this piece was written between 2:30am - 6am in the lobby of the Ashram Galactica Hotel, Restaurant & Spa at around 7 o'clock and Chance on Wednesday, then delivered at 3pm in the Erowid tent. The written transcript and the audio podcast may differ slightly. The {Gong} between sections siginifies the actual striking of a small gong that I brought with me to the Playa for this explicit purpose.Introduction:
Greetings and thank you all for coming. I was sent an email at about 4am last Thursday morning asking if I'd like to be scheduled to talk at Erowid today, and of course, I agreed, seeing a whole week with which to prepare. But of course, I'd forgotten that between Thursday and Wednesday was preparation for Burning Man, plus a 24-hour thousand-mile drive and all the usual distractions that greet one when they arrive Playa-side. So last night I dropped a Modafinil to write on, then proceeded to quaff a small gift-shot of Absinthe, never assuming that the combo would drop me for about five and a half hours of much-needed sleep - gratefully, I woke up in the middle of the night to a 24-hour city, and finally found the time to outline the flash of ideas that came to me when I was initially asked - but of course, I could've benefited from a bit more time.
More time needed - that's always the case here. We're a time-based artworld here at Burning Man, because the time is always ticking down, down towards the end, the singularity, the final denouement of the Festival, the Burning of the Man. To paraphrase Mark Pesce's talk yesterday, we know our expiration date at Burning Man, which lends to all our works here a sense of immediacy that would make any Situationist proud.
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In 1587, a hardy band of New World settlers made their way to Roanoke, Virginia. With 171 men women and children, the colony seemed much too large to die out and disappear in the space of a year, but when supply ships returned to Roanoke in 1588, they simply found no one there. Plates were still set for meals - there were no signs of struggle, and yet all were gone. A single note was found which read, "Gone to Croatoan," and the word Croatoan was found carved into a tree.
Since that time, Croatoan has gone on to become a kind of origin metaphor within underground and alternative cultures throughout the Americas. This notion was solidified with the 1994 publication of Koehnline & Sakolsky's book "Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout." The book, which chronicles various alternative settlements and modes of living thoughout the U.S. prior to the 20th century, would probably be at home on the bookshelf on anyone in this room, certainly mine, alongside texts such as the Whole Earth Catalogue, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Lipstick Traces, and of course, Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone, which unlike the Croatan book's historical nature, is a projection of a future culture, a blueprint of sorts that perhaps the founders of Burning Man - and certainly today's participants - use in creating this community each year.
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In the summer of 2001, following the last major piece on a non-Native artist that I've ever written since, I was mysteriously awarded an intriguing grant: standing naked poolside at Murray Gilman's house in Santa Fe at a party where hundreds drank sangria and marvelled at the opulent art collection of the discoverer of the Quark, a young woman approached me and invited me to spend six weeks inside the Waterman Library of Contemporary Art in Soho, New York City.
I took the offer and flew to NYC, sleeping on the couch of this esteemed collection, housed in an unassuming sixth story loft in Soho, not far from the building that was filled with dirt for an Earthworks project in the 1970s and still remains so, in a way that was all I needed to know about the New York Art World to know I wanted no part of it, such arrogant waste in a city with absurd rents and uncountable homeless. The collection. however, was an overwhelming and mostly private treasure of over 3,000 volumes on and about the art of the 20th century, including such texts as Marcel DuChamp's handwritten diaries, reams of letters written by Salvador Dali to Gala, piles of situationist, surrealist and dada pamplets and screeds, as well as more pedestrian tomes like lovely signed first editions of Clarence Green's first book and Tom Wolfe's "Bau Haus to Our House," as well as stacks and stacks of New York art catalogues ranging from James Lee Byars to Christo and Laurie Anderson to Yoko Ono.
I slept on a Louis the 16th couch and just mostly stared at the books before me, the backs on them with their titles tempting me to read of times gone by: The Truth of Fluxus, The Lies of Dada, Tristan Tzara Speaks, wondering all the while, as people of our era often do, how on earth it was possible that it had seemed at one time that art had had something pressing and vital to offer to the time in which it was made, and why now it all just seemed like such total dross, an opening to attend, a friend to congratulate, a piece to buy for the sake of it in hopes that the artist might someday find a voice and then, in turn, have something interesting to say with it.
I spent a lot of my time in New York simply walking the steets, making a 'zine which is now lost to data crashes, and visiting one strange little gallery in the Chelsea after another, looking for something approaching a real art to sink my teeth into. The closest thing I got to truth was one fortuitous day spent inside the Dia Foundation at a Bruce Nauman retrospective, watching his kinetic dog sculpture and fence-digging videos with his grand-daughter Sophie and his son Erik, with whom I'd gone to hich school with. And I asked him, finally, point-blank and such:
"Have you ever figured out why your dad is such a famous artist for this stuff?"
And he just smiled and said, "It's just like Hollywood, you know - right place, right time," and I can't tell you how grateful I was that he didn't try to sham me with some absurd lie about how damn important and meaningful all this silly work is.
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I remember the day I knew for certain that I would soon walk away from this world forever. It was a delightfully crisp day in August, and I was walking the streets of the Chelsea district, but a stone's throw away from the Hudson River, this fabled neighborhood of galleries for the young and the hip, and I chanced into a street level space where red dots greeted me from titled placards, and the walls were covered with canvasses and photographs of grey, brown, and black murky images, each one containing the words "Self-Portrait" somewhere in their title. The artist's name was simply "K.M." but I snuck a peak at the bio and found a first name of Kelly and the pronoun She. And as my pupils flitted frantically from one piece to the next, searcher for richer content, a well-rounded biographical sketch of the artist in front of me began to emerge from the depths of my very backbrain. It read like this:
My name is Kelly. I'm from Westchester County. My father is an investment banker, my mother is involved in local politics and the historical preservation society. I went to private schools. When I was sixteen, my father caught me in bed with my girlfriend and called me a dirty whore, then bought me a tennis bracelet which I promptly threw away.
I have no culture. I have no culture. I have no culture.
I went to Vassar to major in women's studies, but all women's history was less interesting to me than my own self-expression, so I switched to studio. I went to Parson's and continue to paint now here, in New York, occasional jobs in graphic design but mostly living off my trust as I find myself and my voice as an artist.
I have no culture. I have no culture. I have no culture.
I have all the books I was supposed to read as an artistic radical, but I sold them on the sidewalk when I graduated. I'm not down with the male-dominated patriarchal consumer-capitalist culture, but my work is more important to me than all of that - at least to me. My friends and I speak in ironic cliches at the cocktail parties we attend in the Art World, cruising for important collectors and curators, and if you don't like my work it's because you don't understand it. If you want to *get it*, however, you'll have to master the specialized discursive dialectic found sandwiched between ads for high fashion in the pages of Art Forum - for every outsider like you who says my work sucks, there are a thousand super-serious arts writers who use a wall of words as the framework to slip in a little of their own poetic prose, serving not you but serving ME, and themselves, propping up the central regime in New York and Washington by telling you over and over again that if you don't *get* the art, then you are too stupid for art, and thus another avenue of expression and the propogation of ideas is closed to you.
I am a product of this culture - and my work and the machine which propagates it are what my art world has to offer - a tepid critique of dominant culture and vast fields of alienating work that is designed to mostly repel and confuse you. My art does not celebrate because I have nothing to celebrate. My work is not interesting because my culture is dead.
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It was then I knew that I could leave New York - and the New York Art World - behind completely, for it certainly had nothing to offer me. I could leave now and never look back, for by then I'd been fortunate enough to go to Burning Man, yanked into the melee by the scruff of the neck the previous year, by a friend from the future that I'd met in the past, who knew as I did that despite all the fine advances that the Western canon provided us with, like science and the principles of reason, there was something lurking in the warp and woof of the human experience that simply was not being addressed in the global mega-culture we had created.
"A ten-day rave," I scoffed. "Exactly what I fucking need."
"If only it were that simple," he said. "You simply won't believe me until you go."
And by then, I had seen it - seen an arts festival where no one handed me a business card, where no one listed off their arts-school pedigree, where no one gave One Shit if the work was "archival" because most of it would be burned at the end of the week. It was an arts world where attendees were also participants, where art on the walls could only be there if somebody bothered to build walls, a world where even if 90% of the art was utter shit, it exuded a deep desire to be understood, to be appreciated, to instruct and inform just as eagerly as That Other Art seemed bent to confound and confuse.
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Off-Playa, however, one still needs work to look at, and in late 2001, I began to catch a glimpse of the work I wanted to see - and see more of. I was at an opening in Santa Fe when I saw something that knocked my socks off, aesthetically and philosophically. It was a large-sized canvas with a black background, on top of which was painted a Hopi kachina figure. Silk-screened nearby on the same canvas was a giant blow-up half-tone of the Chanel No. 5 logo. The artist had several other pieces with similar juxtapositions - a Koshare trickster figure and the MTV logo, the Hopi butterly dancer and a Ferrari logo - in that work I had, for the first time in my life really, even growing in the southwest within 50 miles of 23 Pueblo cultures, an instant glimpse into another world - the hybrid reality of contemporary Native American people, many of whom live, work and bathe in US monoculture, while at the same time cling (praise the goddess!) to pre-Christian-conquest spiritual systems that make even the weirdest New Ager seem almost sane by comparison.
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In the Hopi worldview, the totality of the conscious and subconscious sensorium is represented by the Kachina pantheon, a League of Superheroes numbering at least 400 major icons. These would include "spiritual" beings such as Koshare (the trickster) and Eototo (the leader) as well as more pedestrian folk like Field Mouse, Butterfly Maiden, Squash, and Mother. Each year, between February and July, the Kachinas leave their fortress of solitude atop the San Francisco Peaks which form the border between the Hopi and Navajo reservations and fly into Hopi for a season of dancing. Incarnating themselves into the bodies of the human members of the Hopi Kachina Society, they re-enact various mythological rituals whose origin dates back to at least the time of Homer, an oral tradition as rich and developed as any Greek tragedy, only in this case it is a *living* tradition unbroken by conquest and diaspora.
To see the juxtaposition of a Kachina and a corporate logo struck me as no small affair, a signal of sorts that while my pagan roots are mostly a product of conjecture, wishful scholarship, and outright fantasy, here are a people, living in our midst, whose genetic memory and actual contemporary ritual practice dates back to the time before Northern Europe took over the world, before Xianity spread like a virus throughout the planet, before before before before before - and yet, they too were living like I am, in this modern world, not tromping through the jungle in loin cloths, but driving trucks and listening to 50 Cent and going to Dairy Queen and using interest-free checking to pay for it all. I had to know more - so I began to look deeper.
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Back on the Playa, an evolving aesthetic keeps developing. Burning Man is the Tabula Rasa, the place, sez I, where society goes to dream, and the overall collective, derived from the best and the brightest (or perhaps just the wildest and the craziest) of mostly California subcultures (punk, goths, ravers, hippies, all with aspirations towards a verifiable *meaning* in their lifestyle stances) are hurled together into the crucible that is the middle of the nowhere, hammered by wind and dust and heat and cold, rain and forgotten items, the need to reach out and borrow, trade, barter, and gift to all sorts of silly strangers from "other scenes" - an incredible cacophony of bridge-building and increased tolerance occurs here, (even for the dark demons of the hour, the DPW) in what I've come lately to describe as "the white man's pow-wow."
In the process, art is created, though bear in mind that the vast majority of artifacts created by this temporary culture could not really be classified as "art" outside this context! Remove the object from this place and it makes no sense, because most things here reference a conversation that only makes sense here, and many of the things we take pictures of and bring home are less considered "great" because of a singular flash of inspiration than as a refinement of what began as a rather dumb idea - el-wire on a golf-cart being a primary example - most just string it up and turn it on, and it works as radical free expression only because of the loose guidelines for artistry that we've set up her and have decided to live by - some, however, take the "el-wire wiring of golf cart" to new extremes, modifying the cart into the Starship Enterprise or a pink bunny festooned with neon - but off the Playa, it's still difficult to pull these moments from the gestalt that created it and at which it is at home.
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If I had to narrow down Burning Man's aesthetic to two greatest influences, it would be a short list comprised of just two people, one whom almost everyone knows, and one who almost no one has heard of, much less read. The one everyone knows is Moby, master electronic musician, whose main "instrument" (so to speak) is the sequencer, a device designed to allow people to create both music - and art and film and nearly everything else these days - in a step-by-step manner that has evolved a rapidly changing music whose evolution is really just a modification of the initial incarnation. In other words, it's an aesthetic that fits perfectly on the Playa, whose inhabitants seek both maximum efficiency and comfort without ruthlessness, improving one's camp and clothes and social stature while still being nice to other people, no easy feat by the end of the week, to be sure.
The other influence is Hakim Bey, who was probably read by every early citizen of Black Rock and is completely unknown by most of today's finest participants, simply because his meme is present in almost every act and artifact that exists here. In his seminal text, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Bey advocated an approach to art which resonates throughout Burning Man culture, a kind of anarcho-situationist-immediatism, one that encourages both the temporary autonomous zone which Burning Man most certainly exemplifies beyond a doubt, even with the rule and regulations that have developed within it, as well as the notion that all work created, be it large or quite dinky, should be treated as but ephemera, a notion flickering in the wind before the Burning of the Man, meant to be enjoyed here and only here by those who bothered to show up.
Thus, the best art of the Playa, the show pieces which inspires both attendees and those who catch it later in story, photograph, and film, is just not permanent. In keeping with the major underlying philosophical tenets that I've plucked out of thin air and outlined here, works like these achieve greater complexity with each passing year - and yet are *still* burned to the ground because fire isn't just part of the performance of the work, it is the contract that ensures that what is made on the Playa stays on the Playa. And if you want to actually *experience* the art, you have to come here and participate. And that's just too complicated and outside the rules of art's commodification by the mainstream art world, and thus never the twain shall meet. But the question really is - should they?
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I am doing a phone interview with Walter Bigbee, a Commanche photographer who was raised as an urban Indian just outside the Beltway and who "dropped in" to New Mexico in his early thirties to learn all he could of his past. Bigbee is a walking treasure trove of native skills, makes his own mocassins, builds his own drums, breaks horses without hardware, and is considered an expert in "brain tanning," a skill-set which so puzzled me that I just had to ask him what it entailed.
"I tan hides with the brain of the animal it came from," he said, non-chalantly. "There's a rule of thumb to brain tanning, that any animal has at least brain enough to tan his own hide."
Bigbee and I shared a lot as we spoke, about our mutual hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, about his strange journey to acquire the skills of his people, about his search into his heritage. And once I'd gathered all I needed from him to write his profile, I began to say goodbye and he said,
"But wait. What about you? Why are you looking to learn from me and my people?" And before I could answer, he spoke again in a singsong voice, "Do you know your songs? Do you know your dances?"
These are standard questions in Indian Country, when people are trying to ascertain the authenticity of the "Indian" in front of them. The full sequence goes like this:
"Do you know your grandmother?"
(What is your clan?)
"Do you know your songs?"
(Do you engage in ritual?)
"Do you know your dances?"
(Are you a part of your community?)
For a brief moment, a song danced in my head, an ancient track from The Orb, sequed into "Rhythm is a Dancer," my dances danced with passion and fire and Ecstacy and speed across a thousand mesatops and right here on this Playa, stars burning bright overhead, wind whistling gently on cool desert nights, both at home and in Black Rock, ten thousand party people twirling glow-sticks in poi-people patterns, twirling twirling twirling, no dance known really, just the twist of the body forcing it up and awake 'til dawn to feel the triumphant moment of having found a thing lost to us, a long long time ago....
"My songs and my dances are at least 9000 miles from here," I said, making a guess at the drive-time between Santa Fe and County Roscommon, smack in the middle of Ireland. "But even if I were to return to know my true past, I would find nothing - my people fell to British rule in 800 A.D. - your songs and your dances may be the closest I ever get to a pre-Xian, pre-Conquest reality."
Bigbee paused. "Crazy," said he. "I never thought of it that way - but maybe that's why I'm so popular in Europe, with the Germans and the French. I'm more than exotic - I'm a blast from a past they can't even imagine."
Think of it, really - if you want to catch a glimpse of what it might have been like, to live in a world before monotheism, before capitalism, before private property, one might look no further than the Native Americans of the southwestern United States. Despite invasion, genocide and conquest since 1492, many tribes still maintain their songs, their dances, their kiva societies, with some, like the Hopi, enjoying a more or less unbroken chain of what can indeed be described as a pagan culture, never conquered by Christians were the Hopis, living on their mesas, articulating their world-view with each passing year through song and dance, passing on themselves and their cultural beliefs from one generation to the next until now, when a long-haired Kachina dancer can share a canvas with a Ferrari logo, illustrating the moment when all that we have to offer as we chafe beneath the yoke of hyper-modernity jockeys against their greatest philosophical achievement, it falls as flat on the canvas as the silkscreen that printed it, and yet it is that very flatness which pushes us back to the Playa every single August, looking to learn new dances, looking to learn new songs.
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I haven't yet been out to see Uchronia, the Message From the Future that everyone simply calls the Belgian Waffle. I may go tonight, but I've avoided looking so far because everyone claims that it is simply the best piece of Playa art that has ever existed, and I want to savor that moment, see it when I've got nothing at all on my mind. Like David Best's Temple project, it seems to be one of those rare pieces of Playa art that transcends the localized creative dialectic and might be something that "belongs" on the contemporary art landscape in the Default World. But of course, like all art at Burning Man, great and small, it too will be burned, and will never tour the Whitney or appear in the U.S. Pavillion of the Venice Biennale.
But the question remains: "Should it?" And should anyone within this world, this secret society, this underground, this Croatan, this tabula rasa where all icons of our collective unconscious are writ large across the desert floor, should these objects even attempt to transcend this crucible whihc nurtures it and seek so-called "greater glory" on the playing fields of a culture that we know in our hearts to be dead? I, for one, think not, for Burning Man is not an incubator for the culture-at-large but a cultural millieu on its own. It's a true alternative (if only for a week) a crucible in which new ideas are born and nurtured and burned, leaving only memory upon which to build the next year's city. What happens on the Playa stays on the Playa. For it is here that we know our songs, here that we know our dances, here that we cobble together an understanding of ourselves in both the petty subcultures and the greater cosmos towards a cultural heritage that cannot be found only in our past - we too are a hybrid culture, standing on the edges of those flat logos, staring deeply into the eyes of our own personal kachinas.
You made it! As promised, here is the link to the Burning Man 2006 heavy-metal video slideshow.
