This week in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city is reborn. Tens of thousands of people will live on a sunbaked playa for a festival that ends with the burning of a 40-foot-high effigy of latticed wood and neon lights. “Part pre-technological idol and part post-technological puppet,” say Lee Gilmore, a religious-studies scholar at Chabot College, and Mark Van Proyen, an art historian at the San Francisco Art Institute.
As editors of AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press), they join six other essayists to explore the art, community, and bacchanal of Burning Man. Each writer blends academic analysis with repeated experience in the “ephemeropolis” of Black Rock City.
The weeklong festival, which drew more than 35,000 people last year, had modest beginnings. In 1986 two men burned an 8-foot effigy on a San Francisco beach. Attending were a handful of friends, as well as passers-by who stopped to join the catharsis. The next year, the group had grown to 80 and the effigy to 15 feet. When some 800 came in 1990, it was decided to move the gathering to Nevada. Rules include “No spectators” -- interaction is key -- and “No vending,” the exceptions being ice, and drinks at the Black Rock Cafe. Sharing is encouraged in a “gift economy,” in which all are expected to bring everything they will need, and when they leave, to leave no trace.
As the first essayist, Erik Davis links Burning Man to the history of countercultural spirituality in California. Ms. Gilmore then explores the festival as an experience of pilgrimage and transformation. Take an evangelical Christian pastor who came to hand out 5,000 bottles of water and packets of seeds as a “gesture of prophetic witness.” The experience, he wrote, deepened his relationship with God and changed his “personal definition of weird.”
Jeremy Hockett examines such intimate accounts as self-reflexive ethnographies, which he contrasts with media stories, while another kind of involvement is traced by Katherine K. Chen, who considers how the festival manages volunteers. Robert V. Kozinets and John F. Sherry Jr. discuss the paradox of spending “considerable sums just to evade the nefarious grip of marketing” but argue that Burning Man’s ideology, with its parody of and resistance to markets, helps “psychically transform commercial goods into sacred ones.”
On the art side, Mr. Van Proyen explores festival art installations as reflections of the authentic spirit of Surrealism, and JoAnne Northrup discusses the fanciful “art cars” that are the only cars free to drive about the site. Allegra Fortunati links Burning Man to the work of Karl Mannheim and Joseph Beuys, while Sarah M. Pike explores mourning in “The Temple of Tears,” a 2001 installation.
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http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 52, Issue 2, Page A27
