Goodbye to All That

“I was born in a year no cars were produced in America,” said artist Chip Lord, founder of the countercultural Ant Farm collective, in a talk at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. This auto-austerity had been brought about by World War II and come the victorious conclusion of the conflict, America would more than correct the deficit; the car became a national cynosure, a continental obsession. This “car fascination” was long ago crystallized in Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch (1974), an environmental sculpture in the flatlands of Amarillo, Texas, made up of ten tail-finned Cadillacs half-buried in a cow pasture along I-40. Lord said he was inspired by WPA-era photographs of rusting cars with an elegant patina sheen, and the installation does strike an ambivalent note of renascence and decay, exhumation, and burial. This many-sidedness is a likely reason for Cadillac Ranch’s durability in the American imaginary, occupying a place halfway between Bruce Springsteen and Pixar’s Cars). Lord mostly skirted the issue of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, though he joked about the group’s unwitting prescience in retaining image rights for their projects. A valediction of sorts — Lord had titled his presentation, “The Long Goodbye to the Automobile”—only appeared during the Q&A. “Has the automobile been a failure?” inquired moderator . “It has been a failure,” Lord answered. “It’s taken the production and population out of cities and destroyed neighborliness.”