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Art and...

How does the Citizen's Time Capsule embody the intersections between Art and other subjects? Democracy - The project allows for every willing participant's inclusion, de-centralizing and yielding control over larger narratives that are often used to limit inclusion in the retellings of history.

Nostalgia - The project reflects a human tendency to desire to hold on to things and connect with the past.

Preservation - All time capsules suggest a passing of time and the likelihood of loss and erasure that comes with it.

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Provocations: What Public, Whose Good?

Who is the public included by Ant Farm in their Citizen Time Capsule?

Ant Farm didn't discriminate, since the project functioned by placing adverts in newspapers asking for submissions to the project. Anyone who came across the ad, or heard of the matter by mouth by someone who had seen the ad, was welcome to submit. Meanwhile, all time capsule projects share roughly the same audience: someone in the future. Rather than curate a collection of items that would indicate a particular narrative or agenda, the Citizen's Time Capsule created a broader, more fragmented image of a moment in time, made all the more obscured by the improper methods of storage and preservation.

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Investigating / Challenging Conventions in Citizen's Time Capsule

In other words, how is the Citizen's Time Capsule by Ant Farm effective and transgressive?

In terms of social constructs, a number of angles are at play. At the forefront is the negotiation of who and what gets to be remembered by the culture at large. They are certainly not the first group to make a time capsule, but maybe uniquely the point isn't to leave remnants of a particular group to be discovered by related groups in the future (i.e. a high school, a small town, a group of friends) but rather to include anyone and anything willing to be included. It certainly wouldn't be conventional to include things like marijuana or potato chips in a time capsule, because we don't typically attach a lot of sentimentality to them. By allowing the public to submit whatever they wanted, Ant Farm questions the authoritative quality of those who have the power to determine what deserves remembering in the collective cultural consciousness.

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Art objects are bodies, and it is natural for bodies to be lost to time, but it is meaningful to hold on, keep, and pass down. Not everything can be kept, but every article from the past has value, even if only to illuminate horror and honor brutal experience. How we remember them, contextualize them, choose to preserve them, matters. Artists, archivists, conservators, curators and educators will be increasingly crucial for this. If we are indeed entering a chapter of global erasure, we should look to artists to encapsulate all things possible to bury, to pickle, to hide, to be recovered.

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"Ant Farm was part of a 1970s art movement that extended from America to England and Italy that Ken Johnson of The New York Times described as drawing variously “on Dada, Pop Art, hippie culture, science fiction and utopian traditions in the interest of shaking up, if not totally razing, established architectural theories and practices.” Ant Farm’s idol was Buckminster Fuller, whom the collective actually kidnapped for a day in 1969.

Ant Farm co-founder Doug Michels died in 2003. Four years later, its remaining members Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier—today in their 70s—joined forces with Bruce Tomb, about ten years their junior, to form LST (whose moniker is formed from the first letter of each surname). All were trained as architects.

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Citizens Time Capsule was created by placing a newspaper ad inviting contributions from the community. The handwritten logs of what was contributed by whom and why are on view at Pioneer Works. The logs make for entertaining reading: children’s toys, personal memorabilia, magazines of the day, marijuana, a can of Pringle’s potato chips (new at the time), and hundreds of other items. Schreier described the process: citizens donated items that were put into second-hand suitcases for display at a well-attended public performance event in Lewiston, NY. The event was held at the storied Artpark, which originated as a mecca for land art works in honor of Robert Smithson. Until Artpark shifted its focus to being a concert venue, more than 200 artists and collectives created art and installations over the course of a decade.

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To bury Citizens Time Capsule, the suitcases were wrapped in plastic and packed into a 1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, which was itself wrapped in plastic and buried on the Artpark land. All parties agree that Citizens Time Capsule was to be disinterred 25 years later, in 2000. But Artpark was found to have been built on contaminated soil, and the soil was later declared an environmental hazard. As a result, The New York State Parks department, which oversees the land, has not permitted the artwork to be removed, citing environmental concerns. A Parks spokesperson declined to comment or explain what conditions and protocols would be needed to allow the removal of the artwork.

��Doug Michels spent a lot of energy trying to get people interested in excavating it,” said Chip Lord. Some of that correspondence is on view at Pioneer Works.  But Lord encouraged evenhandedness: “It doesn’t do anybody any good to be angry about it.”

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‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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Ant Farm was a group of radical architects, designers, and media artists active from 1968-1978. Perhaps most well known for creating the iconic Cadillac Ranch and pulling off spectacular media events like Media Burn (1975), the group also created a variety of video works, popularized inflatable architecture, and produced participatory performances and a futuristic house in Texas (House of the Century, 1972). The core members — Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Hudson Marquez, and Curtis Schreier — sustained an interest in American cultural iconography, nomadic living, technology, and big cars over a ten year collaborative career. The group officially disbanded in 1978, following a devastating studio fire. Doug Michels, one of the original members of Ant Farm, died in 2003.

LST is a contemporary group including Ant Farm members Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier joined by the artist and architect Bruce Tomb. The contemporary group formed around the creation of the Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule], which contains the Media HUQQUH. The HUQQUH is a digital media time capsule creation device which uploads files from participants. The first iteration of the Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule] was created for The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, a 2008 exhibition at SFMOMA. (which also holds a number of Ant Farm works in its collection). [...]

Ant Farm’s time capsules deviated from typical examples of the form: they did not preserve a stable cultural self-portrait that could persist through time. Rather, encased within everyday objects such as a refrigerator and a 1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser (Citizens Time Capsule, 1975), they were defiantly homemade with little promise of endurance. Whether destroyed, stolen, lost, or deemed “environmentally hazardous,” each work was a categorical failure, underscoring the humor and countercultural critique at the core of the Ant Farm and LST ethos. [...]

Filling the entirePioneer Works main exhibition space is a monumental inflatable structure custom-designed by LST that recalls Ant Farm’s radical architectural environments from the sixties and seventies. The transitory structure cocoons the exhibition’s main feature: Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule] (2008-2016), a contemporary interactive media sculpture and time capsule by LST that re-envisions Ant Farm’s historic 1971 Media Van. Within the contemporary version, a device called the HUQQUH, randomly downloads media files from participants’ smartphones throughout the duration of the exhibition. The compiled data creates a digital time capsule at Pioneer Works.

Digital archives and the nature of time perception is further explored through Time Capsule Triptych (2009). This 18-foot-long work by LST consists of three parts: an installation of over 4,000 digital audio and visual files collected through the HUQQUH in 2008; a video documentation of the (fictional) reemergence of the original Media Van from a missile silo in California; and an architectural rendering of the future resting place of the contemporary media van / time capsule. Together, the media within the triptych manifests a larger artistic fiction that attempts to document the past (discovery of the 1971 Media Van), frame the present (digital archive from the contemporary media van), and posit the future (the eventual site of the contemporary media van).

Over the course of five decades, and specifically through their time capsule works, Ant Farm and LST have routinely transcended disciplinary boundaries and, through experimentation, pioneered new artistic mediums. Through this exhibition, Pioneer Works celebrates and learns from those who established the practices and approaches that the organization strives to foster and emulate.