The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 28. Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974-1994)

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Cadillac Ranch. 14:28 min., color, sound, 1974-1994. By Ant Farm. Ubuweb's description:

There's probably no better-remembered public artwork than those ten Caddies with their butts overheating in the prairie sun. A paean to the triumphant tailfin, a camp commemorative to fifties optimism, a jab at the promise of mobility with its down-in-the-dirt terminus. Whatever meaning may well from its wheel wells, Cadillac Ranch, situated just a few hundred yards from Route 66, could probably do just fine without the companion videotape. The tape, however, more properly monikered as The Cadillac Ranch Show, serves as a kind of spin control, or, better yet, as a fishtail on a different shoulder.

Rather than interpret the sculpture, Ant Farm offers up a raucous cast of characters, with a sterling performance by Stanley Marsh 3, the fat-cat patron of the arts, playing Leo Wyoming. In one wildly referential scene, a cowboy-costumed Marsh slaps leather, then shoots the words "Ant Farm" in the door of a Caddie while singing "the Cadillac Ranch will take you away, take you away," the tune ripped from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

Here's another of the videos on Ubuweb where the operative artwork isn't so much the video itself but the thing out there in the world that it documents. But if you'll never make it out to Amarillo and experience this array of midcentury luxury cars half-buried at pyramidal angles for yourself, this is potentially valuable viewing. You'll certainly never be able to witness it in life as it exists in this video, since the whole shebang was quietly moved a bit, to 35°11′14″N 101°59′13.4″W, in 1997. Plus it's always getting re-painted, re-graffiti'd, re-painted, re-graffiti'd, etc.

The above-mentioned performance by Stanley Marsh 3, who's an actual real dude and the installation's real patron, qualifies as Something You Don't See Every Day, especially in the art world. He cowboy-camps it up in both 1974 and 1994, the years between which the video intercuts. I get the impression that most patrons of the arts are desperate not to make fools of themselves, but Marsh seems to have elevated a certain flavor foolishness to a raison d'être. Then again, I suppose if I came into an inheritance of oil wealth, I'd also try my hardest to earn the title of "prankster."

The video's second half is news broadcast from 1994, one of those brief local-wackiness segments covering the Ranch's 20th anniversary. This is the sort of thing I would expect Ant Farm to include, what with their evident give-and-take relationship with the non-artistic media. In fact, I sort of wish that all artists' videos about their own concrete works or the concrete works of others' included excerpts from the reaction of the mainstream. Though I'm as sick as you are of hearing talking heads ask, "But is it art?", there's oftentimes an interesting clash of perspectives to be explored.

And, unsettling realization: mid-90s TV looks old.

Comments

[The Magic Of Making Up]

Time is not just passing us by, it positively turbo powered, passing us by.
90's Tv looks uncannily like 80's Tv.
Bugaboo Donkey

[XA10]

What was that? that was your life mate!

[generic cialis]

Nice thanks, I have some video interviews of this guys, even that i believe that they were an excellent band in the past.