The Day SF Artists Drove A Car Through The Mainstream Media
On July 4th, 1975, a Bay Area art and architecture collective drove a customized 1959 Cadillac Eldorado through a pyramid of burning TV sets for a crowd of news broadcasters and media cameras.
The collective was Ant Farm, and they promoted their spectacle as the “Ultimate Media Event”, complete with merchandise, posters, and a motorcade carrying an ‘actor president’, who looked and sounded a lot like JFK and whose speech mimicked George McGovern.
Ant Farm called the performance art, “Media Burn”, and their plan was to use the corporate television monopolies to broadcast their own ‘demise’ (in a sense). In the 1970s, the ‘Big 3’ TV networks; ABC, CBS, and NBC controlled nearly all of the programming shown to the American public.
As you might be thinking, not a tremendous amount has changed today, if you substitute ‘TV’ for ‘smartphone’, and the ‘TV networks’ for ‘META, GOOGLE, & TikTok’, you’ll find that today’s media is similarly controlled by a few mega corporations as well (despite Ant Farm’s best efforts).
But with satirical ambition and a dash of Dadaism, Media Burn fooled the corporate media into broadcasting a performance of their own symbolic demise, to viewers across the Bay Area for the July 4th Weekend.
This summer, 500 Capp Street celebrated a 50th Anniversary tribute to radical art and architecture collective Ant Farm’s 1975 performance and subsequent video work, Media Burn, with an exhibit complete with video, artwork, sketches, photographs, and even merchandise that tell the story of “The Ultimate Media Event”.
We got to explore the new exhibit with an original Ant Farm member Chip Lord, and learn about the experience and work that went into building a futuristic car and setting up a satirical media event full of performance art, merchandise, and spectacle. You can go see the whole thing yourself at 500 Capp too this summer, for free.
Ant Farm – Media Burn – West Coast Video Art – MOCAtv
“The exhibition illustrates the evolution of Media Burn, as shifting ambitions, locales, and resources influenced the years-long development of the outrageous idea that would send the Phantom Dream Car hurtling through several thousand pounds of cathode ray TV consoles,” says curator Steve Seid, who has written extensively about the work. “The importance of Ant Farm’s audacious performance lingers to this day as a seminal example of Bay Area conceptualism, as the marker of a rarely seen collective ambition, and as a reminder of the usefulness of potent images in the contestation of power.”
50th Anniversary of Media Burn At 500 Capp St.
Still Burning, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Ant Farm’s Media Burn
Exhibition Run: July 4 – August 23, 2025. Tickets
500 Capp Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Exhibit info here.
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