Epilogue as prologue

Has Burning Man finally returned from the desert? And can San Francisco help share it with the world?

By Steven T. Jones

THE YEAR BEGAN with high-profile conflict, and so it shall end. Burning Man artists (and shameless rebels) Jim Mason and Chicken John started The Petition, which turned into The Bet, which spawned Borg2, a group dedicated to bringing more and better art onto the playa.

It was the young turks against the establishment, a clash of the monster egos, well-intentioned ridiculousness, or a battle over the soul of Burning Man, depending on your perspective.

So what happened? Well, the most obvious answer was that even though this was a banner year for Burning Man art and culture, the rebellion pretty much flopped. It raised a fraction of the funding it had promised, its elected art curators walked away in frustration, and even some of its artists publicly admitted failure.

"So I'm going to go in the dunk tank, and people are going to talk about me," Chicken told me, complying with the terms of The Bet by planning to sit in a dunk tank during Decompression, Burning Man's annual postevent street fair, which takes place this Sunday.

But of course Chicken, the prankster and showman, still has a few cards up his sleeve. When he told Burning Man founder Larry Harvey that he intends to charge attendees money to try their hand at dunking him – something Chicken argues is a standard feature of the traditional dunk tank, gathering money he intends to place into an art fund that he'll control – he was told that was out of the question. After all, the prohibition on commerce is a central tenet of the Burning Man world.

"So I'm just going to do what I want to do, and if they try to stop me, I'm just going to start punching people," Chicken said. "If they don't let me charge money, they will have to do so physically."

How this latest drama will play out is anyone's guess. Chicken is a performance artist with a flair for the dramatic, so I'd be surprised to see actual bloodshed. But you never know, and that's a big part of the dramatic tension that has always hung over Burning Man. Bad things may happen, but it's all going to be OK in the end.

Even as the event finds stability and tries to project its ethos onto the larger world, there is still chaos at its core. It's about building a beautifully functional society in the most inhospitable of environments. It's a crazy patchwork of fierce individualists comprising a cohesive community. It's a story of hope that starts with an introduction of fear.

• • •

There's been a subtle shift in the Burning Man world that began even before The Petition. You could say it began in the mourning after that dismal presidential election. Harvey told me he saw it begin two years ago and that the public generally takes three years to comprehend new realities. But I saw it this year and so did many of the Burning Man participants I talked to.

"I've been to 20 Burning Mans, and I've never seen a better one," Harvey said. "The group that came this year was a bit more noble in their intentions than any I've ever seen in a city this size. They've really absorbed the idea of participation."

Call it the event's renaissance, the perfection of the experiment, its return from the desert. The longstanding question of whether Burning Man can survive has been answered, and now the question becomes whether it can project outward onto this troubled country.

"We've come through," Harvey said. "This is the revolution I'd hoped for all along."

He wasn't talking about a political revolution, but a social one. He saw it in the Flaming Lotus Girls' enlightened approach to gender roles and creative collaboration and in the gracious spirit that characterized the Critical Tits topless after-party, where even the excluded male gawkers outside were served chilled mango slices.

"Here I was, amid 500 tits, and I was principally paying attention to the social aspects of the event," Harvey said. "It was neither puritanical nor prurient."

He even sees the new reality in the acrimony that swirled around Borg2. The group threatened and taunted the Burning Man organization, but ultimately pumped new energy into an event it loved.

In other words, even when some members tried to pick a fight, when they mutinied and tried to force an internal schism, it brought the whole community closer. There aren't many groups of 35,000 people that function this way. There may not be any others.

Even in defeat, Mason, Chicken, and Borg2 Art Council president Charlie Gadeken claim victory for providing the "art spark" that made this year so outstanding. Harvey disputes their impact on his art funding decisions but acknowledges their social impact.

"What they can take credit for is the increased local interest in Burning Man," Harvey said. "If people care about Burning Man as much as Borg2 indicates, they might turn their attention away from the small, embattled group that created it."

And where might they turn their attention? Harvey has a few ideas.

• • •

San Francisco is not just the birthplace of Burning Man, but also its headquarters, its philosophical home, its conscience, and its main conduit to the outside world.

"San Francisco has always been a place apart, and a center of eccentric and independent thinkers. And what we started here, I don't think could have grown up anywhere else," Harvey said. "You can create a social context in which culture can be created, but you can't directly create the culture."

That's where he said Borg2 went wrong, in assuming Harvey could control what the culture was becoming. Only the larger group can now do that.

D espite continuing squabbles over where to focus its resources, energies, and speakers, there is a new cohesion in the Burning Man culture, an excited sense of possibility. It's flipped from reaction to action, from negation to affirmation, or as Harvey casts it, from the countercultural to the cultural.

Harvey sees the renaissance that many are now sensing within Burning Man as a return to the avant garde approach to social progress that was replaced in the 1950s by countercultural movements: the hippies, the punkers, and others who "didn't want to reform society, they simply wanted to be apart from it."

Last summer, a key symbol of the Burning Man culture came home to San Francisco, where none other than the mainstream mayor decided to put it on display in the heart of the city's newest showcase boulevard, Octavia. The Temple, built by Burning Man artist David Best, has been both a hit and a learning experience for the city.

"It is the first time in my 22-year career in public art that a piece has pleased everyone," said Jill Manton, the San Francisco Art Commission's director of public art and the main person who executed Mayor Gavin Newsom's idea to bring The Temple to SF. "Everyone was excited about bringing Burning Man to the people."

The writing on The Temple – words such as participate, kindness, tolerance, equality, and compassion; messages like "May our hearts be enflamed with love and passion" – speaks to an ethos burners hold dear, but their form says more than their content.

City officials initially freaked out when people started writing on the art they had commissioned, at least until burners explained that it's just part of the project. We've been writing on our temples since David Best first started building them. And now that city officials get it, they're excitedly talking about more such interactive art projects, as well as regular fall displays of Burning Man art.

Yet it's only a first step. After all, Manton still shunned the suggestion that they burn it – as Burning Man does its temples – instead of dismantling it next month as planned.

• • •

Burning Man images and culture aren't the only thing seeping out. So are its people and their skills.

"The irony is we went way out of the world and had to learn worldly skills to survive out there," Harvey said. "What people who understand us discover is we have experts is every field of human endeavor."

Those skills came in handy this year around New Orleans, which was hit by Hurricane Katrina during the event. While Burning Man itself responded with a fundraising drive that quickly gathered about $35,000 and various supplies for the relief effort, individual groups of burners responded in different ways.

For example, Harvey said, a group from The Temple team left after the event for Biloxi, Miss., which was hard hit by Katrina. There they discovered that a Buddhist temple important to the local Vietnamese community had been destroyed; The Temple team promptly rebuilt it.

"If that isn't applying our ethos, I don't know what is," Larry said. "The very skills needed to survive at Burning Man are the skills needed to respond to a disaster."

And what about those who see our current political system as a disaster?

"Everyone seems to be feeling that great change is in the offing, but nobody knows what it's going to be. And that raises questions about the creative class," Larry said.

Can the Bay Area's creative class – which extends from the underground artisans who propel Burning Man to the more mainstream business people favored by Newsom – influence the country's worldview and political dialogue in a substantial way?

On a more immediate level, can the ethos of Burning Man even stay together as the event continues to grow? Can Burning Man's social revolution evolve into a political one? What would that even look like? And can what works for 35,000 people really work for 5 or 10 or 100 times that many?

"You can't predict what people will do," Harvey said, "but some people will do things that will resonate." And therein lie the larger hopes of Burning Man.

Decompression takes place Sun/9, noon-10 p.m., Indiana Street between Mariposa and 21st (enter at 19th and Minnesota); admission is $10 in Black Rock City attire, $20 in street clothes.

Chicken John's "Ask Dr. Hal Show," a regular feature at the Odeon Bar, which he owned until earlier this year, starts a nine-week run (every Wed. night) Wed/5 at 8:30 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market; (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com.

To read the rest of our Burning Man series, of which this is the final installment, go to www.sfbg.com/burningman.

E-mail Steven T. Jones at steve@sfbg.com.