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Citizens: Please report to the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) by April 25. That’s the last date to catch “Ant Farm 1968-1978” before it leaves on a five-city tour. For your own protection, don’t miss this retrospective of architecture, urban-planning, and media pranks. It’s thought-provoking, transparent, and great fun. 

You might already know the Ant Farm troupe, if not by name, from two iconic images. “Cadillac Ranch” (1974) is the “modern Stonehenge” the troupe created off Texas’ Route 66 by half-burying 10 vintage Cadillacs, nose down, tailfins up. “Media Burn” (1975) features another Cadillac—customized into something resembling a spacecraft—crashing through a pyramid of burning televisions. 

Ant Farm gestated in Texas and hatched (“founded on a platform of educational reform”) in San Francisco. “We are underground architects,” the founders declared to a Bay Area friend. “Oh, you mean like an Ant Farm?” she replied. The name stuck. 

Mainstays Chip Lord (now teaching at UC Santa Cruz), Curtis Schreier, and the late Doug Michels worked out of San Francisco, Houston, and Washington, D.C., joined by a changing cast of co-conspirators. 

At the Berkeley Art Museum exhibit, you can watch both projects unfold on cycling videos. And you can examine Media Burn’s “Phantom Dream Car” itself—still intact, with conning tower, working fore and aft video cameras, dashboard TV monitor, escape hatch, and lunar-module-style Plexiglass cockpit. 

But the retrospective also presents 10 years of the group’s less famous countercultural interventions—some just as interesting. You literally can’t miss “ICE 9,” a ceiling-high inflatable shelter that occupies much of the gallery. Named for the apocalyptic catalyst in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, it looks like a cross between the Space Shuttle and trippy ‘70s soft furniture. “Sleeps 5, weighs 20 pounds, inflates in 10 minutes—$500 w/fan,” its designers claimed. 

Ant Farm’s early work focused on portable structures and temporary communities—or “nomadics.” “ICE 9” was one of several rounded, cheap, inflatable designs that the museum’s press release calls “symbolic of their opposition to the mainstream Brutalist architecture of the 1960s.” (Such as, ironically, the BAM building itself.) The group’s 1970 “Instant City” plan looks like a blueprint for today’s Burning Man phenomenon.  

The core of Ant Farm’s work playfully satirized the grand public projects of the future-oriented ‘60s and early ‘70s. For the 1972 “Time Capsule” they sealed kitschy consumer products inside a refrigerator. (Why a fridge? To “open doors to the American Dream,” an Ant Farmer explains on video.) Three years later, they buried a similarly laden Oldsmobile station wagon. 

Ant Farm’s LSD-inspired “House of the Century, 1972-2072” was built near Houston without one square corner. The award-winning structure looks like a cross between a lunar lander and a giant Groucho nose/glasses disguise. 

One of their last playful projects was the 1977 “Dolphin Embassy,” a floating outpost for “bringing modern technology to the least developed nation of all.” A 1978 fire destroyed their San Francisco studio and ended Ant Farm as we know it. 

Ant Farm’s projects drew on earlier outsider architects like Buckminster Fuller and Britain’s Archigram (whose elaborate plans for mobile cities filled a wing of SFMOMA in 1999). And their videos and assorted happenings echoed, and inspired, a long chain of conceptual artists. 

But unlike solemn utopians and snide poseurs, Ant Farm did everything in good humor. BAM’s retrospective is a nostalgic flashback to a time when architectural pranksters were rewarded with laughter instead of million-dollar commissions. 

Don’t miss the video of their 1976 opera “CARmen,” performed in the Sydney Opera House’s parking lot. It’s played on 35 cars’ horns, “conducted” by an Ant Farm member hopping around in a ridiculously floppy kangaroo suit. (Two hours of videos are projected at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., and 3 p.m., each Wednesday through Sunday.) 

One last nostalgic angle: Ant Farm’s most trenchant pranks satirized the ‘60s orthodox American Dream of excessive consumption, automobile dependence, mass-media addiction, militarism, and dubious space adventures. Yet pervading Ant Farm’s work is real love for the optimistic, Kennedy-era ideals of mobility, shared affluence, and inclusion. The “Artist-President” who presides over Media Burn is a miraculously resurrected JFK or Bobby Kennedy. 

Some sacred cows that Ant Farm targeted—like network television, or the notion of cars as liberation—have fallen a notch or two. These days, people think they’re achieving liberation by sitting behind computer screens with the “right” logo or innards. Particularly in this town, today’s official dogma is to force people out of their cars, and to force every possible inch of height and floor area out of every construction plot. 

One longs for the next generation of Ant Farm-style provocateurs, who might construct a “Density Ranch” out of half-buried skyscrapers, or videotape a Critical Mass of self-righteous bicyclists riding through a wall of smoking Macintoshes. And stream it on the web, dude.›