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

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Daniel Pinchbeck

Mirroring the rise of indie culture's techno-raves and the quasi-spiritualistic languages of the '90s digital revolution, Burning Man has evolved from a grassroots gathering on a San Francisco beach to an organized, annual congregation of some thirty thousand revelers in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Is the Burning Man "over," or is it just the beginning of some larger cultural realignment? With the festival at a crossroads, Daniel Pinchbeck--author of Breaking Open the Head, a study of shamanism and psychedelics, and a Burning Man veteran--argues the event's wildly idealistic underpinnings echo the utopian conceits of yesteryear and challenge the hegemony of the "official" art world.

Every, August, thirty thousand hardy (or foolhardy) souls pack up food, sleeping bags, and tents, as well as PVC pipe, rebar, thrift-store costumes, blinking lights, mechanical gizmos, and enormous quantities of bottled water, and convoy out to Nevada's Black Rock Desert, which boasts one of the earth's least hospitable climes. On the five square miles of flat alkaline playa reserved for the event, parched and gray and ringed by red-tinged mountains, there is not one native plant or insect, bird, or mammal. During the day, temperatures may surpass 110 degrees and at night sink to near freezing. Blinding dust storms may appear at any moment; rainstorms convert the entire playa to a mud cake; ferocious winds topple tents and shelters. This harsh locale might seem a strange destination for a hedonistic pilgrimage, yet the masses flock to it for the annual, ephemeral manifestation of Burning Man, a weeklong festival that is also, on many levels, a huge art event.

Once in the desert, the self-described "Burners" build a sprawling metropolis, Black Rock City. The construction and planning of the city--the originary gesture that establishes the container for the gathering--is itself considered a work of art by its organizers. Throughout the city and dotting the playa are sculptures and installations, some easy to find, some several miles away in unmarked territory, left for the intrepid to stumble upon. Last summer's projects included the massive Temple of Gravity, five thirteen-thousand-pound chunks of granite suspended by tensile steel cords. Burners leaped atop the floating, swaying rocks and sat beneath them, tempting fate. Temple of Chance was a three-story structure formed of giant wooden playing cards. And of course there is the statue for which the festival is named: At the core of Black Rock City stands a fifty-foot-tall stylized stick figure. Placed high on a raised dais, on the lamp-lit processional avenue (the Black Rock equivalent of the Champs-Elysees), the "Man" is filled with explosives and fireworks. Its destruction, followed by 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 unemployed landscape architect named Larry Harvey built an eight-foot statue of a man, brought it to Baker Beach in San Francisco, and set it afire. As he repeated this ritual in subsequent 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 '70s. By 1990 the event had grown too big for the beach. It relocated to the Black Rock Desert, which Harvey saw as an "enormous blank canvas." The festival continued to grow while remaining true to its free-form, anarchic roots until 1996, when a man on a motorcycle fatally collided head-on with a van. The tragedy prompted increased scrutiny by government officials and provoked the Burning Man organizers themselves to impose more order on the proceedings: Guns were banned, and an urban plan for Black Rock City was instituted. As Burning Man gained in popularity with the dot-com crowd, some of the more anarchistic elements split the scene. (In 2000, I witnessed a parade of punks in Road Warrior-esque vehicles chanting at dot-commers, "Go back to your cubicles! Go back to your computers! Get out of our reality!") Today, Burning Man still draws an impressive brain trust of engineers, scientists, and Silicon Valley CEOs. 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 rooms with a trip-hop backbeat.

Clearly, Burning Man bears little resemblance to exhibitions such as Documenta or the Venice Biennale, where viewers tend to seek out and contemplate discrete aesthetic experiences. While a citizen of Black Rock City, you are also the work in process: To quote 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 seems almost a violation of the gathering's spirit to isolate individual artists for attention: The purpose of the art is to delight and to inspire improbable interactions.