Filmmaker Spotlight: Elizabeth Federici

Interview with Elizabeth Federici

By Caroline Jackson

How did the idea for this film first come about? 

I moved to Houston in 1996 and immediately got involved with the film community there along with my co-filmmaker Laura. She had met Doug Michels (one of the members of the Ant Farm) when he was teaching at the University of Houston in 1998 and then I met him in '99. Ironically, both Laura and I were familiar with them and already big fans of Ant Farm. We were both art history majors and interested in their work,  but also, I was from New Jersey and grew up knowing about Cadillac Ranch from the 1980 Bruce Springsteen song. The film itself started out as just a couple video clips, but ended up turning into a bigger project.

How did the film evolve as you went along?

When we met him, Doug was thinking about doing a project called "9/9/99" and wanted to do a video for it; also, the time capsule that they had assembled in 1972 was being rediscovered by the archives. We decided it was a great time to open it, being right before the year 2000, and its opening evoked important questions about art itself: Does art have an expiration date? If you wait to display it in a museum, does it fall prey to curators and boards of directors? Is it possible to do a project like that at all?

After shooting footage of the time capsule opening, we were able to shoot Cadillac Ranch. Also, Ant Farm was just beginning to work with the Berkley Art Museum on a retrospective show, and Doug said we needed to come and shoot that, too. Then Doug died, and that was when we realized we wanted to make a full-length film that took a historical look at the pinnacle years and the legacy they created.

Was it difficult obtaining some of the older footage? Any surprising sources?

Almost everything we used came from Ant Farm, from projects that they had made or from other video collectives who all gave it to us for free. We could never have done it otherwise; we wanted as many frames of their projects as possible. When they did the Berkely art exhibit, the museum restored a lot of footage to modern formats, and we were very lucky to get a lot from them, too.

Are there any interviews that stood out for you, or was there anyone that you wanted to talk to but was either unwilling or unavailable?

We of course knew about Stanley [Marsh], and were grateful to talk to him, but he was sometimes hard to pin down. There is not a lot of modern footage of him, we never got him to talk that much; he loved Cadillac Ranch -- he painted it black when Doug died -- but we wish we could have gotten a little more. We were really excited that we got to interview Richard Jost who had helped them with House of the Century. What was nice was how genuinely moved people were after all these years. When Michael Sorkin, who is incredibly respected in the architecture world, talked about those times and what they were doing, he talked very nostalgically instead of academically.

The collaborators in Ant Farm seemed to possess both a strong anti-establishment sentiment as well as an excitement about technology.Was this unique combination interesting to observe?

Oh, absolutely. What they were doing with Media Van, we all can do on our phones and in our car now, so they were definitely prescient. These two aspects of their work helped them reach a wider audience. They went to Yale, Tulane and Berkeley, so they were all incredibly educated, and their art showed both a breadth of knowledge and a punk rock attitude. However, the era then was amenable to that kind of thing; they got great grants, living was cheap, they could live and eat collectively. They could spend very little while REALLY exploring the kind of projects they were interested in.

While Cadillac Ranch may the most iconic of their projects, what do you think the members of Ant Farm see as their most significant work?

That is very tough, I think you would have to pose that to them. For me personally, I love the Eternal Frame. It's historic, in just the fact that they did it, and in how it captures that time; the people watching it seemed more innocent. However, the thing that's so beautiful about Cadillac Ranch is that it is a sculpture, we can interact with it, and it means different things to new audiences all the time; Cadillac Ranch is out there for everyone to enjoy, while the eternal frame could sit in a vault. With Cadillac Ranch, no instituation of art can control it. And the thing is we're still having the same conversation: then it was cadillacs now we have hummers! It's still incredibly relevant; we're still talking about oil, and at the same time we're still a culture that is obsessed with and appreciative good design. 

It is obvious that the Ant Farm collective worked very well as a group, but was any one member seen as the leader?

There really never was a leader. Sometimes we'd tease that Doug was the "lead singer of the band," but it really was truly a collective. Doug was front and center a lot because he was charismatic and a prolific drawer, but as they got realized, it was completely a collaboration. They all worked together with their wide range of skills, each adding something specific to each project. Most of them still create art, too, and Curtis is still living the nomadic lifestyle to some degree; he has maintained the truest adherence to that original lifestyle.

What is Ant Farm's legacy?

That is a hard question to answer, but interestingly enough, their legacy to some degree flew under the radar for a long time. As Doug said, Cadillac Ranch put them in the spotlight a little bit, but they often purposefully shunned media attention.  However, in the current culture, people have become very re-interested in that era and what it stood for. The Berkeley exhibit helped, and in the last 10 years, Ant Farm has gained a lot more interest. Their work has directly influenced so much art being created today from architecture to performance art.

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