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A World on Fire - annual Burning Man event
Art Journal, Summer, 2000 by Matt Ferranto
Welcome to hell. It's wedged into a forgotten corner of the Great Basin, not far from oozing nuclear waste dumps and military target ranges. A stark and unforgiving site, the Black Rock Desert affords a unique sensation of unbounded space, not to mention punishing heat, harsh winds, occasional blizzards of thick whitish dust, unnerving thunderstorms, and brief, torrential rains. It's here that Black Rock City flits across a parched expanse of cracked alkali. A ramshackle collection of multicolored tents, parked RVs, and jury-rigged lean-to huts, it congeals, decays, and disintegrates in a fortnight. The tumultuous morass of geodesic structures is cobbled together from aluminum poles, plastic bags, bed sheets, and rope. Painted signs and flapping banners identify campsites as "Sin-O-Plex," "McSatan's," or "Sister Dana van Iquitiy's House of Perpetual Indulgence." Echoes of distant drumming, the relentless buzz of portable generators, and the occasional earth-shuddering thump of munitions-grade pyrotechnics litter the desert soundscape.
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But hell's fury never looked so fine. A population of costumed revelers cavorts in togas and turbans, feather boas and black leather, silver space suits and devil horns. Many slather gray mud over their naked skin, giving themselves a wan, ghoulish cast, and they saunter through a surreal panorama punctuated by eccentric installations. A towering castle of mud has screaming faces and gargoyles sculpted into its crenellated turrets. Dinosaur-shaped tanks patched together from industrial scrap and dysfunctional machinery cast jagged silhouettes against the bleak horizon. Towering above it all stands the forty-foot Burning Man. With a triangular, lantern-like head and a wood-ribbed skeleton lined in blue and pink neon, the gangly creature looks like a robot crafted by affectionate aliens. A serene centerpiece to this chaotic assembly, the figure is set ablaze on the festival's final night. Lifting his arms skyward, his head explodes in a glittering shower of fireworks before he tumbles to earth in a lurching, c limactic inferno. The desert night becomes a raging frenzy of dancing flame and smoky glimpses. Flags, books, clothing, and paintings are tossed into greedy conflagrations that leap and roar with delight.
The Burning Man festival took shape in 1986, when Larry Harvey set fire to a twenty-foot sculpture in an obscure performance at San Francisco's Baker Beach. In 1990, local police prohibited the yearly beach burnings, initiating his first trek to the Black Rock Desert. The severe surroundings are now central to a larger Burning Man credo of "radical self-reliance and radical self-expression" in what's referred to as a "temporary autonomous zone." Meanwhile, what was once a single evening's affair has grown into a weeklong rite that participants call an "experiment in temporary community." Burning Man has gained fame and notoriety for its freewheeling utopianism and sense of play, its combination of privation, personal risk, and creative liberty. Combining efficient organization and volunteer labor provided by groups such as the Society of Carpenters and the San Francisco Cacophony Society, the outlandish carnival has grown steadily, attracting some twenty thousand participants last year alone.
There are no spectators at Burning Man, the saying goes, only participants. Anyone who can afford a ticket, which ranged from sixty to one hundred dollars in has the opportunity to live out fantasies. Here they can build dreams and nightmares on a scale unfathomable in ordinary urban and suburban spaces. Monumental sculpture and impromptu performance shake and bake into a freewheeling happening; the traditional boundaries separating audience from artist constantly dissolve and morph. The cluttered camp resembles a vast art workshop, and mutual cooperation among strangers is often necessary to construct the towering sculptural projects that dot the playa. Collapsing spontaneous social interaction and civic architecture, these works are often predicated on galvanizing activity, on transforming passive viewers into dynamic cohorts. Onlookers are encouraged to crawl through the huge canvas coil of an otherworldly nautilus shell, finally slithering through a narrow exit at its center. As an eleven-foot wide ice b all embedded with watches and clocks slowly melts in the sullen desert heat, mud-encrusted wanderers cool themselves by rubbing their bodies against its slippery surface. A tree-like system of interwoven copper pipes spouts water, fire, and steam; it functions as a communal spa for the giddy bathers underneath. Farther out on the desert, an insistent percussive chime announces a "piano bell." Passersby rap, beat, and strum the exposed innards of sixty-some pianos stacked in a vast circle to make collective music. Rather than going to market, most of these works are destroyed in performance rituals, burned down like the Burning Man himself. As darkness falls on Black Rock City, huge pyres erupt on the sites of yesterday's landmarks. The playa resembles an inferno; the world is on fire. The towering castle of mud ignites in sherbet-colored flames while dancers perform an eerie operatic cycle. The dinosaur tanks careen about spitting fire at each other while pennies, shot into the sky, rain down on screaming cro wds.
