Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image

A detailed account of Ant Farm's 1975 Media Burn performance, a legendary act of consumerist critique

This book examines the complex set of cultural references and art-making strategies informing Ant Farm's seminal 1975 performance Media Burn in which a customized Cadillac, dubbed the Phantom Dream Car, was driven through a wall of burning television sets.

Originally conceived as a conceptual architectural practice, Ant Farm evolved into a full-service art collaborative, culminating in such notable works as House of the Century (1971-73), Cadillac Ranch (1974) and The Eternal Frame (1975).

In Media Burn the artists flourished in a rich tumult of ideas that engaged contemporary media theory, an oddly complicated aesthetic spectacle, textual appropriation and an all-encompassing branding effort.

Written by Steve Seid (Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive), and drawing upon a rich visual documentation, this book delves into the little-known critical backstory to this influential performance (and video work) involving a massive effort to mount a subversive critique of media hegemony while continually re-imagining the crux of the performance itself.

Seid's work of art history, "Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of an Image," was published in November as a softbound book with full-bleed double-truck images and an account of the year it took to customize the Caddy into a land rocket called the Phantom Dream Car and accumulate 40 TV sets, many the living room console style in vogue at that time. The organization and documentation of "Media Burn" [is] nearly as complex as the staging of Cristo's "Running Fence," which was completed the next year along the hills in Marin and Sonoma counties.--Sam Whiting "San Francisco Chronicle"