There is a lawless place in the desert of Nevada that appears suddenly and then disappears one week later, like a trompe d’œil. The only rules are basically “Be a participator” and “Don’t be a jerk.” Here, you can ride around on a unicycle in your birthday suit and no one will think twice about it. To navigate the grounds you will practically trip over art installations. Bartering is actually still a form of currency here and the fire department will NOT show up to break up your party when you torch a 100-foot-tall structure and dance around it in a tutu. I don’t know how this has not been outlawed, but for one week out of the year this is all possible. This is Burning Man.
image credit: telegraph.co.uk
There has been buzz about this place, this dream, for many years and I’ve always ignored it as it sounded like a bunch of naked, crazed hippies on acid running around in the desert. But this event is not to be filed in the book with hippie music festivals. You couldn’t even really call this experience a festival. It’s more of an experiment where the guinea pigs are voluntary and the results are up to you. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts – Stuff You Should Know – and Josh and Chuck told me all about this magical place that is able to live (and thrive) completely outside of societal conventions.
image credit: supercub.org
For one, this is an anarchistic society that you enter into and people do not murder each other. They do not pillage. They do not fight. Instead they make art (and beautiful, breathtaking art at that):
image credit: flickr.com
image credit: travelhymns.com
image credit: Karl Klemmick
image credit: Phil Berg
image credit: Mota Bota
So who got the crazy idea to gather 50,000 human beings in a lawless area of desert in Nevada and burn a massive effigy? Well his name is Larry Harvey and he is a genius. This whole mad experience got started in the 80s (isn’t that when everything crazy got started?) on Baker Beach in San Francisco (isn’t that where everything crazy got started?). He burned an eight-foot-tall wooden man on the beach in the spirit of radical self-expression and it attracted a few folks. Every year after that, the flaming wooden man and the party got bigger until the authorities basically said, “Listen, man. You can’t burn a twenty-foot-tall wooden structure on a public beach.” So Larry decided to take it to the middle of nowhere, Nevada. Here is an aerial view of the temporary city, which makes it look like they are trying to attract aliens:
image credit: boston.com
Speaking of trying to attract aliens, Burning Man is trying to attract aliens. According to the SYSK podcast and confirmed by the Burning Man website, 2013’s effigy was placed on top of a pavilion built to look like an alien spacecraft. And apparently, in constructing a “replica of their sky-craft,” they will attract extraterrestrial visitors who will in turn, fix our economy. Sweet deal! So I’m working on a new wooden spacecraft in my backyard in hopes they will come fix our government (don’t worry guys, I’ve got this).
image credit: Michael Holden
But in all seriousness, I find this to be a completely radical social experiment, which is what the founders were going for. There is something about creating a space free from commodities, free from norms (as much as we can stray) and free from laws that govern us on a daily basis that attracts a crowd of 50,000 beings every year. Burning Man seems to be a place where one can find one’s humanness again. Throwing off the ropes that bind us to financial anxiety and societal conformity, we can learn a good deal about uninhibited self-expression and human nature. And here, we can finally realize our dream of riding naked on a unicycle into the Nevada desert sunset.
Cultural Curiosities 