A utopian Art Festival that exists for REAL!
No Spectators: The Art Of Burning Man, Black Rock City
This weeklong festival must be a dream event of anyone and everyone who knows about it, artist or not, this event can make you feel like one!
‘Burning Man’ is a unique art festival that’s celebrated every August for a week in the Black Rock City, a city that temporarily springs up in the northwest desert of Nevada, United States. This thriving one-week metropolis is a hotbed of artistic expression and innovation. It’s a dusty week of art-making, music, dancing, and experimental living with the goal of “radical self-expression”.
In addition to the large-scale sculptures, the exhibition features immersive sound environments, mutant vehicles, jewellery, costumes, videos and photography by artists and designers who participate in Burning Man. Multi-story art structures and massive, interactive art installations are erected and explored; some are burned to the ground and at the end of the week, the city vanishes without a trace. This city exists outside the boundaries of everyday life, where immediacy and serendipity reign. Its organizers describe it as “a city in the desert, a culture of possibility, a network of doers and dreamers.”
No Spectators: By blurring the line between audience and performer, everybody is a superstar at Burning Man.
One of the old tickets said, “Participants Only, No Spectators”, that’s the thing about Burning Man, it makes you a part of something greater than yourself, it speaks of soulful need, the desire to belong to a place, to belong to a time, and to belong to one another, even in the midst of impermanence.
Every year, an interesting and often unconventional theme is decided for the exhibition, and an inflammable statue resembling a human figure (The Burning Man) is placed high on a themed structure. On the sixth day of the event, participants encircle Burning Man to witness its destruction. Here, the entire community regards itself. People do this with the reassurance that another Man, always slightly different Man, will rise anew.
Anyone may pose as ‘merchant’ here, and anyone may play a ‘customer’, but nothing in this strange emporium shall have a purchase price — no quid, no pro, no quo — no trade at all will be allowed in this ambiguous arcade. According to a rule of desert hospitality, the only thing of value in this ‘marketplace’ will be one’s interaction with a fellow human being.
This festival follows the principle of ‘Decommodification’, implying that it seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. As they say, “This is not a consumer event, leave nothing behind when you leave the site.”
Leaving No Trace: Caring for the environment is a fundamental value of the Burning Man community. We have always believed deeply in leaving a place in better condition than we found it in.
The Burning Man community asks to leave no trace of what they call MOOP (Matter Out Of Place), everything that was solely a part of the festival and doesn’t belong to the desert is cleaned up as the temporary city is deconstructed. The place gets back to looking like nothing ever happened there, like thousands of people never lived those days at the same place, like art and music was never a part of that place, like all those accounts of ‘transformative experience’ are fictional.
Burning Man has been pioneering the post-work world for decades. What would you do if you could do what you wanted? And not what you had to do to make a living? Reawakening those desires is a transformative experience; relearning how to dream, how to play, how to have desires that arise innately from your being, rather than selected off a shelf of preprogrammed experiences — and perhaps most importantly, to do all this in a community that brings you into living contact with your fellow human beings.
You are expected to collaborate, to be inclusive, creative and connective, and to clean up after yourself. Participate actively as a citizen of Black Rock City. We value who you are, not what you have.
Now, just over 30 years since it originated as a small bonfire on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, it draws over 70,000 participants annually, rivalling the largest art fairs worldwide, and has evolved beyond its temporal limits into the largest year-round “intentional community” in the world.
Note — Everything mentioned in this blog is more or less a collection of excerpts from the official website of Burning Man: https://burningman.org
