Media Burn
Steve Seid
Inventory Press/RITE Editions, November 2020
Paperback | 9 x 12 inches | 128 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1941753354 | $35.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Ant Farm, the conceptual architectural practice turned art collaborative, is known for such distinctive works as House of the Century (1971–73), Cadillac Ranch (1974), and The Eternal Frame (1975).
Of equal notoriety is Media Burn, Ant Farm’s legendary 1975 performance, in which a radically customized Cadillac was driven through a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image is a vibrant assessment of the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing this collision of twentieth-century icons.
Author Steve Seid (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive) probes the little-known critical backstory of this bold performance (and resulting video work) and its irreverent effort to mount a subversive critique of media hegemony while reimagining the core meaning of performance itself.
Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image examines car culture, image proliferation, and radical architectural practice, and offers a close read of Media Burn’s numerous texts, speeches, ephemera, and artifacts.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Since at least creating A Weekly Dose of Architecture in 1999, my writing has been predominantly bite-sized, more than 140 characters but far short of long-form writing. Even the books I've written take the "dose"-length writing of that blog and its offshoots into print form. But when it comes to the books I read, my favorites are case studies: in-depth histories of buildings, landscapes, books, films, events, and other things of interest. One of the most refreshing such books I've encountered recently is Steve Seid's account of Ant Farm's Media Burn, which took place on July 4, 1975, in San Francisco.
The subtitle of the book reads, in part, "the making of an image," and for sure many people who were nowhere near the Cow Palace on that Independence Day are nevertheless familiar with the image: a dramatically modified Cadillac driving through a wall of ablaze television sets. It's the image on the cover of the book, on a postcard accompanying the book, and on many of its pages, different photos from different vantage points taken at slightly different moments. But for Ant Farm — the collective of architects/artists who created the event — and for Seid, the image is part of a larger process and critique that the image cannot be divorced from.
Ant Farm, working on projects in Texas in the early 1970s (most famous was Cadillac Ranch), tried to mount a similar event in Houston in October 1974. Easy Money would have seen three members of Ant Farm drive a modified 1958 Ford Thunderbird "thru a pyramid of burning TV sets" (second spread below). That event, which would have also included the production of a 30-minute video documentary, didn't happen, but it is presented in the first part of Seid's book as just one of many car- and media-focused artworks by Ant Farm, sketched out during the slow evolution to what would become Media Burn.
While the first part of the book analyzes the events leading up to July 4, 1975, the second focuses on the day itself, which also consisted of a speech by the "Artist-President" ahead of the Cadillac's journey through the wall of TVs. If the image was instantaneous, the Cadillac accelerating from zero to impact was fifteen seconds, and the documentary Ant Farm made on it was 23 minutes, the true duration of Media Burn is impossible to quantify. The happening had years of gestation, media outlets picked up the story in local news, and the image of the moment of impact has lived for decades since; this book is evidence of that.
Seid's account of Media Burn is far from a dry retelling of what led up to it, what transpired that day, and what later grew out of the event; the last is addressed in the book's third and last part. Seid was a curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and accordingly his text is critical, searching for meaning in every detail. There's no shortage of meaning in the collision of a fast-moving car anda burning wall of TVs, but Seid skillfully explores ideas that are far from obvious. The text is intellectually stimulating and dense, yet highly readable. But the book is also a visual treat, with the original $1 program reprinted on its pages, stills from the video (fourth spread), and lots of images beyond that single, iconic image.
SPREADS:
