Bucky placing art

I’ve got my feet in several worlds this year on playa, working for the ARTery, documenting art projects to share with you all, and I’m doing some placement with the Artist Support Services (ASS) folks and I’m pretty much there to do whatever else they want me to. I’m also helping out with some Tech stuff since in my year round job I work on this here web site about the whole Burning Man thing. My ARTery mentor is Awesome Sauce, and yesterday, under her steady tutelage,  I had the pleasure of placing my first art project EVER, Otic Oasis.

My most awesome mentor, Awesome Sauce

Basically the ARTery places art once you hit the playa with your project. You roll into the ARTery and register, and then one of our team will set a time to take you out on the playa with what is called a “floofy” which sounds like “flew fee” with the plural being “floofies”. The ARTery has a rigid lexicon to describe what they do.

There are two main reasons for registering your ART. First and most obvious is to have a map of where the projects are, so people searching for them can find them, and secondly to be able to list projects on the MOOP map to make sure we all Leave No Trace.

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The Pier trucked in

With less than two weeks before the event starts, some of the largest art is here already setting up. There’s four so far, David Best’s Temple beyond Man Base, Otto Von Danger’s Burn Wall Street around 9:00 off from the Man, the Man Base and the Pier 2 who showed up Tuesday night and are placed at 4:30 and Esplanade.

I’m following the art this year on playa and one thing I really like about Burning Man artists is that they’re building not only huge things to enthrall you participants, both with physical interaction, and some will burn the whole thing eventually, but they do it in the middle of this harsh desert as just an extra, “Oh and if that wasn’t enough”.

Pier 2 survey

Matt Schultz and Paul of the Pier rolled into our newly shaded ARTery from the Salvagery in Reno. Some of their wood came along with the Burn Wall Street crew when they came in over the weekend . If you missed the Pier last year, it was a magical stroll along an actual pier above our dry lake bed, complete with the ambiance sounds of water below, dinghies, a Master Bait and Tackle shop and people fishing at the end. It was pretty fun hanging out with others on the pier. This year I’m told by Orlin and Fish that a Spanish Galleon has crashed into the end of the pier and it will feature a Captain’s Room, a main room, crew quarters with hammocks and a stowage area. Also this year you’ll want to have a fishing license and have it stamped if you’re going to fish.

The Pier structure built

They’d set up camp the night before (in one of the four storms we’ve had in the last 4 days), surveyed the project footprint and were busily unloading trucks full of props as wood was being moved over from Burn Wall Street’s Camp. We met with them when they went over some engineering aspects of the piece yesterday afternoon and they were intent of finishing the Pier part of their project by midnight last night. If the crew could finish by midnight last night, they would get a keg of beer. Despite the total white out from 8 to 9:30ish, they finished at 11:55 and there was beer all around. Now they will build the ship and I hear it is amazing from the artist who worked with them in Reno.

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Commissary Dust Night

A dust storm Sunday night at dinner came on like a monolithic white swirling entity with enough force to sand blast the surface of Mars and the huge Commissary tent where we ate creaked and shivered. You could hear the plywood walls out back straining against buckling as the Commissary crew and us ran into the white out to tighten straps and ropes, attempting to keep her from launching. Brad, the drink Man from Spectrum said he’d rushed out to the kitchen tents to keep them in place.

Afterward, as always, those pounding white walls of grit cleared like passing phantoms and glorious towering clouds hung over the mountain range to the west, moving slowly in the darkening sky into a long twilight of infinite sunsets.

And the Commissary cleaned up.

Drink Man Brad standing

Much has been most eloquently written of the DPW by Mr. Curley who’s captured the spirit and tenacity, the skill and true steel forged strength of these roughnecks who build Black Rock City and also the raising of the Commissary Tent. I can attest, after being here as DPW is setting up structure after structure in the 100 plus degree heat, working hard to set up the template upon which you will bring your insanity, that they do, indeed, deserve your beer.

However, I’ve been hanging out at the Commissary, helping Mr. Barcoderino and Sgt. Slaughter set up meal databases and meeting Hayseed’s crew of 10 or so people plus the Spectrum folks who are doing the cooking and they’re all actually also pretty baddass.

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The first fence crews started gathering well before dawn Monday morning, even as the smoke from nearby forest fires still lingered in the desert air. Spoono and his group would have chow and coffee for everyone who would be spending the next ten hours or so working in the desert heat.

There were stakes to pound and a fence to put up. Trucks would be rumbling from the highway to the playa, dropping containers and generators and all manner of stuff all over the desert floor. The Man Base crew would be hauling gear and the pieces they’d been working on at the ranch for the last three weeks. The vendor’s Commissary tents would be going up, and the Artica and Power teams would be staking out their turf and counting their inventory.

It was the first big day in the building of Black Rock City for 2012, and it was going off big time, everywhere and all at once. Read more »

“Just be awesome.”

We thought we’d seen the beginning of Burning Man before, but we didn’t  know until Monday that we really hadn’t.

This will be the fifth year that we’ll be out there as miles and miles of fence get put up in a day, and we’ve always associated the fence with the beginning of the Burning Man year.  But we’ve been wrong.

Coyote, aka Tony Perez, has been teasing us for at least a couple of years about fence day. “Don’t all those pictures look pretty much the same as last year?” he’d ask. And the answer has always been yes, of course, they’re the same as last year. Only different. Just like the event itself. It’s the same, but different. Different people, different feel, but still the same.

So we accepted his invitation to come up and see what the survey team does before the fence crew arrives, and we weren’t really prepared for the experience. Read more »

David Best talked at the desert arts preview about what the Temple does for the community

Hi  all, and hey, isn’t the desert time getting pretty close again?

All the signs are here – everyone is having a fundraiser (and don’t you want to buy some stock in Kickstarter?), Will Chase is filling up our inboxes with vital info via the JackRabbit Speaks (and you really want to subscribe to that if you don’t already), and the Man is built. What’s that, you say? The Man is built? Yes indeed, grasshopper. The Man Crew was up on the work ranch a couple of weeks ago, building this year’s big wooden stiff. If you’re on the Instagram, which you can find on the internets, you’ll want to do a search for Sfslim and check out his great pictures of the crew that puts the Man together.

The point is, everything is moving forward. The Man burns in … what, a couple of weeks? It seems that way. But who’s counting?

Well, we’re all counting. Frankly, it’s been a long cold winter, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Keyboards have been worn smooth with the amount of … communicating … that’s gone on this offseason about … well, you know what about.

But we’re going to make a radical suggestion: Let’s put that stuff aside for the time being. It’s time to build some stuff, then burn some stuff, and get hot and dusty and sweaty and exultant in the process.

There are lots of places to vent and share and commiserate. The amazing Halcyon has written and videotaped some wonderful pieces right here on this Burning Blog about how to cope with … no, how to transcend, the ticket stuff. Whether you have tickets or you don’t have tickets, there’s a lot to think about, a lot to come to terms with. The ticketing process (and the process of dealing with it) will continue to evolve. That’s the way it works. We don’t want to dismiss or make light of the situation, but we’d like, we’d really like, to just step aside of it for a couple of minutes. We’d like to play matador – when the ticket bull rushes us, we’ll wave the cape, step smartly aside, and wave to the crowd.

So, to that end, we wandered to the gritty heart of San Francisco the other night, to get a taste of what all the fuss is about, to remind ourselves of why we go through all this – the sleep deprivation, the cracked fingers, the stuffed noses, the empty stomachs, the parched mouths, the blinding sandstorms, the wreckage of all the stuff, the dubstep … Read more »

When people say “I could put on a Burning Man event, you just need to draw some roads and bring porta-potties, right?”, I wish they could see what happens behind the scenes. The amount of work that goes into the event is staggering, yet much of it is completely invisible to participants. Take for example, the work weekends up at the Burning Man Ranch that start in the spring and continue into summer.

Photo by Miranda von Stockhausen

I attended the last combined DPW/Gate work weekend for the year and, not having a particular task to do, was adopted by Gate.

I spent much of the day in the warm desert sun, painting steps. From my central location, I got to watch the busy hum of activity in the common shop area, as well as a small crew building a small “shack” (which was remarkably well-constructed for something called a shack). I overheard one of the construction managers say to a volunteer: “We don’t care about getting this done fast. We want it to be good.” Read more »

Burn Wall Street 2012

I was fortunate enough to receive an update from Otto Von Danger on the progress of his large scale installation for this year’s Burning Man: Burn Wall Street.

Otto’s been part of the Burning Man landscape for quite a while now, first as part of the Man Crew, building the Man and Man base and then branching out to work on other projects such as the yearly return of his Frog Bat , Burning Man 2010′s Megatropolis and his Hippie/Raver Powered Lawn Chair. If you know him, you know he is driven to create large tangible things with a sense of humor and his work is not only interactive but he enjoys blowing it up before he burns it much to the delight of all.

Burn Wall Street is his most ambitious project to date and he told me,  “I’ve always been political, but this is my first art with a political meaning” and his aim is simple. Burn Wall Street is a fiercely “non-partisan to the core” installation that touches on everything from the Bill of Rights and Voter turnout to what Otto says are the two main goals of his piece:

Get Money Out of Politics and Regulate Wall Street.

Otto explains this as only he can,

 Both left and right, the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, they’re always fighting about these wedge issues, but Burn Wall Street wants them to put that BS down for a minute, put away your Bibles and Manifestos, and come together to accomplish two things. We need to TAKE THE MONEY OUT OF POLITICS and make it an even process with a constitutional amendment so the courts can’t come back and fuck us, and then we have to actually REGULATE WALL STREET. If they can put a kid in prison for selling drugs, they should be able to put a banker who steals millions of dollars in jail… really in prison, where they can introduce him to his new life partner Bubba. No more slaps on the wrist. These people are robbing your grandmother and my grandmother and everyone’s kids and walking scot free.

Once that’s taken care of, right and left can go back to bickering over their wedge issues, but this needs to be done now.

Mike Matel paints the Bill of Rights

The press loves tension between the Right and the Left.  Mr. Von Danger says, “There is both left and right at Black Rock City but Burning Man supersedes that kind of shit. It is the perfect place for a project like this.”  He was interviewed by NPR at KUNR this week and you can hear the interview here.

In keeping with the idea of coming together, Burn Wall Street is trying to get speakers from all sides of our politics to speak at the 9 am keynote speeches throughout the week including Sharron Angle to give the Tea Party point of view, Ron Paul to deliver his Libertarian thoughts and Reverend Billy to discuss Occupy Wall Street.

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