Photo: Mikki Willis
September 2006
Don’t Bring Your Business Cards to Black Rock City
This month, Burning Man turns 21. As it transitions into adulthood, has the Man sold out?
By Matthew Heller
The little desert festival that could is finally claiming adulthood. When that 40-foot wooden effigy goes up in flames in the northern Nevada desert Sept. 4, what began in 1986 as a modest piece of performance art on a San Francisco beach will turn 21. A record crowd of more than 35,000 revelers—who have paid at least $250 for admission to the temporary encampment known as “Black Rock City”—is expected to witness the culmination of an eight-day festival that devotees see as a uniquely “authentic” cultural and spiritual experience.
Burning Man comes of age at a time when people both inside and outside the event are questioning whether the founding vision of artistic expression still matches its reality. “We’ve made it to 21,” insists Burning Man cofounder Larry Harvey, “because we’ve remained true to the principles we’ve discovered along the way.” While other ‘alternative’ events have, presumably, succumbed to the stifling embrace of the mainstream (what Harvey calls the “commodification of cultural process”), “We’ve shown that if your goal is to create something authentic, you can preserve it.”
But in tiny Gerlach, the town closest to the remote Burning Man site in Pershing County, Nev., one resident sees something quite different. “You’ve got people showing up [to Burning Man] in $800,000 motor homes with diesel power, air conditioning, all the latest antennas,” says Stephen Chandler, a landscape photographer. “It really has made the atmosphere of the event so mainstream and mechanized. It’s like another Disneyland out here in the desert.”
In the vibrant blogosphere that sustains diehard Black Rock City residents in the long, cold months between burns, some critics are buzzing: How can Burning Man have grown so big and bureaucratic without having sacrificed some of its youthful spontaneity and “immediacy?” (The San Francisco-based Burning Man organization is now a limited liability enterprise with a $7.5 million budget and assets that include 200 acres of land near Gerlach, used for storage and maintenance). Are those RV campers really interested in art, or just a bacchanalian blast of self-indulgence? As one online naysayer put it, “Finding one of the last sublime remnants of the unpopulated West, [the organizers] want nothing more than to pack it with tender urbanites in a glorified tailgate party.”
Larry Harvey, a chain-smoking, Stetson-wearing builder and landscaper, has mixed memories of that storied first burn in 1986 on Baker Beach. In a celebration of the summer solstice, he and some friends set fire to a life-sized human effigy made out of scrap wood. After the Man got too big for beach-burning, it found a home in 1990 on the parched clay “playa” of the federally-owned Black Rock Desert. But Harvey is not about to wax nostalgic about the “good old days.” “In the first years,” he says, “apart from the Man there wasn’t any art... We were struggling to create a community.”
But by 1996, the festival had attracted a respectable following—12,000 revelers—as well as a reputation for anything goes, come-at-your-own-risk artistic anarchy. Hackett, a Brooklyn, NY, artist who goes by his surname, wistfully recalls the “totally amazing sense of danger and possibility and chaos” (and the $35 ticket price).
The danger was less appealing to many—and fatal for some. As Harvey remembers, campers at Burning Man started complaining about bullets whizzing past their tents—shooting guns into the sky had been a popular burner pastime. “One guy told me a bullet went so close to his ear he went deaf,” Harvey says. In 1996, one person was killed and two severely injured in accidents associated with the event.
After that edition of Burning Man, technical director John Law quit, complaining that the event had grown too large. “It has devolved into something more like what I used to go out to the desert to get away from,” he later told Comet magazine. The following year, organizers used surveyor’s wire to divide the sprawling encampment into a navigable street grid. The Burning Man “scene” had become a city, albeit one with portable toilets and no electricity. “Things started to change,” Hackett laments. “From ‘No Spectators,’ the mantra soon became ‘Leave No Trace.’ It went from radical self-expression to worrying about litter.”
Robert Kozinets, a professor of marketing at York University in Toronto, first attended Burning Man in ’99. “People were saying then that it was too commercial, had run out of steam, was not what it used to be,” he recalls. “But it had to become more institutionalized, just for sheer safety.” At its current size, Black Rock City is almost six times as large as the entire population of Pershing County.
By last year, the chorus of critics included Piss Clear, the event’s alternative newspaper, which lamented: “Are dot-commers killing Burning Man? Probably.” Decrying the quality of the art, longtime devotee “Chicken John” Rinaldi griped to the San Francisco Chronicle that “Burning Man has turned into a giant group hug in the desert... It is embarrassing and humiliating how they are bypassing the art.”
No other event has “so much participatory art in one place,” Hackett says. “But for a lot of people, it’s like a vacation.”
If Burning Man has gone mainstream, that would hardly be surprising. “You see the mainstreaming of everything” in American culture, observes Kozinets. “The counterculture drives mainstream culture.”
Larry Harvey claims to understand the dynamic all too well. The Bay Area hippie movement, he says, “sold out from the beginning. The Summer of Love was sponsored by the Haight Street Merchants Association. If you follow that trajectory [with Burning Man], economic forces will instantly cannibalize it.”
Which is why commercial sponsors and food and drink concessions are still banned from Burning Man—burners must survive on their own provisions. And organizers have zealously resisted other forms of commercial exploitation. In 1999, they turned down MTV’s application to cover the event and, after learning that a network freelancer had surreptitiously filmed footage, mobilized their attorneys to prevent it from being broadcast. Burning Man also sued an adult video company for selling tapes of nude women shot at the event. As part of a settlement of the case, Voyeur Video stopped the sales and agreed never to return to Black Rock City.
In other ways, Harvey insists, Burning Man has struggled to maintain its authenticity. The number of theme camps, for example, has “vastly increased” and, within the camps, the communal ideal lives on. Among the hundreds registered for this year’s event are everything from the Apocalypse Lounge to the Zombie Dome. Selected artists are benefiting from $400,000 in grants from the organization. “We conceive our role to be that of social engineers who create a social context that will generate interactivity,” Harvey explains.
The 21st Burning Man features the art theme “Hope and Fear: The Future.” In an Art Deco Pavilion of the Future, participants will be asked to “vote for hope” or “vote for fear.” According to Harvey, this reflects Burning Man’s ideal of civic responsibility and engagement. “This is not just eight days in the desert,” he says.
The immediate future of Burning Man certainly seems to be assured. The federal Bureau of Land Management has granted organizers a five-year permit that expires in 2011. “It’s still a meaningful ritual,” says Kozinets. “People have made lasting changes in their lives because of their experiences at Burning Man. It has the transformative energy that one would associate with self-realization movements.”
Pointing to the harsh desert environment, Kozinets believes that Burning Man is “far from tame and routinized. There’s still plenty of danger for city folks... I don’t think [all the danger] has been leeched out of it.”
As for Harvey, his passion for the event he helped found still burns. “If I ever see that Burning Man is losing its authenticity, I won’t want to do it,” he says. He adds with a wry laugh, referring to the rock ’n’ roll impresario of the Summer of Love, “I don’t want to be Bill Graham. He was putting on a show.”
Matthew Heller is a Los Angeles-based journalist. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and New Times.
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