Catching fire
Photos from veteran Burner and arts reporter Kris Vagner
“The Folly” was an intricate, ornately detailed group of adjacent buildings—a storybook mashup of carnival, shantytown, clock tower and windmill—built by San Francisco’s Dave Keane and a large crew who’d worked on other ambitious Burning Man structures in the past. It served as a gathering place and music venue for several days before it burned on Thursday night.
After the Burn, playa art sometimes goes into storage, to another festival, to a private collector, or is placed in a public area like a park or city square. The final destination for London-based designer Andrea Greenlees and Reno fabricator Andy Tibbetts’ “Bee Dance” has not yet been determined.
Inside The Temple, people left photos and remembrances of departed loved ones all week and sought shade as temperatures soared in the high 90s.
Miracle Wonderland Carnival Co., a collective from New Orleans, installed several swingsets lit from above by LED clouds with changing colors.
Art cars large and small gathered along with cyclists in the parking area outside of a large sound camp.
Las Vegas teenager Tahoe Mack began “Monumental Mammoth” as a Girl Scout project. It’s made largely of scavenged metal pieces that had been dumped illegally in the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.
In its 34 years, Burning Man has never really had a curator or an art department gatekeeper. A committee determines which art pieces get funded, but there’s no committee to determine that a particular piece is allowed to be shown. The rule is: If you can haul it out to the desert, install it and light it reasonably safely, no one’s stopping you.
A handful of time-tested subgenres have arisen organically from this “anything-goes” approach to curation—or, rather, complete lack of curation. Some of the categories include “art that spews fire when you push a button,” “art with mind-bogglingly complex LED patterns that trap stoned hippies for hours,” “sculpture that doubles as a theatrical set,” and, of course, “enormous wooden structures that look great on fire.” This year, Burning Man had strong showings in all of these genres.
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