Presidents and Precedents – Mitchell Miller

Ant Farm, Media Burn, July 4, 1975. Photograph by John F. Turner. Performance at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, CA.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper in 2003, Jonathan Jones set the birthday of video art around 1974 in the multiple video images of President Richard Nixon as the first inklings of Watergate slowly came to the public’s attention. Focused, with merciless intensity, on the TV rhetorician, video revealed its talent for penetration peeling away Nixon’s layers, to capture the deceit and desperation on his sweaty brow.

Jones was of course being provocative. Video art had existed since the late 60s but with the advent of relatively affordable equipment such as the Sony Portapak it became more accessible. Warhol had pre-empted the iconic Nixon-fizzog in his Vote McGovern silkscreen print of 1972. But Jones is correct in crediting Nixon as the negative inspiration for the first video artists, who survived his adolescence of presidential assassinations, Cold War and the Moon landing. Few were full-time filmmakers or photographers and video afforded them an opportunity to be truly amateur and entirely direct in expressing their confusion, their rage and their growing indignation. Video allowed the artist-activists to bypass all institutions and closed-shops.

Between 1968 and 1978 the Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, Doug Michels and Douglas Hurr, with the oft-co-opted Hudson Marquez) explored its potential as an integral part of their architectural and sculptural projects. Within the course of their investigations were numerous precedents for what would become video art. Their back catalogue recently received undivided attention at Glasgow’s Lighthouse, February to April, 2006, in an exhibit-installation by Rob Kennedy.

Entering a giant cardboard box-structure modelled on one of the Ant Farm’s "Time Capsules" the visitor is surrounded by artefacts and documentation from the group’s projects. But it is the stelae of televisions at its centre that confronts and holds the attention. Each screen simultaneously plays the Ant Farm DVD and Kennedy allows the bottom screen to disappear into the box, hinting perhaps, at an infinite repetition of the same event (surely the inherent promise of any video-tape). Kennedy’s exhibit is an elegant and clever means of both presenting the exhibit and commenting on it. Unable to house the full Ant Farm exhibit the Lighthouse has turned what could be a limitation into a virtue, allowing audiences to focus in depth on an oft-forgotten aspect of their work, a very atypical architectural display. As exhibitions manager Lucy MacEachan explained: "Architecture exhibitions tend to be models and boards, but Ant Farm looked from such a wide angle."

Described by Chip Lord as an "architectural rock-group," the Ant Farm were the products of the counter-cultural ferment of late 60s San Francisco. As underground architects they set out to prototype alternative forms of social and domestic organisation, based on concepts of mobility, natural forms, the moon landing and a consumerist brand of utopianism. They trialled inflatable structures made from household plastics, demonstrated in one of their earliest videos, Inflatables, a political convention centre modelled on Hollywood sets, Watergate and a mall custom-built for teenagers. The satirical strain to all of these projects represents a trend that increasingly dominated their output as the sourness of the 70s drew the cheeks ever in.

When Jones describes early video tapes as "the artefacts of conspiracy," he may have been thinking of Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame (1975), a mock-documentary of the Kennedy assassination that includes a full-scale re-enactment of the shooting in Dealey Plaza. Produced in collaboration with performance art collective, T.R. Uthco, the video disturbs precisely because it replicates the original (the Zapruder film) so well. An analogue of an analogue of a single event that was in itself, open to many differing interpretations and understandings, even by those who were there. Were the Zapruder film not already the historical equivalent of a snuff movie one could say it’s in unforgivably bad taste, T.R. Uthco’s Doug Hall is JFK and Ant Farm’s Michels is in drag as Jackie, but this was not the reason the FBI confiscated a copy. In The Eternal Frame the distinction between past and present is lost and the chain of evidence that forms our concept of history called into question.

In his book Expanded Cinema, 1970, Gene Youngblood noted that television functioned through selling a pre-stylised reality that sets out to convince us that it is raw, unaffected and artless. In the Eternal Frame, Ant Farm simply reverses this polarity to show that disaster and serendipity can quite easily be premeditated, that cherished American beliefs in either the transparency of public or their great journalistic tradition could no longer be maintained with any certainty.

The Eternal Frame was a sequel to Media Burn, easily the most famous of all Ant Farm’s video works. It produced the indelible image of a Cadillac crashing violently into a wall of television sets, a cliché almost as soon as it was realised. Media Burn is an even more successful poke at the pre-stylising of mainstream television. TV stations were summoned to a car park where the artist-president (once again, Doug Hall) would open the spectacle with an eloquent McLuhan-esque stump speech on media garbage. The TV stations provide footage that Ant Farm weaves into its own document of the event, which only happens because someone is there to watch it. One perceptive newscaster actually explains it for us, with a heroically straight face, "a media event only happens because someone made it happen, because the cameras are there."

In such a vein Media Burn riotously ups the ante, making art out of hype and a spectacle from an event with, in truth, no actual underlying substance, save for the Phantom Dream Car and several dozen broken TVs. The president is fake and his speech is fake. The corporate front of the Ant Farm is in reality, a conspiracy between four hippies. But it is the people’s conspiracy, out to reveal the overpowering of substance by raw meaning. In this, they were somewhat prophetic, one thinks of the Burmese government relocating wholesale to a purpose-built capital and Ant Farm projects such as Convention City, 1972.

Given its own space to enlighten and entertain in Glasgow’s cardboard cube, the tapes raise a smile and even send a few chills down the spine. We have clearly known for some time that image need have no relationship to actual substance or a Chief Executive to the truth. Presidents set their own precedents, as easily as Ant Farm manufactured their own media event. And with their fake Kennedy assassination, Ant Farm leave us with the uneasy realisation that there may really be no past or indeed, president.