Ant Farm's Space Age Cowboy
Ant Farm critiqued consumer culture in their renowned "Cadillac Ranch" installation which is examined in TO LIFE!. But I'm happy to have this opportunity to explore the group's engagement with two tradition-morphing architectural explorations.
One was based on a distinctly counter-culture model – the cowboy.
The other expanded a mainstream image - space ship.
The group’s exploratory zeal, therefore, propelled them in two directions simultaneously.
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– Ant Farm pummeled norms into oblivion when they composed their Cowboy Nomad Manifesto in 1969. Cowboys were Ant Farm’s cultural icons because cowboys sacrifice these conventional cultural values in exchange for freedom and mobility. Their life-styles were honorable because they stripped material positions down to what a horse could carry. No consumer excess here. Ant Farm utilized this image to contrast it with the farmer’s desire for routines, roots, and stability – which happens to coincide with the desires of factory workers, bureaucrats, and the vast majority of Americans.
The architectural expression of the cowboy ethic took the form of inflatable enclosures that were mobile, light weight, transient, cheap, and capable of being constructed DIY. Furthermore, inflatables leave no mark on the landscape when they are dismantled. In all these ways they are environmentally superior to the conventional buildings that typify homes, churches, offices in cities everywhere.
– Ant Farm also reveled in the futuristic potential of space-travel technologies that captivated the era when the first human landed on the moon. It inspired them to exceed the mainstream embrace of industry to envision a post-industrial era. Ant Farm manifested their approval by experimenting with space-capsule closed systems for cycling air, water, and waste; sensors that functioned like astronaut suits; and high-tech communication devices.
House of the Century, a weekend house in Texas that was designed and constructed by Ant Farm in the early 1970s, provides a vivid example of the group’s earth-bound space-age explorations. Photographs reveal a biomorphic form, painted with slick high-gloss white finish interrupted by circular mirror glass windows perched on the bank of a lake. The interior includes a ‘mobile nutrient servoid’, ‘mobile refrigerator, mobile media servoid, and other space capsule-like techological props.
Ant Farm sums up these innovative escapades by announcing their intention – “to blow the minds of the middle class American suburbanite.
The renowned Steve MillerBand confirmed the group’s merging of disparate influences by writing “Space Cowboy”. The lyrics begin: “Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah. Some call me the gangster of love.”