Jennifer Raiser - Burning Man: Art on Fire

Race Point Publishing

An imprint of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

276 Fifth Avenue, Suite 205

New York, NY 10001

RACE POINT PUBLISHING and the distinctive Race Point Publishing logo are trademarks of the Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

Copyright Text by Jennifer Raiser 2014

Copyright Photography Sidney Erthal and Scott London

Please see for photography credits.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Burning Man and the Burning Man logo are registered trademarks of Black Rock City LLC and are used throughout this book by permission.

The Publisher and Author have made all reasonable attempts to credit the artists and designers for their artwork throughout the book. If an artist has not been properly credited, please contact the Publisher at www.racepointpub.com.

Digital edition: 978-1-62788-393-1
Hardcover edition: 978-1-93799-437-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Text: Jennifer Raiser

Photography: Sidney Erthal and Scott London

Editorial Director: Jeannine Dillon

Managing Editor: Erin Canning

Project Editor: Steve Burdett

Designer: maru studio

Front cover image: Star Seed photo by Scott London

Jennifer Raiser

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Sidney Erthal Scott London

with an introduction by Larry Harvey

What makes the desert beautiful,
says the little prince,
is that somewhere it hides a well.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPRY

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

PABLO PICASSO

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO HAVE DISCOVERED THEIR SPARK OF INSPIRATION IN THE DESERT AND SHARED IT WITH ABUNDANCE.

CONTENTS

T hey had gone to the Black Rock Desert to erect a wooden sculpture hewn into the rough form of a Man and burn it down.

It was 1990, and theyd finally been shooed off San Franciscos Baker Beach after having burned three of them in as many years. This time, though, the police put the kibosh on it the crowd gathering to watch the burn had gotten too large and too nervous-making, so no dice. In search of a remote location to do it, they packed the Man up and drove it out to the Black Rock Desert.

The one feature the Black Rock Desert really had going for it back then was that nobody gave much of a damn what you got up to out there. Its 400 square miles of absolutely flat, barren nothingness. Literally the middle of nowhere. It was a place best known (if it were known at all) for killing off unsuspecting wagon-training pioneers seeking the promised land, for hot springs that would boil you alive, andmore recentlyfor land speed trials and amateur rocketeering. The nobody-can-hear-you-scream kind of stuff.

So what better place to go with your buddies, shoot some guns, light some stuff on fire, and get your ya-yas out, with nobody to say no? Right. So they packed up and off they went.

Now, heres the thing something happens to you when you first set foot on the impossibly flat expanse of absofreakinglutely nothing that is the Black Rock Desertespecially when youre the only ones out there. Its like your cells shift. Your bearings go as flat as the horizon line. Theres nothing to break your line of sight, no visual punctuation to get hung up on, nothing to take in.

And at the same time theres everything you can go any direction and do whatever and it can be as long and loud and bright and whatever, whos going to know the difference and HOLY GOD WHAT DO I WANT TO DO?

Its the fear you feel first. It comes on you like a constriction in your chest because youve never felt this kind of infinity before. Youve never actually stood on a blank slate of truly limitless possibility and had to face WHAT YOURE GOING TO DO WITH IT.

This is Kurtz-in-the-Congo territory, psychologically speaking, and so what follows on the heels of that darn good question are the real mind-f*ck ones youre suddenly asking yourself: WHO AM I? And maybe more importantly: WHO DO I WANT TO BE?

Because suddenly, you can be anything. And that really messes with your headand youre involuntarily and inexplicably and permanently transformed.

As legend has it, when the gaggle of Cacophonists, carpenters, and neo-Bohemians that were the seed of Burning Man first arrived on playa, Danger Rangerrenowned for his presciencedrew a line in the dust and said, When we cross this line, everything will be different.

And he could say that, because it could be true. Because theres nothing there that youre not going to create.

So you stand there on the other side of that line and your brain does this little unfettered shimmy as it dances around in your skullquite possibly on its virgin tour of this unfamiliar land of opportunity. Then as you reassemble whats left of your bearings, the possibilities start flowing.

You can create anything.

So originally, they came with a wooden effigy of a Man, to stand it up and burn it down. But then something else happened. They built some art for nobody but themselvesas a gift to their fellow experience junkies. Because after all, they were San Francisco Bohemians with skills and visions. And now they were Burners the seed of a community.

Freed of the inhibitions of the mainstream art world (not to mention the mainstream world), they were invited to tap into the fullest expression of their deepest creativity, manifested through artwork that couldnt be done anywhere else a massive ball of melting ice, elaborate pagan operas around beautifully crafted tower structures set afire, bizarre allegorical performance pieces, fire-breathing dragons, happy elves operating erector-set crematoriums, stuffed animals smoldering on rotisseries, a funny little Jack-in-the-box spewing fire. It was art for arts sake, art in its purest form, a Dadaist dream on steroids cut with a tab of acid.

Pepe Ozans Narwhal provided transport and performance space.

Pepe Ozan, The Dreamer, 2005. Mixed media.

Having tasted it, they returned year after year to deep-dive into this artistic primordial soup, surrounded by like-minded souls committed to a Mad Max-esque rant-cum-philosophy, where creative expression sits cheek-to-jowl with high-speed driving, guns, and the giddy freedom of living beyond the pale. These were dizzyingly heady times, as one would expect when radicalized artists careen into the lawless frontier of the Wild West.

Like moths to the flame, more and more artists (including professional and the would-be professionals) started making the trek over the years, lighting their own fires. Up sprang giant towers made of cow bones, a massive ammonite, Trojan ducks, shrines filled with desiccated rats, sprawling neon installationsfantastical, site-specific, interactive, and participatory creations from the sublime to the ridiculous, as conceptually broad as superheated imaginations could dream.