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Chip Lord
Merging
social observation with satirical humor, Chip Lord's work focuses on
American myths and icons, from the cult of the automobile to baseball,
advertising, suburbia and television. To Lord, collective identity and
everyday life are defined by the consumer-based, media-driven culture
of the postwar American Dream. His recreations of the classic Americana
of his
youth are often nostalgic, but edged with an ironic detachment.
Motorist
(1989) is a "road video" homage to the car culture of the
1950s and '60s; Easy Living (1984) is a miniaturized simulation of suburbia.
Lord
sardonically scrutinizes pop culture by adopting and subverting television
strategies and formats -- the commercial, the sit-com, the news bite.
Often casting himself as a performer, he critiques the absurdities of
contemporary politics and the military, and wryly observes the passivity
of an
American public conditioned by television.
Lord's
involvement with video dates to the late 1960s; in 1968 he co-founded,
with Doug Michels, the San Francisco-based multi-media collective Ant
Farm. In a series of memorable performance art events,
including Cadillac Ranch (1974), Media Burn (1975), and The Eternal
Frame
(1975, with T.R. Uthco), Ant Farm tore up the media landscape with works
that critiqued America's media and political cultures through parody
and spectacle.
Lord
was born in 1944. He received a B. Arch. from Tulane University. He
is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Artist Fellowship
from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, several National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowships, and several Western States Regional Media
Arts
Fellowships. He is currently Professor in the Department of Film and
Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1973,
Lord and Doug
Michels received a Progressive Architecture design award for their work
with Ant Farm. Lord's work has been widely exhibited throughout the
world,
at festivals and institutions including the Paris Biennale; Documenta
6, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Toronto Film
Festival;
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Museum
of
Modern Art, New York; JVC Tokyo Video Festival; San Francisco Museum
of
Modern Art; London Film Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art
Biennial
Exhibition, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London.
He
lives in San Francisco, California.
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Title: El Livahpla-Waking Dream
Show:
See Ya at the Movies
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