We’ve recently come back from Burning Man, and i thought i’d share a few reflections on the experience.
As an organisation that works with participatory processes and creativity, Burning Man has long been of interest. For the first time, we went along this year, and were interested to see it all in person.
A number of brief observations:
1. Artwork as an “peripheral” element.
What interested us most was not the artworks themselves, but their collective function in transforming the event. Whilst sometimes engaging, the individual works often fell back into relatively established desert/land art motifs. However, where the artworks really counted was ability to collectively transform the playa into an archipelago of ludic, social spaces.
Throughout the week-long event, people wander out into the desert, ostensibly to view the art, but this becomes a necessary pretext for a range of other experiences. The joy of cycling in solitude, of playful conversations with strangers, of getting lost in dust and wind.
This notion of art as “the necessary pretext” is something we’re increasingly interested in, and the festival was a great example of it. In its oldest forms, creative endeavour generally existed as a pretext, in some form or other, to access a range of social or individual experiences. This seems to be a lost tradition - contemporary forms of culture generally mistake the means for the end and, wandering through galleries and exhibitions, we stare at pictures and enact largely predetermined interactions, generally ignoring other people or fugitive thoughts, and passing by exactly those kinds of transformative experiences we hope to experience. At Burning Man, 500 years of museum theology is brushed away, and the artworks transform open desert into a social field of open possibility.
2. Open & Sacred Space
One of the most interesting examples of this kind of “open field” was the Temple. A large, open structure made of sweet-smelling wood (featured in the pictures above), the Temple gets written, drawn and decorated throughout the week, with tributes to dead lovers, cheap jokes and everything in between. This sounds simple enough, but it is one of the key social spaces of the festival, and a place of considerable emotional power. What was most interesting to me was the way in which it seemed to be able to contain anything, without losing this power.
A church can be a pretty affecting place, but the minute the hush is broken by a shouting child, or the incursion of “real world”, something gets lost. Not here. Often filled with people, moments of deep personal contemplation exists alongside naked exhibitionism, bad hippie dancing alongside remembrances of times and people past. Laughter and tears, dancing and silence. The space somehow able to contain all of this, and to imbue it with coherence. A more basic sense and powerful sense of “sacred space”. An open space that seemed able to include and refract the whole gamut of human experience.
In both cases, the festival seemed to helpfully enable (but not dictate) the dissolution of a lot of traditional categories and assumptions (art & audience, sacred & profane, the increasingly unhelpful notions of critical and aesthetic distance, and of people and places as specialised, rather than generalised, functions etc etc) and to thrive in the spaces left behind. There was other stuff too, for sure. For one thing, the festival seems to operate as a large-scale embodiment of a pretty simple maxim: treat others like good people and they tend to act the same. A one week festival with over 50,000 people and i didn’t see a single piece of trash. Or a single piece of aggression. Compare that to Coachella or Reading. But this is a blog post, so … that’s all for now.
I took a few pinhole photographs during the event, a few of which are included here. For future visits, i’m not sure trying to take and develop this kinda photography in the middle of a sun-bleached desert filled with dust storms is necessarily the most practical means of documenting the event. But hey, sometimes the long road ….
