Publisher Description

Felicity D. Scott revisits the architectural, art, video, and intermedia practices of the experimental collective Ant Farm, self-described ¨super-radical activist environmentalists.¨ Drawing together archival material on their extended fields of practice, Ant Farm features the first full-color publication of the complete Ant Farm Timeline, as well as Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout (1969) and an archival dossier on Ant Farm's Truckstop Network (1970-1972). The Ant Farm architects produced experimental works on the "fringe of architecture" (1968-1978) and were influential video artists. Felicity D. Scott is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and a founding editor of Grey Room.

Perhaps best known for the iconic desert monolith "Cadillac Ranch" and stunts like "Media Burn," the radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm created an abundance of works across disciplines--including video, publications, built environments and performances. Throughout their career (1968-79), Ant Farm conceived a series of time capsules that focused not on the eternal but rather on the fleeting aspects of postwar American culture: consumer goods, media archives and tchotchkes. For various reasons, all of Ant Farm's time capsules failed to function, that is, to be opened at the allotted future time and the intact contents examined. Ant Farm's successor group, LST, has taken up the project with their contemporary work "Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule]" (2008). This work not only functions but updates the original's line of questioning, exploring notions of the time capsule in the digital age. The Present Is the Form of All Life represents the first comprehensive documentation of these overlooked ephemeral works. Including many previously unpublished images, this publication also boasts essays by Constance M. Lewallen, Steve Seid and Gabriella Giannachi, and a discussion between curator Rudolf Frieling and LST.

"There is not a trace of the provincial nor the apologetic in the tone of the State of Mind texts. Rather there is a justified claim for the sophisticated originality of this Californian art—sophisticated because the authors have convincingly argued that the artists, for the most part, had many conscious connections and familiarity with art from the rest of the country and Europe, yet were driven by a desire to be independent and different." —Moira Roth, editor and contributor, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980 "State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is an essential overview of the rich and complex moment when California assumed its role as a leading center for the making and exhibition of the kind of adventurous and progressive art that immediately fascinated the world, and over the years has come to define a generation and a region. An unmatched source of hard-to-find primary images combined with thought-provoking critical essays, this book can easily function as a standard text on this subject.” —David Ross, former director of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and currently Chairman of the MFA program in Art Practice at The School of Visual Arts