Ant Farm (1968-1978)

GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Ant Farm can safely be called Texas's best known and most subversive art collective, one that continues to exert a fascination on subsequent generations of artists, curators, and critics for its incisive critique of contemporary culture through ostensibly humorous means. Ant Farm played a crucial role in the emergence of video as artistic expression in the era of 1970s experimentation with the form. In its mock documentary aesthetic, Ant Farm's work parallels everything from institutional critique of French theorists and filmmakers, to the broad humor of the 1980s film This is Spinal Tap, taking advantage of the rapt attention we pay to the moving image to subvert traditional ideas about how ideas and beliefs come into common currency in our media-dominated era. The members of Ant Farm were the architects Chip Lord (1944-) and Doug Michels (1943-2003), and video artists Hudson Marquez (1946- ) and Curtis Schreier (1944- ).

Adapted from
Charles Wylie, DMA unpublished material, 2005.

NOTES 

ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS (list applicable note links)

AUDIO ASSETS 

VIDEO ASSETS 

IMAGE ASSETS 

WEB RESOURCES 

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES (digitized/non-digitized)

FUN FACTS 

TEACHING IDEAS

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General Description
Ant Farm can safely be called Texas's best known and most subversive art collective, one that continues to exert a fascination on subsequent generations of artists, curators, and critics for its incisive critique of contemporary culture through ostensibly humorous means. Ant Farm played a crucial role in the emergence of video as artistic expression in the era of 1970s experimentation with the form. In its mock documentary aesthetic, Ant Farm's work parallels everything from institutional critique of French theorists and filmmakers, to the broad humor of the 1980s film This is Spinal Tap, taking advantage of the rapt attention we pay to the moving image to subvert traditional ideas about how ideas and beliefs come into common currency in our media-dominated era. The members of Ant Farm were the architects Chip Lord (1944-) and Doug Michels (1943-2003), and video artists Hudson Marquez (1946- ) and Curtis Schreier (1944- ).

Adapted from
Charles Wylie, DMA unpublished material, 2005.

Fun Facts
 

Archival Resources
(digitized/non-digitized)

Web Resources
 

Notes
 

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id
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*Contemporary Art
Texas (state/United States): TGN: 7007826
video art: AAT: 300102067
Ant Farm: ULAN: 500116257
Lord_Chip: ULAN: 500014939
Marquez_Hudson: ULAN: 500116255
Michels_Doug: ULAN: 500005713
Schreier_Curtis: ULAN: 500116256
artists' collectives: AAT: 300265433
source file
artists_and_designers-0231.xml.nores