Radical Ritual by Neil Shister

Author:Neil Shister
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092204
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

III

BURNING MAN’S UTOPIAN VISION

7

Art as a Trojan Horse

Burning Man is art that is generated by a way of life and seeks to reclaim the realms of politics, nature, ritual and myth for the sake of art. This is art with a utopian agenda.

LARRY HARVEY

At its outset, Burning Man was not about the art. In its present iteration, nothing is more important.

Playa art is the universal touchstone everybody relates to, the feature that legitimates the event to skeptics. Indeed, it is not wholly mad to suggest that as Florence was to the Renaissance, Black Rock City is to a twenty-first-century cultural movement yet to be named, with art at its core. The tail has come to wag the dog.

This emphasis on art, however, arose as a political tactic. An exercise in disinformation. After the first few years in the desert, Larry Harvey started telling anybody who would listen that Burning Man was an arts festival even though he hadn’t previously considered it such. This was a ploy, unadulterated spin. His intent was to confuse the authorities, who absolutely loathed this annual gathering, which they likened to devil worship. Harvey’s strategy was to change the narrative by rebranding the event.

“Sure,” one can hear him saying, agreeing with the Bureau of Land Management and local government officials that Black Rock City was a whack show. “Damn right! It would drive anybody crazy. Sometimes, it drives me crazy. But the thing is, these are artists! As you and I both know, they’re not normal people. They’re nuts by definition.” That was Harvey’s line. He wedged a membrane of redemption into Burning Man that the authorities, and later the media, grudgingly conceded. The Feds backed off a bit. Reporters found a more favorable story line. Tactical brilliance!

The thing was, propaganda to the contrary, very few Burners at the time thought of themselves as artists. There was costuming and prank performance, dressed-up dummies and assorted ironic objets d’art like a car flattened by the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Stuff that, maybe if you stretched the point, might pass for Dada. Nobody, though, was coming out to the playa to do Art, capital A.

How things changed over the course of several decades!

The Project now budgets more than one million dollars annually to support art projects in various venues and iterations. Grants are made for work not even destined for Black Rock City. Patrons buy Burner art, municipalities commission it, real estate developers install it as the centerpiece to developments. “Burning Man is used as an adjective among art directors,” reports a big-time set designer. “They’ll say, ‘Can you make it a little more Burning Man-ish.’” No less a custodian of American taste than the Smithsonian has weighed in, devoting the entire Renwick Gallery to “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” in 2018.

With the sky literally the limit, artists have seized the challenge to go bigger and bolder. Marco Cochrane, arguably Burning Man’s Michelangelo, was blown away the first time he saw the size of the stage he could sculpt upon.

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