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

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Daniel Pinchbeck

A central organizing principle of Burning Man is its theme camps, many of which have their own websites and infrastructures developed over years of participation in the festival. Composed of ravers or Microsoft code writers or underground artists or voyeuristic perverts, each theme camp--ranging from chaotic slackertowns to carefully planned environments--presents a unique vision, reflecting a particular community's musical and aesthetic ideal and subcultural affiliations. Some camps have become elaborate enterprises with several hundred members and equipment stored in warehouses in nearby towns. The theme camps create public areas, chill spaces, or installations, and their artistry and attention to detail can be prodigious. One of nay favorite camps last summer was Bollywood, featuring Goa trance music, wafts of incense, projections of Indian films, and a huge plaster statue of an elephant--Ganesh, god of gateways--covered in decorative patterns. At the entrance was a row of objects resembling Tibetan prayer wheels; when they were spun, sequences of images flashed repeatedly, featuring dancing Shivas and burlesques.

The official Burning Man organization, based in San Franciso and employing a full-time staff of ten, has become one of the largest givers of arts grants in the state of California, and it rewards audacity and extravagance of vision. One popular project is Dr. MegaVolt, a truck-mounted Tesla coil that channels visible lightning bolts through the body of a person wearing a special metal suit; it's the undertaking of a camp formed by a onetime doctoral student in physics at Berkeley. Another camp sights precision lasers, north to south and east to west, directly through the Man--a technical feat requiring hundreds of man-hours of preparation to pull off. The organization also subsidizes the creation of massive "art cars," sculptural vehicles that roam the desert by night, such as Draka the Dragon, which features two bars within its scaly iron hull and, of course, breathes fire.

Nobody would say that all of the art on the playa is good. In Black Rock City, however, "bad taste" is not denigrated--even failures can be recycled into future fabulosity. From Hello Kitty to Aztec temples, from fairy wings to Minimalism, the stylistic sampling of Burning Man, like the sampling of certain contemporary DJs, suggests a stance beyond aesthetic judgment. In this context, artworks become experiential tools, not final statements or museum pieces. When the work has been experienced, the object that catalyzed the experience can be liberated through its destruction. It doesn't matter how much time, energy, and skill has been lavished on the object. The point is not to cling to that shell, that structure, but to evolve from it. If Burning Man is a cult, it is above all a cult of transformation.

One crucial aspect of Burning Man is that nothing is for sale (with the extremely appreciated exceptions of coffee, tea, and chai at the cafe). Everyone must arrive with food and supplies, entirely self-sufficient. Within the "city," only a gift economy functions, and most people bring trinkets and tokens like handmade books, photos, and buttons to bestow on friendly strangers. The lack of commerce is intended to create a radical inversion of values, a fleeting freedom from mainstream mechanisms of promotion and merchandising. Indeed, the generosity-based economy of Burning Man also recalls assertions by figures from the Dalai Lama to Wilhelm Reich that society's crises are tied to the ego structure of the West and its incessant demand for satiation and material gain. The implicit Burning Man answer is not to suppress the ego but to expose and liberate it. The celebrated Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek has exhorted his readers to "Enjoy your symptom!" At Burning Man, you find a city of freaks doing exactly that. The body, as expression of the self, is a limit to be explored, one expression of one's symptom. Nakedness, body painting, bizarre costumes, patterns of piercings, and every form of extreme self-modification become commonplace sights after a few hours at the festival. What might have seemed like the individual's interior darkness or neurosis while trapped in the mainstream culture's "accelerated grimace" reveals itself as inner illumination and suppressed psychic energy in this other world.