Digs at convention

In 1968, Chip Lord and Doug Michels, both recent architecture school graduates, found themselves in San Francisco making plans. They wanted to build structures that would blend pop culture icons with counterculture irreverence. Alternative architecture, they told one friend. Like an underground newspaper, they explained.

You mean, the friend replied, like an ant farm.

Exactly.

“We wanted to be an architecture group that was more like a rock band,” Michels recalled in one interview.

“There was revolution in the air,” Lord says from his home in San Francisco. “We wanted to establish a countercultural practice of architecture. We weren’t going to grovel to get a branch bank commission.”

Thus was born Ant Farm, a collective of radical architects-cum-performance artists who announced themselves to their colleagues by disrupting an American Institute of Architects meeting to pass out a manifesto. Before long, the group was actually implementing its first designs: inflatable structures, some as large as 100 feet in both length and width, made from polyethylene and tape and puffed up by secondhand fans from Goodwill.

Then things got weird. Planting Cadillacs in a Texas wheat field. Restaging the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for a film. Driving a car through a wall of burning TVs.

Now Ant Farm, which started as a revolt against the staid strictures of the academy, has at last been embraced by those same institutions. The Berkeley Art Museum, for one, has organized the first retrospective on the group.

“Ant Farm 1968-1978” chronicles a decade of frenetic activity featuring more than 200 objects, photos, drawings, videos and the 1959 Cadillac that plowed through the wall of TVs. The show is on display in Berkeley until April 26, after which it moves to the Santa Monica Museum of Art (July 2 to Aug. 14) before traveling the country through 2005.

“Ant Farm was trying to find a way around traditional architecture,” says Constance Lewallen, a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum. “They were serious but also ironic and funny. Their projects were not so much meant to be built as to stimulate thought. A lot of their ideas wound up being adopted later. They were prescient, and they really bridged a lot of worlds.”

Lord and Michels (who shifted their base between San Francisco and Houston, where they had teaching jobs) were soon joined by other core members Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez and W. Douglas Hurr.

The collective tried to challenge the notion of what architecture could be. The inflatable structures, for example, were cheap and portable, the space-age equivalent of a nomad’s yurt. The Whole Earth Catalog briefly ran an office inside a 50-foot inflatable rectangle. And the group tried to make its blueprints available to the public, publishing a how-to manual called the “Inflatocookbook.”

“The inflatables were fun to do,” recalls Marquez, a Los Angeles-based artist. “We lived in one for an entire summer in Vermont.”

Although much of the group’s work appealed to the counterculture, some of its projects were solidly bourgeois. Ant Farm designed a Convention City, a giant TV studio intended as a permanent home for political nominating conferences. And a Houston developer commissioned plans for a mall catering to teenagers. The design, called Freedomland, featured an inflatable roof. The venture never got off the ground.

Some Ant Farm designs actually got built. There was the visual arts building at Antioch College in Ohio, a bright yellow metal warehouse with a slanting glass roof. And the award-winning House of the Century, a ferro-cement, biomorphic dwelling on the edge of a lake in Angleton, Texas (which was later heavily damaged by a flood).

Political performances

But Ant Farm is less remembered for its architecture than for its spectacles. In 1969, for example, Ant Farm staged its first performance piece, “Plastic Businessman,” in which members dressed in suits invaded a vending machine room at a corporate office and handed out cash -- recording the event (including their arrest for trespassing) on film.

“The performances were pure politics,” Marquez says. “It was our way of protesting corporate America taking over the culture. It was a culture war, but it was a lot of fun. A lot of people on the same wavelength as us didn’t have any fun and were totally humorless. We weren’t going to do anything if it wasn’t fun.”

That fun, curator Lewallen explains, turns out to have been influential as well.

“Ant Farm was at the very beginning of what we now call Conceptual art,” she says. “Conceptual art arose in a lot of places around the same time. A lot of artists didn’t want to participate in the commercial art world. It was part of a whole contemporary zeitgeist. It has all been co-opted now, of course. It has become part of the academy.”

As have many of the Ant Farmers: Today Lord is the chairman of the film and digital media department at UC Santa Cruz; Michels taught at, among other places, UCLA and the University of Houston.

“It’s more than ironic,” says Marquez, who attended the opening in Berkeley. “About half of the people who used to be in Ant Farm are in the ivory tower now. It was exactly the same crowd we used to disrupt by lighting railroad flares at museum openings. At this opening, them was us. It was just despicable. Three or four people told me to calm down. All of these people are concerned about their tenure.”

Unlike architecture, which is mostly about planning, Ant Farm early on realized that performance art was more like playing jazz, which thrives on improvisation.

The group went on a trip in what was dubbed the Media Van (a Chevrolet customized into a mobile TV studio), stopping at campuses across the country, demonstrating designs, such as an inflatable solar-powered shower, and having fun, such as meeting an aspiring lounge singer at a carwash and bringing him to Yale to make his debut before surprised students and faculty at the university’s architecture school.

Then in 1974, Lord, Michels and Marquez created the group’s most iconic work, “Cadillac Ranch.” The trio purchased 10 old Caddies and half-buried the cars nose first along Interstate 40 in Amarillo, Texas. The procession of tailfins jutting out of the earth became an instant icon, a song by Bruce Springsteen, a prop in countless ads selling everything from Volvos and Lincolns to computers and cafes and an unlikely tourist attraction.

“Its Stonehenge quality precisely suggests the work of a cult willing to go to absurd lengths in worship of an object of totally strange character,” Michael Sorkin writes in the exhibition catalog. “It’s like a lot of their work: double-edged,” Lewallen says. “They loved Cadillacs, but it was also a critique of planned obsolescence. It was both a critique and an embrace.”

(When Michels died in June, Stanley Marsh III, who had commissioned the work for his ranch, had the row of tailfins painted black.)

Ant Farm members might have loved Cadillacs, but they sure were tough on them. In 1975, for instance, Michels and Schreier drove a 1959 Caddie through a pyramid of flaming televisions, an event called “Media Burn” that became a seminal video and a hugely popular postcard. The car, customized to resemble the Batmobile, wound up in the Morgan Gallery in Kansas City, Mo., and was shipped to Berkeley for the show.

“It was highly symbolic,” Lord says. “We were car-obsessed kids and the Cadillac was the ultimate status symbol.”

Later that year, the group filmed a reenactment of Kennedy’s assassination in Dealey Plaza, a weird homage to the Abraham Zapruder film (Michels dressed in drag to play Jacqueline Kennedy).

The following years saw the group bury an Oldsmobile station wagon filled with magazines and household goods at Artpark in New York as well as stage “CARmen,” an opera for 35 autos performed in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Ned Telly of the group ran for mayor of Sydney (he finished third).

In 1978 a fire destroyed the Ant Farm studio on San Francisco’s Pier 40 and the group officially broke up.

“Fires and floods seem to plague them,” Lewallen says. “It’s kind of biblical.”