Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes (1971)
Through November 16th, EAI is pleased to feature Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes (1971), a freewheeling Portapak time capsule that captures an array of vignettes in the day-to-day life of influential countercultural collective Ant Farm. In addition to being a fascinating document of the group’s activities, the video has the distinction of being the first title in EAI’s catalogue. Alongside our presentation, we are excited to feature a new text by Lori Zippay, Director Emerita of EAI, considering the video within the context of the early days of the organization’s distribution program and the nascent video culture.
Ant Farm, Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes
1971/2003, 8:30 min, b&w, sound
Viewing period for this work has ended.
“You’ve never seen anything like this before, ever”:
Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes, EAI Tape 001, and the New Art
by Lori Zippay
The original “database” of the EAI collection of video artworks is housed in a set of thirteen slightly worn leather-bound ledgers, some with their covers held together by silk ribbons, others by rubber bands. Each binder holds two columns of index cards, individually encased in plastic. Numbered from 002 to 612, the cards carry details of the first works to be catalogued in the EAI collection—title, year completed, running time, original format—along with anecdotal notations, handwritten in ink or pencil: “transfer needed,” “master borrowed by artist 2-5-75, never returned.” Together, these volumes weave a narrative of a future archive in its nascent form and reveal the generative ethos, eclecticism, and interdisciplinary impulses that shaped the early video art movement.
Spanning the years 1971 to 1975, the first 150 tapes logged in the ledgers provide a glimpse of a new artistic medium before a canon had fully taken root.¹ Titles that already in the 1970s were recognized as signal works in video art’s short history, such as Nam June Paik’s 1973 Global Groove (034), share a binder with the unexpected, the obscure, and the delightfully idiosyncratic: Jean Dubuffet’s Coucou Bazar (014) from 1971–73, for example, or Frank and Laura Cavestani’s 1973 Abbie Hoffman Makes Gefilte Fish (043), in which the Yippie activist delivers exactly what the title promises. Key figures of the American avant-garde, such as John Cage (Catch 44, 1971, 083) join lesser-known artists and works, like Doris Chase’s Calvin Hampton at Calgary Church (1973, 006), and others that seem to be lost to history altogether: Does anyone now remember Cynthia Grey’s Karma (025), or Tobe J. Carey’s Down in the Dumps (150)?
Images of EAI’s catalog ledgers, listing items #002 to #083.
The first 150 titles also reveal an astonishing cross-pollination—an intermix, if you will––of genres, ideas, and innovations advanced by artists and collectives using video as a new tool for creative experimentation and political activism. In the first ledger alone, we encounter Anthony Ramos’s harrowing conceptual performances, which confront racial injustice and reference his experiences in federal prison for resisting the draft during the Vietnam War; the intimate Portapak diaries of Shigeko Kubota; guerrilla television documentaries by the media collective TVTV; the sui generis ethnographic essays of Juan Downey, and electronic image processing explorations by Steina and Woody Vasulka, to cite just a few examples.
With their cryptic coding protocol (blue, yellow, or red tags were clipped to certain cards to indicate status and location) and informal notations, the leather-bound binders held and continue to hold any number of mysteries—including, for at least twenty years, the identity of tape 001. Although EAI’s Distribution Service was founded in 1973 as a new paradigm, an alternative model for providing access to artists’ video work, the card catalogue system was not devised until 1976. By 1981, the index card for tape 001 was missing and no physical tape with that designation was housed at EAI. The eureka moment came only in 2001, when Chip Lord, founding member of the experimental architecture, design, and media art collective Ant Farm, discovered a half-inch open reel tape bearing a sticker labeled “EAI 001” in his archive. The title: Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes.
The San Francisco Bay Area–based collective Ant Farm, which was active from 1968 to 1978, was founded by Lord and Doug Michels and later expanded to include Curtis Schreier, Douglas Hurr, Hudson Marquez, and other occasional members.² Promoting alternative forms of architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design, including inflatable structures and geodesic domes, the collective quickly recognized the potential of electronic media—in all its contradictory forms—to expand their practice, and they often integrated video and television into their projects and performances. In 1970, they created the Media Van, a Chevy van outfitted with a Portapak and video editing equipment. Self-described “media nomads,” Ant Farm documented their road trips in the van, holding events at colleges and other sites on what they called the Truckstop Network tour. Although the Media Van was as much a conceptual experiment as a fully realized project, its aim to connect disparate communities through accessible mobile communication technologies reflects the group’s prescience.
Ant Farm engaged in cultural critique with a prankster sensibility; their best-known works are hallmarks of countercultural performance art of the 1970s. In Cadillac Ranch (1974), they partially buried ten Cadillacs, fins up, in a field off Route 66; in Media Burn (1975), a customized Cadillac (the “Phantom Dream Car”) was driven into a pyramid of flaming television sets; and in The Eternal Frame (1975), a collaboration with the collective T.R. Uthco, they reenacted the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza through the lens of Abraham Zapruder’s iconic film of the event. The collective’s video documents of these actions became artworks in their own right.³
Recorded in 1971, Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes is a free-form countercultural time capsule, a rough-around-the-edges video journal of daily life with Ant Farm members, partners, and friends in their warehouse building on the waterfront in Sausalito. Lord describes it as “an anthology of clips from the first year of living with a portapak and it gives a fairly good representation of how we lived in those days—collectively, loosely, improvisationally.”⁴ Running just over eight-and-a half minutes in its current iteration, Dirty Dishes is decidedly less “spectacular” than the collective’s signature works, but no less redolent of its particular time and place. Over the course of the tape, not much happens—the artists and their friends tell stories, eat, sleep, watch TV, discuss art––but much is conveyed of the texture of the everyday and of the larger cultural, and countercultural, landscape. (The sartorial and tonsorial details—a plethora of bandannas and flowing manes—date the footage as precisely as the “1971” that appears on the screen.) Much of the action is driven by the artists goofing around with the camera and recording random conversations: They stage a table-top wedding of a Honey Bear syrup dispenser and a toy figure named Bill Ding. A woman (Randy Eberle) opines on Andy Warhol’s film Trash (1970). A hapless couple wanders in looking for ants for their actual ant farm. The characteristic murky grey tonality of the Portapak image adds to the tape’s intimate aura of stoned amiability; one risks getting a contact high just by watching.
For all of its antic playfulness, Dirty Dishes strikingly captures the centrality of both video and television to the artists’ everyday lives. Not only do we see lives lived in front of the television screen, the all-pervasive mass medium, but we also see lives lived in front of and behind the video camera, a new tool for interpersonal communication. Dirty Dishes captures the advent of a fully televisual culture, framed by video from within and television from without.
Lord writes, “The Sony Portapak AV 3400 video rover had recently been introduced, and Joe Hall went out and bought one. Over the next two years this device became an interactive tool within the dynamics of the group—used to document our work, but also as a sketchbook—a way to creatively interact.”⁵ The video camera was an integral part of the group’s social and personal exchanges; it quite literally occupied a pivotal position in their living space. As Lord explains, “In the center of [the] table was a lazy Susan, and after dinner, we would often mount the video camera on the lazy Susan, and let it spin or stop to record revelations (yes, drugs may have been involved) or jokes or the empty stares in between.”⁶ Decades before the selfie became a ubiquitous phenomenon, video artists and activists had discovered the potent social and metaphorical significance of video’s self-reflexive, endlessly mirroring feedback loop.
The collective members, born in the 1940s, were first-wave baby boomers, the first generation to grow up with television as a mass cultural force, and Dirty Dishes is rife with references to TV that reveal a generational and cultural divide. As the piece opens, Lord is attempting, through fits of laughter, to tell the story of the first TV program he’d ever seen, at five years old: The Kate Smith Show, an afternoon variety show in which the eponymous singer’s signature act was a rousingly patriotic rendition of God Bless America. A television set in the warehouse is tuned to Trisha Nixon’s June 1971 wedding to Edwin F. Cox in the White House Rose Garden. We see President Nixon stride across the screen in a tuxedo with his daughter on his arm, beaming at the camera, a benign scene that belied the reality of a nation torn apart by the Vietnam War and antiwar protests, which television brought into America’s homes on the nightly news. The final minutes of Dirty Dishes jump to an absurdist TV talk show parody identified as the Top-less Talk Show of Topanga, with a mock commercial for Gideons Bibles.
Underscoring the perceived cultural power of television at that historical moment, we overhear a conversation in which a visitor (Ben Holmes) asserts a utopian vision of the medium’s expansive potential. Holmes uncannily presages similar claims made decades later, at the advent of the internet era: “[Kids are] gonna get smarter. . . . The kids have grown up with the tube. They have the world at their hands, right now. All they gotta do is turn on the switch. That’s where the revolution is.” (The exchange ends with a dystopian punch line: “If you’re lucky, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”) Providing individuals with the tools and technologies to “talk back” to television was a core tenet of the early video movement, and democratization and access were key words. It would take decades before affordable mobile communications technologies, in the form of smartphones and social media, would come into truly widespread public use, but the Portapak and alternative transmission modes like public access cable first held out this promise to video artists and activists.
As with many early video works, the making of Dirty Dishes was as concerned with process as it was with a finished product. Lord writes, “We just had the Portapak, there was no editing, except in the camera, which meant that we were often recording OVER some wonderful nuggets of humor or wisdom—everything seemed interesting, so why edit?”⁷ Perhaps not surprisingly, Dirty Dishes exists in multiple iterations. According to Lord, it was originally compiled at Lanesville TV, the renegade community television station operated by the Videofreex in upstate New York, then re-edited at EAI’s editing facility in 1978. The current version, with Lord’s “additional trims and restorative refinements,”⁸ dates from 2003.
Open ended, fluid, and mutable, Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes is emblematic of an emergent art form that defied easy categorization, irreverently upending the parameters of the traditional art world and mainstream television. Part video journal, part conceptual performance, merging mass media critique with personal media interaction, Dirty Dishes points to a radical shift in the ways in which art could be produced and disseminated. As Hudson Marquez says in the video, in a voice laced with equal parts sincerity and irony, “This is all new. It’s totally new. You’ve never seen anything like this before, ever. This is the newest thing. New art.”
Today, EAI’s collection database, the foundation of which was built from the original 612 index cards, resides on a digital server, and its archive of nearly four thousand media artworks is stored on the cloud. In the fifty years since Ant Farm turned the Portapak on themselves in Dirty Dishes—and since EAI was founded—the analog community that their video reflected back has been almost totally eclipsed by the digital world. Despite the wide chasm that divides these eras, the legacy of the formative spirit and ethos of early video—the “new art”⁹ as embodied by EAI Tape 001––still animates the EAI collection and resonates in EAI’s mission to preserve and provide access to some of the most relentlessly challenging, experimental, and powerful art of our time.
1. I would like to acknowledge and thank Kara Van Malssen, whose investigations into the early cataloging of the EAI collection, as part of her 2006 internship through New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, provided valuable research.
2. Ant Farm members were often joined by friends and other artists on projects. The on-screen credits for Dirty Dishes name the following individuals: Randy Eberle, Ben Holmes, Doug Hurr, Richard Lettuce, Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Rhyder McClure, Doug Michels, Pepper Mouser, Betsey Ross, Curtis Schreier, Andy Shapiro.
3. These events are memorialized in Ant Farm’s three best-known single-channel video works: Cadillac Ranch 1974/1994 (1974–94, 16:40 minutes, color, sound); Media Burn (1975, 23:02 minutes, color, sound); and The Eternal Frame (1975, 23:50 minutes, black and white and color, sound), in collaboration with T.R. Uthco.
4. Chip Lord, email message to author, June 2001.
6. Lord, email message.
7. Lord, email message.
8. Lord, email message.
9. Text from the on-screen credits of Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes (1971-2003, 8:30 minutes, black and white, sound).
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.