Ant Farm - The Lighthouse

Famous for staging media events, which take their form from a synthesis of sixties-style happenings and staged televisual events, Ant Farm commented upon a mediatized society by using the Situationist trick of detournement to appropriate and reconfigure the media's techniques in order to critique it best. Documented in a series of films from the seventies, Ant Farm created the landmark 'Chevy Ranch', for which they half-buried a series of Chevrolets, ordered from recent model to vintage, in the ground. They also expressed their dissatisfaction with media-led society by crashing a souped-up car into a pile of televisions, preceded by a left-wing, anti-war speech by a John Kennedy imitator. The work, which is both fascinating and crass, comes across like the Jackass mob if they'd studied Continental theory: a flippant, slightly dumb form of socially concerned art. [Jasper Hamill]