I must go to this festival immediately; there is nothing more gratifying than seeing giant flames engulf a vacant sky and dancing around it like the free loving hippie we all claim we don’t want to be. Burning Man is a yearly event held in northern Nevada in the Black Rock Desert where thousands of people celebrate the summer solstice by burning strikingly large wooden sculptures. The ritual began in San Francisco in 1986 when a man burned a 9 foot wooden man, along with a wooden dog, on Baker Beach as a “spontaneous act of self expression.” Eventually this idea leaked into the Black Rock Dessert and became an annual event where thousands of people would showcase spectacular pieces of wooden sculpture.
This is where the innate hippie inside of me really gets excited and wants to rip off her clothes and dance around a bon fire naked to the music of The Grateful Dead on acid; yes, you read that correctly. I love the idea of “outsider art” coming together to create a visionary retreat of inspiration and creativity. Yah it’s kind of hippie-ish and I am sure there are some far out characters there who are still advocating issues that the contemporary world has long outgrown, but to all their own right? It’s those people who are great to hang out with because they lack the pretentious attitude of most of us modern people.
How marvelous it must feel to stand amongst a burning sculpture amidst an anxiously intoxicated crowd in a desolate dessert where the spirit of art and freedom are lucidly one…. Wow I need to stop now, the hippie lingo is starting to come up.
(Ecstacy by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito 2009; Fire Of Fires by David Umlas, Marrilee Ratcliffe, Community Art Makers 2009)
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