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Burning Man: Past, Present, and Future. Part 1.
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Larry Harvey
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Seventeen years ago on a beach in San Francisco, Larry Harvey built an eight–foot wooden man, and—in an act of what would come to be known as "radical self-expression"—lit it on fire. Because the beach was a public space, a few curious onlookers had gathered around to watch him construct the man, but "when we lit the figure... our numbers tripled." Burning Man had been born.
Fast forward to late August, 2003. Burning Man is now a week-long extravaganza located in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The humble 8-foot effigy has been replaced by a 70-foot monolith and 30,000 people have come to watch it burn. What on earth happened? Who better to ask than the man who started it all and who is guiding BM into its 18th year? In this dialogue, Larry discusses Burning Man’s beginnings and his thoughts on why it has become so phenomenally popular.
Perhaps no cultural event has drawn as many explanations and interpretations, both fiercely pro and condescendingly con.
On the one hand, it is Larry's opinion that, in a culture that commodifies experience and where the marketplace emphasizes the desires of the individual, experiences aren’t co-created and shared, they are purchased and hoarded. You don't participate in the creation of meaning, you consume the product of what someone else has decided is important. Larry suggests that living this way leaves a large gap in the human psyche, a need for a creative ethos made manifest in a communal setting. As he points out, "One of our aims at Burning Man is to recreate social conditions that are conducive to the spontaneous generation of this type of culture.... I don’t know if it has even occurred to anthropologists, but culture in the sense that we are talking about, as an ethos, is an endangered species."
On the other hand, critics have pointed out that Burning Man actually exemplifies and amplifies precisely the problems Harvey condemns. The most sophisticated criticism claims that BM confuses pre-rational sensations with trans-rational consciousness, and thus heightens the egocentric glorification of "radical self-expression," which, when carried to extremes, acts to undermine a culture of depth and replace it with a culture of egoic infatuation re-labeled "spiritual," a condition often called "boomeritis."
Who's right? As usual, probably a mixture of both. Why don’t you listen to this dialogue and decide for yourself?
For one of the first times ever, Larry explores at length the origin, the impulses, the meaning, and the future of Burning Man as he himself sees it and created it. As this dialogue makes clear, Larry isn't going to let the radical self-expression that has defined Burning Man become extinct without a fight. He is working to promote the Burning-Man ethos as a cultural movement unto itself, and—a bit of an inside news flash that Larry first revealed in this dialogue—the Burning Man Network has now been created and is going worldwide.
Want to get a rare insider's look at the territory of that movement? Then please join us in this revealing tour through the interior contours of Burning Man.... |
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transmission time: 33 minutes |
Burning Man, Black Rock City, a new kind of holiday, tailgate parties, spontaneous creations of culture, "What is Integral?," "What is Boomeritis?," commodification, MTV, ethos, radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, pre-modern cultures, tribal societies, civic vision, Burning Man network, Boomeritis.
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most memorable moment: "Nature doesn’t operate on a plan. Nature never made a plan. Nature happens. And our problem is that we don’t respect that fact, that stunning fact. At Burning Man, we just try to design a structure that will allow nature to happen." |
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