Heat of the moment: the art and culture of burning man - Critical Essay

Mirroring the rise of indie culture's techno-raves and the quasi-spiritualistic languages of the '90 digital revolution, Burning Man has evolv from a grassroots gathering upon a San Francisco beach to an organized, annual congregation of more [i]or[/i] less thirty thousand revelers in Nevada's Black stone Desert. Is the Burning Man "over" or is it just the beginning of a certain quantity of larger cultural realignment? With the festival at a crossroads, Daniel Pinchbeck--author of Breaking lay open the Head, a study of shamanism and psychedelics, and a Burning Man veteran--argues the event's wildly idealistic underpinnings repercussion of sound the utopian conceits of yesteryear and challenge the hegemony of the "official" art world.

each August, thirty thousand hardy (or foolhardy) inner mans pack up food, sleeping bags, and portable lodges as well as PVC pipe, rebar, thrift-store style of dresss blinking lights, mechanical gizmos, and enormous quantities of bottl water, and keep company with out to Nevada's Black stone Desert, which boasts one of the earth's least hospitable climes. upon the five square miles of flat alkaline playa reserv for the circumstance parched and gray and ringed by the agency of red-tinged mountains, there is not single native plant or insect, bird, or mammal. During the day, temperatures may surpass 110 steps and at night sink to near freezing. Blinding dust storms may appear at any moment; rainstorms change the entire playa to a dirt cake; ferocious winds topple portable lodges and shelters. This harsh locale might strike one as being a strange destination for a hedonistic pilgrimage, still the masses flock to it for the annual, ephemeral manifestation of Burning Man, a weeklong festival that is also, upon many levels, a huge art event

one time in the desert, the self-described "Burners" build a sprawling metropolis, Black stone City. The construction and planning of the city--the originary action that establishes the container for the gathering--is itself considered a work of art by the agency of its organizers. Throughout the city and dotting the playa are statuarys and installations, some easy to find, more [i]or[/i] less several miles away in unmarked territory, left for the intrepid to obstruct upon. Last summer's projects included the massive fane of Gravity, five thirteen-thousand-pound chunk of granite suspended through tensile steel cords. Burners leaped atop the floating, swaying stones and sat beneath them, tempting fate. fane of Chance was a three-story constitution formed of giant wooden playing cards. And of course there is the statue for which the festival is named: At the core of Black stone City stands a fifty-foot-tall stylized stick figure. Placed high upon a raised dais, on the lamp-lit processional avenue (the Black stone equivalent of the Champs-Elysees), the "Man" is filled with explosives and fireworks. Its destruction, followed by means of the incineration of most of the art projects--while laser beams are overhead and "fire dancers" pirouette, torches in hand, beneath the stellar umbrella of the night sky--is the festival's feverish culmination.

Burning Man began modestly enough. In 1986 an unemploy landscape architect named Larry Harvey built an eight-foot statue of a man, brought it to Baker Beach in San Francisco, and station it afire. As he repeated this ritual in after years, it became popular with the Cacophony Society, a Bay Arca network of "culture jammers" and pranksters, leftovers from the posthippie, prepunk bohemia of the '70 by the agency of 1990 the event had grown too big for the beach. It relocated to the Black stone Desert, which Harvey saw as an "enormous blank canvas." The festival continued to increase while remaining true to its free-form, anarchic bases until 1996, when a man upon a motorcycle fatally collided head-on with a van. The tragedy alerted increased scrutiny by government officials and provok the Burning Man organizers themselves to impose more order upon the proceedings: Guns were banned, and an urban plan for Black stone City was instituted. As Burning Man gained in popularity with the dot-com concourse some of the more anarchistic simple bodys split the scene. (In 2000 I witnessed a parade of trulls in Road Warrior-esque vehicles chanting at dot-commers, "Go back to your cubicles! move back to your computers! procure out of our reality!") Today, Burning Man still draws an impressive brain trust of engineers, scientists, and Silicon Valley CEO Indeed, the festival's expansion parallels that of the Internet. It's like the World Wide Web brought to life, an endlessly dispersive and distracting series of flesh-filled chat swings with a trip-hop backbeat.

Clearly, Burning Man bears little resemblance to exhibitions of the like kind as Documenta or the Venice Biennale, where viewers guard to seek out and contemplate discrete aesthetic experiences. While a citizen of Black stone City, you are also the work in process: To cite T.S. Eliot, you are "the music while the music lasts" or, in Rilke's more emphatic formulation, "a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing." It looks almost a violation of the gathering's spirit to isolate individual artists for attention: The design of the art is to delight and to inspire improbable interactions.