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

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Daniel Pinchbeck

With its utopian spirit and creative aims, Burning Man can be compared to a range of twentieth-century art movements, from Dada to the radical community of the Viennese Actionists. The festival's expressive mode could be called post-Pop surrealist--last summer's artworks included a giant urinal (a nod to Duchamp) and a chandelier so large it seemed to have fallen from a god's banquet hall--but pushed to the point where irony cannibalizes itself and disappears, leaving a sincere and seamless merging of the profound and the profane. Occasionally, Burning Man achieves a shocking level of transcendent beauty. Each year, sculptor David Best builds an extraordinary sanctuary on the playa. In the summer of 2001 he constructed The Temple of Tears from balsam-wood boards with cutout patterns, discarded by a factory that made dinosaur models for children. The temple was six stories high, and its intricate spires resembled the ancient Hindu centers of Bhaktapur. Best dedicated the structure to a friend who had committed suicide, and over the course of the week, Burners stopped to pray and weep for loved ours who had died. Thousands of memorials were written on the wood; some people created miniature shrines. The torching of the temple was a tremendously cathartic and moving event.

Of course, on another level, Burning Man is also a huge and raucous party. After a while, the festival's emphasis on hedonism and overt displays of sexuality can seem like a hipster straitjacket and the overtones of New Age spirituality a gloss for a new type of vapid and self-congratulatory consumerism. On the other hand, some feel that Burning Man's sheer size and popularity have attracted too many "straights" and lurkers, diminishing the participatory ideal espoused by the creators. While these criticisms are valid, the essential point of Burning Man is not what it is now but what it suggests for the future, which is not just a new cultural form but the possibility of a new way of being, a kind of radical openness toward experience that maintains responsibility for the community. Radical openness means no closure, perpetual process and transformation, and embracing paradox, contradiction, and uncomfortable states. Every instant becomes synchronistic, every contact a contact high.

Burning Man is now seeking to expand into new locales; and, somewhat ironically, the organization is looking at methods to franchise the event's do-it-yourself inspiration. This may or may not work in the way the organizers imagine--time will tell. "Emergence" and "self organization" are catchphrases of contemporary science, and the social organism of Burning Man resembles an emergent life form, proving itself able to adapt to threatening challenges whether from the government or marketplace. Personally, I admit that I see Burning Man as a model and a potential seedbed for a culture that, as it comes to self-consciousness, will supplant and replace the current moribund cultural system. This experience on the playa bears significant resemblance to the oldest human culture on the planet: that of the Australian Aboriginals, as described in Robert Lawlor's Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime (1991). For the Aboriginals, in Lawlor's account, every day is the first day, the origin point, and they perform rituals and songs in order to maintain the creation, which was dreamed into being by the Ancestors in the Dreamtime.