The early history of Cadillac Ranch

The Artsy website posted a well-researched article of how the Cadillac Ranch art installation in Amarillo, Texas, came to be, including vintage photos of it being built.

Cadillac Ranch turned into a roadside icon — including for Route 66 travelers — in the four decades since local tycoon Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned it from the Ant Farm art collective in 1974. It’s probably the one of the most-photographed sites on Route 66, has hosted music videos and was the inspiration to a well-known Bruce Springsteen song.

Ant Farm member Hudson Marquez proposed another art project after Marsh initially rejected a documentary film proposal:

The artist threw out an idea — what if they printed fake seed packets with illustrations of cars coming up out of the ground, instead of carnations or cucumbers? “’49 Fords: Guaranteed High Yields,” they might read. Then these packets would be placed in with the real ones. “The whole idea was to get someone to look through and ask the feedstore guy, ‘What in tarnation is this?’” Marquez recalled. “And Stanley said, ‘That’s a fine idea. But why don’t we just do that for real?’ I said, ‘Grow cars? You mean like a Cadillac ranch? And Stanley said, ‘That’s it!’”

Another Ant Farm member, Chip Lord, had a different recollection of how Cadillac Ranch was born:

He said the collective was first put in touch with Marsh by a mutual friend from Albuquerque. On the drive back to San Francisco after completing their commission in Houston, he and Ant Farm member Doug Michels (now deceased) stopped by to see Marsh at Toad Hall. In Lord’s telling, the final proposal was inspired by a print advertisement for the 1959 Cadillac. Both Lord and Marquez agree, however, that the correspondence with Marsh was a form of artistic expression in of itself. The Amarillo businessman wrote all his letters with a special, large-font typewriter on oversized stationary that required additional postage. In a missive dated March 8, 1974, he responded to Ant Farm’s proposal with tentative interest: “It’s going to take me awhile to get used to the idea of the Cadillac Ranch. I’ll answer you by April Fool’s Day. It’s such an irrelevant and silly proposition that I want to give it all my time and attention so I can make a casual judgment of it.”

Some other tidbits from the article:

• The Ant Farm had a budget of $3,000 to buy the 10 Cadillacs — most of them from junkyards.
• The group had a devil of a time finding a 1957 Sedan DeVille for the project and started burying the other more easily procured Cadillacs before finding it.
• Lord said the Cadillac Ranch served as a commentary of planned obsolesce and the prototypical Texas oilman selling off a relatively new car “when the ashtray got full.”
• At the dedication, motorists passing by on Route 66 stopped and went to see what all the hubbub was about. Marsh, in his typically irreverent way, allowed them to join the party.
• During the gala, a local Cadillac dealer placed a plastic flower on the ground at each buried Cadillac as if it were a gravestone.
• Marsh periodically would repaint Cadillac Ranch in a various colors to cover the graffiti. But it invariably would be tagged again by visitors. One local artist is creating jewelry from the gazillion layers of paint that have fallen off.
• Marsh frequently claimed the Cadillacs stand an angle similar to the Great Pyramid of Giza. Lord said this is not the case. The cars simply were buried at an angle that looked best. The only requirement was the cars must be leaning west.

So far, Cadillac Ranch has outlived two of its participants — including Marsh, who died in 2014 amid a swarm of lawsuits and criminal indictments over allegations he sexually exploited teenage boys.

Cadillac Ranch was placed in a non-Marsh trust not long before he died. The art installation presumably will remain there until the cars rust into the Texas Panhandle dust.

(Image of Cadillac Ranch by Morten Rand-Hendricksen via Flickr)