Editor's note: The story below has been modified slightly from the print edition.

Art, danger, and democracy
Burning Man's populist rebellion moves unsteadily from primal scream to the tough work of governing.

By Steven T. Jones

CHARLIE GADEKEN WAS irritated with Chicken John. The face-off between the two friends occurred shortly after Chicken arrived at Gadeken's place for the Jan. 18 election party. Halfway through two days of voting for the new Borg 2 art council, Gadeken was the leading vote getter.

Borg 2 is the offshoot group of Burning Man artists who are challenging founder Larry Harvey's control of the desert festival that has become the country's largest annual counterculture gathering. The upstarts want to create their own event within the event, an experiment in democracy and restoring the primacy of art within Burning Man's larger experiment in alternative community (see "State of the Art," 12/15/04).

Chicken and his cohort, large-scale artist Jim Mason, started the rebellion with a petition signed by burner artists and rallied much of its support at the Box Shop, the industrial artist hive in Hunters Point that Gadeken runs.

But then Chicken and Mason walked away from any official roles, leaving Gadeken and the others to make everything work. Beyond the logistics, which were tough enough, Gadeken and company would need to deal with this experiment's many conflicts and paradoxes: anarchist artists engaged in representative democracy, how to participate in an event whose framework they were rejecting, art simultaneously selected by elected guest curators and a popular vote, serious organizational and fundraising issues facing people who were only serious about art.

Gadeken's frustration with Chicken seemed to epitomize the problem. He was mad about Chicken's "dancing and whooping with shit in his pants" story. A day earlier, in one of his last official acts before turning his Borg 2 baby over to democratic control, Chicken was allowed access to the 33,000 people on Burning Man's Jack Rabbit Speaks e-mail list.

Borg 2 needed money if it was going to get anywhere close to its $250,000 fundraising goal. It needed volunteers and the participation of top-tier artists. And it needed to speak eloquently to a larger audience that hadn't heard about any of this through San Francisco newspapers or the Tribe and E-Playa online discussion boards.

Instead, Chicken chose to tell a strange tale from Burning Man's past about an artist whose project was such a miserable failure that he went fetal in his tent and shit himself during the night, only to have others turn his parts and pieces into a beautiful blinking windmill. When the guy arose to discover what happened, he started "dancing and whooping with shit in his pants," an unsettling image that Chicken tried to turn into a Borg 2 mantra of sorts, like his earlier promise to bring more "woo woo for Larry's hoo ha."

Chicken let the story stand as a sort of enigmatic parable, not really bringing it back to anything tangible or helpful to Borg 2's plight. It was pure Chicken – offbeat, punk rock, a strange but engaging piece of art. It was memorably unknowable, like much of what Chicken creates.

But to Gadeken, it was just a blown opportunity, a squandered chance to rally support. After all, Gadeken and company have just months to raise the money and build from scratch a structure for getting great art out to the remote and inhospitable Black Rock Desert, something Harvey is still honing 20 years later, even with his built-in funding supply.

To accomplish that task, Gadeken must use an often-combative crew of counterculture freaks, temperamental artists, grungy welders and wrenches, mad geniuses, gutter punks, wannabe Warhols, young dreamers, and other too-proud individualists – who all feel entitled to help guide the process and vote on the results.

Meet the council

Gadeken may embody the best hopes of Borg 2, but its continuum runs roughly from the superorganized Network Girl to the downright dangerous Madagascar Institute – which was elected to the guest curator position – with Michael Michael sort of circling the group in his own orbit.

As more than one person has told me, Gadeken could probably handle this all by himself, rather than being one of "the Nine." Gadeken has the artistic eye, the facilities, and the connections.

He's a quietly capable, no-nonsense guy, although a bit curmudgeonly. Since the election, he's worked closely with Network Girl, a.k.a. Jeanavive Janssen, in pushing things forward. She's the founder of www.thenetworkgirl.com, which helps artists network, share resources, and do their thing, a similar role to the one she's playing on the art council.

"It's just another avenue for me to express myself and help artists," she said.

But she's been a little surprised by the early backlash the art council got when it held its first meeting behind closed doors, only to get flamed on the Tribe message boards for so quickly betraying the democracy.

As a few posters passionately said, this is a movement of hundreds of artists who expect to keep making the decisions and have the art council carry out their will.

"We were just getting to know each other, and the next thing you know, people are feeling left out," Network Girl told me. "People have to trust that they elected us and that we're going to live up to the platforms."

But "trust us" doesn't go very far with this group. After all, many took Chicken's "radically participatory democracy" rhetoric seriously. And they come from an anarchic DIY philosophical tradition in which there is little use for hierarchy.

Borg 2 tweaks this sensibility just a bit by placing people in positions of responsibility, and Network Girl feels that weight probably more acutely than most of her colleagues on the council. She knows that all the many tasks must be completed immediately because projects are already underway, and Burning Man is just six months away.

"There are going to be artists waiting for the money," she said.

And then there's Michael, a legendary figure in Burning Man history. Also known as Danger Ranger or M2, he founded the Black Rock Rangers and still sits on the original six-member Borg, even though he's now been elected to Borg 2.

He's also a bit of an eccentric, believing himself sent from the future. Or as Harvey describes him, "Michael is like a helium balloon. If someone forgets to hold his string, he soars up into the stratosphere."

Michael sees it differently. "One of the things I do is push the envelope," he told me, and that's what he's doing now.

"If the experiment fails, it will just be another Black Rock City theme camp," he said. "But if it succeeds, Borg 2 will be the Burning Man renaissance."

Promoting fear

Much of what has motivated the Borg 2 rebellion is a longing for an idealized Burning Man past that was less structured and more chaotic, where there were explosions and gunfire and utter madness in the air and the whole experience made you a little scared, and maybe even left you scarred, figuratively or literally. That's what the Madagascar Institute represents to many Borg 2 backers.

Madagascar is a New York-based art collective whose motto is "fear is never boring." Whether doing guerrilla performance art on big-city streets or building crazed carnival rides and exploding installation pieces at festivals around the world, Madagascar has cultivated a reputation as street artists on the edge.

"We're trying to make it a little more dangerous and a little more chaotic, scaring people back to life" was how Doyle – who is working with fellow Madagascar artist Rosanna Scimeca on the task – described their goal for this year's Burning Man. "Try to help people push their own boundaries."

Even though they were elected as guest curators, there are constraints on the ability of Doyle and Scimeca to implement their artistic vision, the main one being the fact that a central tenet of Borg 2's creation was how all its participants will be able to vote on what art projects the group funds.

"There are ways around democracy. Just ask Karl Rove," Doyle said. His goal is to package the choices for what should be funded in ways that allow voters to just validate much of what Scimeca and Doyle bring in – like more outside artists and performance pieces.

Most of all, they want to walk the edge. They love the image of the mad artist. "Drive yourself crazy, and your crazy personality becomes an art piece," Scimeca said. Doyle smiled and added, "Let the monster out of the box."

Fucking, flying, burning pigs

Borg 2 is a work of art. Sure, it's also a political movement by artists who have some gripes, but the organization itself is the creative plaything of these same artists. Witness the pig party at the Shipyard.

The Feb. 5 party was filled with cool burner art: a remote-controlled, rapidly spinning electronic ball that shot long flames in two diagonal directions, a flying pink pig built on an electric wheelchair base that shot fireballs into the air, a calliope constructed on a washing machine, and random pieces by Shipyard artists.

But this was a scene built around a centerpiece: two flying, fucking, burning pigs. Their bodies were built of bent rebar, chicken wire, and propane gas lines. They were stuffed with newspaper wrapped around bundles of donated coins, soaked in lard, with some bacon and fireworks thrown in for good measure. The heads were actual pig heads mounted on metal bars, and the top pig had hinged hips and a huge drill for a cock.

As midnight approached, wild-haired Mason drove the forklift and suspended the pigs from their beams, while Mateo, the unofficial jester of the Borg 2 court, hung off the back of the lift jabbering into a megaphone.

The fireball whirled, people drank beer and bacon Bloody Marys, the Tanglers taught square dancing lessons, and a guy wearing an Army helmet kept encouraging people to smash him over the head with a two-by-four, harder, harder.

The pigs were finally put into place, and the crowd of hundreds gathered around them, tossing spare change into the pigs, at each other, and especially hard at Mateo. Large barrels were placed below the pigs, then sheet metal was laid over those, with microphones placed underneath to amplify the melodious falling of coins from the burning pigs.

As the excitement built, the pigs started passionately drilling each other as they were doused with more fuel squirted from a fertilizer can. A half-dozen people used their lighters to help Mason get his long torch going, and the pigs were set ablaze.

The various gas lines on the pigs started shooting flames out of several key spots, including the tip of the top pig's cock. Fireworks exploded. When most of the combustibles were spent and the charred innards began to settle, Mason grabbed a shovel and started beating the pigs and the sheet metal, with others joining in to poke and beat the pigs into fully consuming their insides and freeing all the change. The ritual seemed dutiful at first, then percussively joyful, a venting of the buildup, a launch into something new and exciting.

Or as Mason put it to me, "We're having fun with Burning Man again."

E-mail Steven T. Jones, a.k.a. Scribe