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The Desert (Gallery 104)
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
-- Malcolm Gladwell
In 1990, as Burning Man first arrived in the Black Rock Desert during the Cacophony Society's infamous Zone Trip #4, in a mythic moment, co-founder Michael Mikel drew a line in the sand and announced, "On the other side of this line, everything will be different." He was right.
The alien landscape of the Black Rock Desert has come to define Burning Man; the gathering's distinctive culture can be attributed to this place. The ancient lake bed, nestled between distant mountains, is so flat it is rumored you can see the curvature of the earth as you look out across it. Nothing grows here. Its surface, dubbed, "the playa," is covered with fine alkaline dust that clings to the skin and seeps into every crevice. The area is prone to high winds, white-out dust storms, and punishing temperatures. For the many city-dwellers who flock to the festival, the brutal environment seems designed to give pause, assuring only the serious make the trek. This is part of the essential character of Burning Man every participant must grapple with. No one wants to live in Black Rock City forever. It's hard.
Yet co-founder Larry Harvey has also called the environment a tabula rasa, a blank slate where all things are possible. From the first step over the line, the frontier of the desert symbolized literal and figurative freedom. The early rules focused primarily on survival, and the emptiness invited the imagination to fill it. Here, where the featureless plain stretches out for miles in every direction, one can easily become disoriented and lose all sense of scale. Every element of the oasis that suddenly springs forth is manmade and must be carted in, erected, carted out --- the result of necessity, passion, and ingenuity. This return to subsistence living, and absence of luxuries like cell phone connectivity and regular showers, defines the experience. The bond participants feel derives largely from overcoming the desert's hardships together.
Finally, when the event concludes and participants disperse, the community is responsible to leave no trace, returning the desert to its pristine state until the next year. |