Burning Man 2006 Art Review

I went to Burning Man again this year, for the 11th time in a row. My overall feeling is that the art this time around wasn't overall as good as last year, though last year was hard to top since it was head and shoulders better than many of the years leading up to it, and this year's work is, too.

If I list more pieces this year than I have in years past, it's only because this is the first year I took notes.

The Waffle

This piece, by a group of Belgian artists, had a different name--Uchronia--but everyone on the playa knew it as The Waffle (much to the lead artist's frustration, as I understand it, but it's a better and less pretentious name, so he should just learn to deal with it). An amazing and conflicting piece: a classic potlatch of waste (hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of brand new wood for dancing in, and then burning to the ground in a matter of minutes), but a stunning installation. This is the kind of pure expression that architects aspire to and rarely get to do (and when they do, and it's for a utilitarian building, they often sacrifice utility for vision; the Waffle had no sacrifices to make, so it was free to be simply amazing). When it burned, it had the look of the Hindenburg disaster or a crashed space ship, and was possibly, as Liz (who watched the World Trade Center crash) said, the largest thing I ever want to see burning.

Serpent Mother

It's great to see artists develop their expression, and impressive when a group of people learn to create consistently compelling visions. The Flaming Lotus Girls have developed over the last 5 years into a great team that produces remarkable, monumental fire art. Their piece this year, the Serpent Mother was great. Huge, fun and excellently executed from a technical standpoint, the piece was a crowd hit. The key to it, I believe, is their movement from working purely with propane and electricity to computer control. Richard Mortimer Humphrey--who I worked with on the Stock Puppets--built MIDI-addressable propane valve controllers for them which allow them to precisely control the piece, ratcheting up the slickness and effectiveness by a big notch.

(image by antagonist, found on Flickr)

Starry Bamboo Mandala

It was hard to beat this piece for pure visual elegance. Beautifully made and looking like an immense 3D arabesque on legs, the mandala was a pleasure to look at, lean on and touch. We visited it in the dark, when it looked like a silent sea urchin-themed sentinel, still guarding the now-dry lake. Great stuff.

i.t.

This years' entry in the "most likely to maim a hippie" interactive sculpture contest (won last year by Zach Coffin's Colossus). Michael Christian still rules the biomorphic monumental sculpture world, whimsically creating ever-greater pieces out of bent pipe. The BM theme this year was "Hope and Fear, the Future", so this piece is Michael's vision of the monsters from War of the Worlds, but with festival participants taking the role of the alien. An homage to Louise Bourgeois by way of 1890s science fiction.

Hope Flower and Fear Trap

It's kind of amazing how a giant flower made of lace wrapped around a snorkel lift can express pathos, curiosity and profound alienness at the same time, but these did. Liz and I spent a long time pulling and prodding the things and marveling at the great cleverness of the design, but the real magic came from the way that they were operated, like 100-foot-high puppets. These were everything that an art car should be (i.e. not a car).

(image by giantmonster, found on Flickr)

Big Round Cubatron

One of the best LED pieces I've ever seen. Using a modified commercial product and a sequel to one of my favorite pieces of several years ago (the Cubatron), it created a pure visual experience that was one of the most intense things I've seen. The artists also provide an excellent description/log of the technical details.

Burninator II

Another computer-controlled propane piece, but with a much different focus than the Serpent Mother. While the Serpent Mother created a character, the Burninator II was pure technology, and kind of scary technology at that. Propane poofer fires are an old Burning Man technology: a liquid propane tank with a regulator fills an expansion vessel with a valve and a pilot light; when the valve is opened the propane rushes out of the expansion vessel and makes a big whoomp sound and fireball. By themselves, they no longer surprise (though they're still fun to operate). What makes Burninator interesting is the magnitude and the effect created by the computer control. The sequenced fire, which created a whomp-whomp-whomp sound as the poofers were triggered looked like it coming right for you, even though it was shooting straight in the air. The combination of sound with the impression of impossibly fast speed made it much more impressive than just a bunch of propane fire cannons.

(image by SoopahViv, found on Flickr)

Venus Eye Trap

I'm a sucker for good inflatables. This one was particularly whimsical and beautiful.

(image by jesseehull, found on Flickr)

Bikes w/Triklits LEDs

I don't know the name of the people who did these (I suspect the Big Round Cubatron camp) or what they're called, but there was a group that used the same pingpong ball lights that are made by the folks who made the Cubatron, dangling like grapes from umbrella-like trees hanging from the back of bikes. When the whole group rode around, it was great, but very difficult to photograph.

Kites

The white kits flying at night during the burns were eerie and moving, like ghosts or (to continue the theme), aliens. Again, it was difficult to photograph them, but you can see them hanging on the right in this photo:

And this particularly ghostly one at the top of this photo:

Neverwas Haul

Possibly the best art car ever. A Victorian house on wheels, staffed by people in period dress riding a Miyazaki-meets-Verne hallucination that's (according to their documentation) a criticism of the cultural blindness that technology enables. Beautiful workmanship and another marker in San Francisco's current love affair with making actual steampunk devices (as a return to the origins of Modernism? As a reference to pre-petroleum energy technology? As nostalgia for an era of technological optimism? All of the above, probably.).

(image by molitov, found on Flickr)

Frostbyte memorial

One of the saddest things on the playa this year was the memorial installation of all of Kevin "frostbyte" McCormick's work. McCormick died last year, very young, and was one of the most promising artists at Burning Man. I had admired his work for a number of years and could see elements of it in many people's work (the Cubatron, SoLA, etc.). Basically, he was the first person to really push LEDs to their technological limits as a visually expressive medium, and every year his pieces evolved further. That development is one of the things I love the most about Burning Man, and every year I look forward to Michael Christian's explorations of bent pipe or the Flaming Lotus Girls' explorations of fire. That's how I felt about McCormick, and every year there will be a moment where I'll think "hey, I wonder what's frostbyte did this year?" and remember.