Burning Man: Art on Fire

BURNING

MAN

ART ON FIRE

Jennifer Raiser

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Sidney Erthal     Scott London

with an introduction by Larry Harvey

"What makes the desert beautiful,"

says the little prince,

is that somewhere it hides a well.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

PABLO PICASSO

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY WILL CHASE

INTRODUCTION BY LARRY HARVEY

PREFACE BY JENNIFER RAISER

ART TO AMAZE

MUTANT CRAZE

EVERYONE PLAYS

SILICON RAYS

ART TO PRAISE

ART ABLAZE

DISORIENT IN THE DESERT BY LEO VILLAREAL

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

They had gone to the Black Rock Desert to erect a wooden sculpture hewn into the rough form of a Man and burn it down.

It was 1990, and they’d finally been shooed off San Francisco’s Baker Beach after having burned three of them in as many years. This time, though, the police put the kibosh on it … the crowd gathering to watch the burn had gotten too large and too nervous-making, so no dice. In search of a remote location to do it, they packed the Man up and drove it out to the Black Rock Desert.

The one feature the Black Rock Desert really had going for it back then was that nobody gave much of a damn what you got up to out there. It’s 400 square miles of absolutely flat, barren nothingness. Literally the middle of nowhere. It was a place best known (if it were known at all) for killing off unsuspecting wagon-training pioneers seeking the promised land, for hot springs that would boil you alive, and—more recently—for land speed trials and amateur rocketeering. The nobody-can-hear-you-scream kind of stuff.

So what better place to go with your buddies, shoot some guns, light some stuff on fire, and get your ya-yas out, with nobody to say no? Right. So they packed up and off they went.

Now, here’s the thing … something happens to you when you first set foot on the impossibly flat expanse of absofreakinglutely nothing that is the Black Rock Desert—especially when you’re the only ones out there. It’s like your cells … shift. Your bearings go as flat as the horizon line. There’s nothing to break your line of sight, no visual punctuation to get hung up on, nothing to take in.

And at the same time there’s everything … you can go any direction and do whatever and it can be as long and loud and bright and whatever, who’s going to know the difference and HOLY GOD WHAT DO I WANT TO DO?

It’s the fear you feel first. It comes on you like a constriction in your chest because you’ve never felt this kind of infinity before. You’ve never actually stood on a blank slate of truly limitless possibility and had to face WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO WITH IT.

This is Kurtz-in-the-Congo territory, psychologically speaking, and so what follows on the heels of that darn good question are the real mind-f*ck ones you’re suddenly asking yourself: WHO AM I? And maybe more importantly: WHO DO I WANT TO BE?

Because suddenly, you can be anything. And that really messes with your head—and you’re involuntarily and inexplicably and permanently transformed.

As legend has it, when the gaggle of Cacophonists, carpenters, and neo-Bohemians that were the seed of Burning Man first arrived on playa, Danger Ranger—renowned for his prescience—drew a line in the dust and said, When we cross this line, everything will be different.

And he could say that, because it could be true. Because there’s nothing there that you’re not going to create.

So you stand there on the other side of that line and your brain does this little unfettered shimmy as it dances around in your skull—quite possibly on its virgin tour of this unfamiliar land of opportunity. Then as you reassemble what’s left of your bearings, the possibilities start flowing.

You can create … anything.

So originally, they came with a wooden effigy of a Man, to stand it up and burn it down. But then something else happened. They built some art for nobody but themselves—as a gift to their fellow experience junkies. Because after all, they were San Francisco Bohemians with skills and visions. And now they were Burners … the seed of a community.

Freed of the inhibitions of the mainstream art world (not to mention the mainstream world), they were invited to tap into the fullest expression of their deepest creativity, manifested through artwork that couldn’t be done anywhere else … a massive ball of melting ice, elaborate pagan operas around beautifully crafted tower structures set afire, bizarre allegorical performance pieces, fire-breathing dragons, happy elves operating erector-set crematoriums, stuffed animals smoldering on rotisseries, a funny little Jack-in-the-box spewing fire. It was art for art’s sake, art in its purest form, a Dadaist dream on steroids cut with a tab of acid.

Pepe Ozan’s Narwhal provided transport and performance space.

Pepe Ozan, The Dreamer, 2005. Mixed media.

Having tasted it, they returned year after year to deep-dive into this artistic primordial soup, surrounded by like-minded souls committed to a Mad Max-esque rant-cum-philosophy, where creative expression sits cheek-to-jowl with high-speed driving, guns, and the giddy freedom of living beyond the pale. These were dizzyingly heady times, as one would expect when radicalized artists careen into the lawless frontier of the Wild West.

Like moths to the flame, more and more artists (including professional and the would-be professionals) started making the trek over the years, lighting their own fires. Up sprang giant towers made of cow bones, a massive ammonite, Trojan ducks, shrines filled with desiccated rats, sprawling neon installations—fantastical, site-specific, interactive, and participatory creations from the sublime to the ridiculous, as conceptually broad as superheated imaginations could dream.

Over time, the encampment became a small town, and then a small city, and ultimately a metropolis. Things necessarily changed and became somewhat more structured and civilized, and so too did the art. But despite the evolution, it has kept its soul, and to this day—over 20 years later—you can see still hear the heartbeat of radical self-expression thumping in time with the din of the multitudes.

Burning Man, at its core, is a permission engine. It gives you permission to create practically anything you want, while surrounded by people eager to help and to celebrate with you. For any artist, it’s the best place on Earth to find out who you are, and who you could be.

WILL CHASE

INTRODUCTION

Dana Albany, The Bone Tree, 1999. Bones, steel, moss. This piece was pulled around the Man for the 1999 Burn which was themed The Wheel of Time.

It may be argued that the art of Burning Man does not, for the most part, represent significant formal innovation. Indeed, very little can be said to be new amid the postmodern marketplace for style. However, the qualities that are refreshing in this work derive from its communal and economic origins. This is not art that can be viewed independently of the process that fosters its creation. It is the fruit of self-expression elevated to a civic duty, a medium of gift exchange within a relentlessly social environment. This work is not designed to reify critical theory, nor has it been subsumed as a commodity within a marketplace. Burning Man is a revival of art’s culture-bearing and connective function. It is art that is meant to be touched, handled, played with, and moved through in a public arena. It solicits a collaborative response from its audience, even as it encourages collaboration between artists. It deliberately blurs the distinction between audience and art form, professional and amateur, spectator and participant. Burning Man is art that’s generated by a way of life, and it seeks, in its broadest aims, to reclaim the realms of politics, nature, history, ritual, and myth for the practice of art. This is art with a utopian agenda.

The practice of art, like so many other disciplines in our postmodern era, has long been relegated to a professional ghetto in which institutional values predominate. Art works now exist as if to illustrate an increasingly arcane and specialized academic discourse. Furthermore, the currency of art within the greater public realm is controlled by managerial elites that market art as an investment opportunity. Within a world governed by such externalities, careerism soon supplants vocation and optics replace vision. The life of the artist has come to be driven by organizational imperatives.

In her book Has Modernism Failed?, author Suzi Gablik says: In the case of the art world, the bureaucratic power structure is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. Bureaucratic rules and procedures take the place of personal morality: this is what institutionalized morality means. The old values of individuality, indispensability, and spontaneity are replaced by new ones, based on obedience, dispensability, specialization, planning, and paternalism. The goal is security: to be part of the big powerful machine, to be protected by it, and to feel strong in the symbiotic connection with it. In the case of artists, these values are hostile to all that we know about the nature of creativity. And yet, to survive in this new order of things all must conform to the requirements of the modern organization—therein lies the problem.

What better remedy for this than Burning Man—a community that is created by artists themselves. Unless such moral ground can be secured in our contemporary world, some context for the production of art that is independent of the organized marketplace and freed from the dictates of a misapplied scholarship, it seems doubtful that any avant-garde challenge to the status quo can succeed. Indeed, if avant-garde movements originate on the fringes of society, what better fringe could be secured than an experimental city located in the heart of a desert? If avant-gardes challenge the rule of entrenched social interest and material gain, what better vehicle than a movement devoted to the essential calling of an artist’s life: the bestowal of spiritual gifts? Outsiders, it would appear, are coming in from the cold, and Burning Man is a phenomenon whose time has come.

LARRY HARVEY

TEN PRINCIPLES OF BURNING MAN

Founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed.

RADICAL INCLUSION

Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

GIFTING

Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

DECOMMODIFICATION

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

RADICAL SELF-RELIANCE

Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

RADICAL SELF-EXPRESSION

Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

COMMUNAL EFFORT

Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive