Burning Man 98 - Black Rock City
Mini - metropolis  ::  study case

Event Review and photos by Shirley Shor & Aviv Eyal, 1998



What is the burning man?
It’s a chaotic event, it’s festival-time, it’s a new-magi ritual, it’s a radical social experience, it’s art, it's an art museum without walls, it’s art’s death, its like reporting from within a dream, it’s creative, it’s destructive, it’s a rave in the wilderness, it’s music, it’s a theme song for technology, it’s colorful, it’s a show, it’s a form of disappearance, it's an unknown tribe, it’s ridicules, it’s a game, it’s a communal camping, it’s a temporal freaks shopping mall with no cash, it’s a temporary semi-autonomous zone, it’s a spectacle, it's Disneyland not for the whole family, it’s all real.

Most burning man tourism is difficult to be described in writing. We guess that is why people come there and are not satisfied with ‘official’ videos. Imagine an inverted Disneyland. Instead of fabricated family oriented fun, pre-designed by brilliant ‘Disney imagines’, you will find real-time theme parks and lounging activity for the rest of us. Unlike the imagined escapist fantasy that is produced by engineers and controlled by computer expert systems and technicians, here everything is immediate and unmediated. You can touch it. It has smell. The park is not cleaned by an army of worker every night. A theme park of shapes, colors, and people spreads in front of us above the desert background. Now, we become part of it.

Once a year, a location for the temporary city is selected. A city for one week. Once the event is done, the city is taken apart and away from the desert plateau. In the geometric center of its semi-circle counter stands the Man, it is a historical landmark, a concentric center of meaning, a unifying mythological totem of the camp people. Just before the city crumbles and falls the man is burnt down in a full moon night of pagan festivities and dance parties...

 

Events happen all around you, if you are not too sun stricken to walk the miles needed to get to them. The whole city is a big party, art museum without walls, so there is no reason to follow the written words. People who play it square and try to follow the list find themselves waiting until 03:00 AM for the evening opera. We cruised town with the van and found out that several thousand burn-heads have already set camps in various ‘theme villages’, so we built our house in the southern edge, on the outer perimeter, far from the northern villages of Trance. After setting up our house, decorating it and having a short house warming, we hit town again.

It seems that here, time is meaningless. The only temporal focal point is the Man’s burning event that suppose to happen sometime in the far future – on Sunday night. You do not need a watch since the moon will tell you when this happens – it will happen when it will be full. Until then, you will find that art installations and/or parties appear and disappear at random hours throughout the festival duration. Some installations are nightly in nature – they burn through the night and sometimes getting set up again during the day. Some are daytime installations – you have to be careful not to stumble on them in the dusky dark hours before the moonshine. We attended noon house parties and post midnight lectures and breakfasts. It is also quite impossible to use your own ‘natural clock’ since unless you camped like us in the outer perimeter of the madhouse, it is difficult to catch a decent night sleep. As the festival times reaches the burning point, thousands of fresh party people continue to pour into the settlement. Arbitrary bits, bass, drums and shouting sounds are caught carried in the night breeze throughout the campground. A temporal tower of Babel is the man. 

The Burning Man 98 Ticket
"YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING.

You mast bring enough food, water, shelter, and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment. Commercial vending, firearms, fireworks, rockets, and all other explosives prohibited. Your image may be captured without compensation. Commercial use of images taken at Burning Man is prohibited without the prior written consent of BM. A Survival Guide will be made available thirty days prior to the event, which you must read before attending. You agree to abide by all rules in the SG. This is not a consumer event. Leave nothing behind when you leave the site.  

 ***PARTICIPANTS ONLY, NO SPECTATORS"***"

The 60$ ticket for the event and the 'official' web site ( http://www.burningman.com ) tells us that there shall be spectators "Participants only, no spectators" but this is (of course) bullshit since Art cannot exists in a vacuum, and in the society of the spectacle there is nothing but spectacle. No matter how you define art, Artists live and create installations for others to experience. There is no installation without a social space for the installation to happen in.

So how can art happen at the burning man if there are no spectators? Maybe the "Artists" suppose to also play the role of the "spectators." But when one stops to be creative (participate in an event) and starts to consume (be a spectator to an event)? Where is the line? We will look for it at the man. 

The Man - we don't need another hero
On Sunday night, we burned the man totem down. It’s a 50 feet neon and wood beast. As the sun sets and a new full moon is born, the countdown begins… A collective countdown engulfed the city as it drew towards its yearly destruction that starts with the man's burn. As it is getting dark, all start the pilgrimage to the artificial bush burn site. Thousands gather at the City's center and move along in a colorful parade towards the man. The ceremony is quite impressive. The man explodes numerous times and emitted bright lights, fireworks, and firecrackers. It’s eyes burned in a white burst of energy.

py·ro·man·cy, noun, Divination by fire or flames
As it finished exploding and continued burning, people around the Mega-fire went wild with ecstasy. Starting at the flames they cried aloud as another limb fell from the burning corpse. As the fire consumes the body, lonely moonstricken people are drawn into an ever-growing group of body painted people who are frantically clock wising around the freshly made grave of this anonymous celebrity.

As the body burning ceremony enters its trance phase, we can not keep ourselves from wandering – who is the man? What does it stands for? Who or what does it represents. What is being celebrated? This man out there, in this fictional desert pyramid, is no more than a focal point that tells you where you are. It is functioning as a compass, as a navigational map. If we are aloud to use Internet buzzword, it is a Portal. It is a symmetry axis for the happening. It seems that we celebrate and cheer everything and nothing in the same time. The man is every man and no-man. If we can use another cliche, He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere chair, waiting in his nowhere land for nobody.... This is a celebration for the ethnocentric. The destruction and the disappearance of the Canon, a self-purification subjective process that does not follow identification with established religion. This is the death of the cult of culture. 

This is a religion event for non-religious people who move, in the world’s wealthiest country, towards entropy and cultural fragmentation and tapestry multitude of meaning and essences. The man is the new low-end common grounds for worship and prayer for a generation of disillusioned and well informed beings who can afford 60$ to worship nothing together. The man is a fad of a small group of party people that has gone out of control. It does not matter anymore what they intended this event to be. They obviously lost all control over it facing these huge heterogeneous participants. At one moment, it seems to us that people will soon start to jump into the flames. Fire fighters in heat suits prevent some ecstatic dancers from accomplishing this feat. Several punk-rocker girls are treated for nausea in the nearby parking ambulances.

Later, the mass gathering seems to divide to several parties' zones, more spontaneous and interesting in nature. The crowds split out between them and move the party, as new fires are set and old fires fade away. It’s all desert, right? It is hard not to stumble on dozens of couples who are preoccupied in love making, in their ecstasy, complete ignoring the passerby's. Every pyromaniac in the West Cost must have had his day today.
The night sky smell of ash and smoke. People go to their camp, bring their favorite wooden object, and throw it to the fire. The 'nebulous entity' - an art installation, joins the fray and moves between the parties. The appearance of the new sites marked a textural change in the plateau. A powerful green laser night started to zigzag the skies above our heads.

Deep bits and electronic drum loops sounds echo through the smoke, drawing us and many others to a location that this afternoon, was just empty desert non-place. As we approached, we could make out a shape of a flying saucer stuck between two sound trucks. The green laser was emitting from the saucer. As we drew near, we realized that the saucer was a DJ booth. The trucks framed the party space and blocked the sound from escaping the dancing crowds. Several hundreds of people were already there, raving away, in front of three large video projected screens and two gigantic speakers' walls. Goa Gil was up in the space ship, coordinating the tracks. The sound was very impressive especially when compared with the guerilla jungle and drum-n-bass parties of Saturday night.
Behind the screens, several nomad-geeks were busy typing titles that appeared in real time on one of the video screens. The other two screens showed clips from the now almost forgotten burning, psychedelically super-imposed across quite impressive 3D computer generated fluff. About ten fire jugglers joined the fun. The party went on until about 10am.