SPACE, LAND AND TIME: UNDERGROUND ADVENTURES WITH ANT FARM (2011) Directed by Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison
The event is presented in conjunction with West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, on view at MCAM from June 12- September 1, 2013.
Before Burning Man, before The Yes Men, before South Park, before flash mobs, there was Ant Farm, the prototypical underground culture jamming architectural firm and performance art and media collective whose antics and anarchic guerrilla theatre paved the way for future armies of freethinkers and public artists.
Born in San Francisco out of the subversive counterculture ethos of the 1960s, founders Chip Lord and Doug Michels, and later Curtis Schreier and Hudson Marquez, sought initially to challenge the conventional notions of how buildings and living spaces were conceived. They eventually evolved into an “art agency that [promoted] ideas that [had] no commercial potential, but which [they thought were] important vehicles of cultural introspection.”
This film is a potent combination of video, music, animation and editing that captures the spirit of this underground group, which mixed political subversion and goofy good times to create an art movement that resonates today.
Followed by a Q&A with original Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier.
Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
