Patricia Mellencamp is emeritus professor in the Department of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the author of High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy.

Early on, the renegade architectural collective Ant Farm turned its attention to a new form for habitation, the great mediascape. Melding exuberant spectacle, historical restagings, and guerrilla tactics, they created iconoclastic videoworks that captured America's preoccupation with power, mobility, and media. The public sculpture Cadillac Ranch condensed the complexities of autonomy and obsolescence into a single potent image, the Cadillac impaled in the Texas prairie. The Cadillac Ranch Show (1974/1994, 15 mins), its video manifestation, establishes the sculpture as a true roadside attraction. On July 4, 1975, Ant Farm jump-started Media Burn (1975, restored 2003, 25:43 mins) with a momentous performance in which a customized 1959 Cadillac is driven through a wall of burning TV sets. Initiated by the inciteful words of the “Artist-President,” played by Doug Hall, Media Burn showed that the collision of two American icons, TV and the automobile, could create a self-propelled image. Ant Farm daringly traveled to Dallas to take on that most traumatic of American images, the Kennedy assassination. Restaging the Zapruder footage on the original site, The Eternal Frame (1975, restored 2002, 23:50 mins) tracks the trajectory of tragic death to image immortality. The uncanny prescience of Ant Farm's best-known works ironically transformed their charged critiques into yet another order of icon. The program also includes excerpts from Dirty Dishes (1970, B&W), Truckstop Network (1971, B&W), and Freedomland (1973).