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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
I’m also here because of my interest in the gift of creation—the artist’s gift of inspiration and its reciprocation when the artist shares his creations with his community and the world at large. Black Rock City is a world apart, as creatively fertile as the ground is barren, a place out of reach of the commercial snares and entanglements of society’s market economy. Black Rock City is a gift economy. Nothing is for sale here (after the $200 admission, only coffee and ice are sold at the Café). Corporate sponsors or media coverage with tabloid or blatantly commercial angles are banned. Barter is the only form of exchange, but mostly people share what they bring, be it art, food, drugs, or their ornately tattooed and absurdly decorated bodies. One rule governs life at BM: no spectators allowed. The rule’s corollary is: no matter what you bring or don’t bring—participate. Some artists spend an entire year planning an installation, then ceremonially cremate their work on Burning Man’s closing night. It’s all in the pleasure and passion of creating, giving and sharing. Team leader David Best is building a twenty foot high wooden pagoda-like sculpture on the Playa. Friday night he will douse it with kerosene and burn it.
"The Burning keeps the art in the land of the sacred," says David when asked why he destroys something he could sell for tens of thousands of dollars when he returns to his home in Petaluma, California. David is a compact man, deeply tanned, forever on the move. He has the penetrating blue-eyed gaze and an easy going manner that belies his creative intensity. When I met him for the first time three weeks ago, I knew immediately that whatever Burning Man was, if he was going I wanted to follow. Right now, he’s out on the Playa, needing help with building his sculpture, and I’m out of time and past my word count limit for the day… |
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Driving down the last three miles onto the Playa of the Black Rock Desert is like entering a colossal clam shell. A big-sky lid of blue arches overhead and down to a seam of distant mountains which holds it to the endless horizontal of grayish-whitish desert. Within this space, on a spectacularly flat and ancient lake bed, Black Rock City—home to Burning Man’s 30,000 soon-arriving citizens—is sprouting from the lifeless ground. By Wednesday it will be in full flower, after Sunday’s close it will wilt, by next Tuesday the only trace of its existence will be tire tracks. Those making the journey to this ephemeral metropolis come to join in a celebration of music, dance, art, and round-the-clock creative mayhem in an environment where temperatures topping 120 degrees and white-out dust storms are the standard daily bill of fare. I’m here as Daily Chronicler for The Sultan’s Oasis, a theme camp of a dozen forty-something men led by Jack Haye and David Best, each in their own right accomplished artists in the world outside of Black Rock City. 
