a literal collision of two American icons-the car and the television-Ant Farmers Michels and Schreier, costumed as astronauts or space cowboys, drove a modified 1959 Cadillac (the Phantom Dream Car) through a pyramid of flaming televisions. In creating a widely broadcast media image, Ant Farm managed to exploit the very medium it critiqued.

Ant Farm collaborated with other video collectives to create alternative video coverage of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1972, and most famously to create a reenactment on video of the famous Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination. The Eternal Flame, also 1975, was conceived as a quintessential comment on the replacement of real experience and memory with its mass-media version, a phenomenon only too familiar today as exemplified in the countless repetitions of the World Trade Center attacks.

Ant Farm's work embraces icons of American culture-such as cars, television, space travel, and the Kennedys-while simultaneously deconstructing and critiquing the underlying mechanism of the establishment these icons represent. No one piece could exemplify this more than the 1974 Cadillac Ranch, commissioned by Stanley Marsh 3. In creating this Texas icon of public art, Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels partially buried ten Cadillacs dating from 1948 to 1964 in the ground along Route 66. With their tailfins charting the history of a design, Cadillac Ranch becomes a dual symbol of progress and obsolescence.

When a 1978 fire in their San Francisco studio destroyed much of their work, the Ant Farm era came to an end. Fortunately for us, enough ephemeral material was left to mount this exhibition, which charts their myriad activities with blueprints, publications, documents, drawings, collages, photographs, architectural models, and documentary video clips recounting the Ant Farm story, including a video program drawn from holdings in the Pacific Film Archive, and recreations of ICE-9 and the Refrigerator Capsule. The exhibition Ant Farm, 1968-78 is organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and is cosponsored by the College of Environmental Design and Department of Architecture and will be on view from January 15 through March 5, 2005. Concurrent with this exhibition The Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture will present "Doug Michels: Beyond the Ant Farm" in the Gallery of the Architecture Building.