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…