A dventures in P ap er - Black Rock City Heritage

Adventures in Paper
Black Rock City Heritage
Introduction
Annually, on the dust flats of Nevada’s
Black Rock Desert, emerges an
ephemeral city of extraordinary
wonder: the Burning Man arts and
survival festival. It is like nowhere else,
distinct in its setting, unique in its
proposition. For the thousands who
travel across land and sea to be there,
the challenge is first how to survive
where humans simply shouldn’t, and
second how to do the event justice.
In the summer of 2015 that was my
challenge.
Introduction
I started with a canvas as blank and
flat as the crusty, sun-baked alkaline
landscape I would soon visit. With
no predefined site, style, material or
approach, there were almost no limits
to what I could create there. Almost,
but not quite: one inescapable, scopesetting limit was the £1,000 AHMM
Travel Prize budget, and the looming
deadline of the event’s start date
four months away. These constraints
established a technical definition for
the artwork: whatever it was, I would
need to make it, transport it 5,000
miles and install it in the desert for no
more than £1,000. And soon.
Two thought streams quickly
emerged: the prosaic and the poetic.
Both progressed in parallel and equally
shaped the project. The prosaic
thinking focused in detail on how
to address those constraints with
distinct boundaries: time, size and
cost.
Designing, manufacturing and
assembling the artwork would all take
time. On one hand, I could create
something in London over a few
months, package it up and quickly
rebuild it in Nevada; on the other, I
could arrange to have something built
in America to be collected and erected
in the desert. There were different
twists on these two approaches that
also needed to be considered, each
presenting its own challenges.
Time was intrinsically linked with
size. Not living in Nevada, or even
in the US, I had limited time to build
out there, perhaps no more than a
few days. If the artwork was large it
could be broken down into a number
of pre-manufactured pieces, but a
larger artwork would also take longer
Out on the Playa
Over seven days a grand total of 30
plaques were awarded, less than
hoped but quite an achievement
considering the unexpected
conditions. The project started, as
I had decided beforehand, with the
camp I was part of, Camp Cheeky
Bollocks. Six of us had travelled
together all the way from London to
make our own mini-hacienda in the
desert and, as the project was to be
seen through my own eyes and follow
my experience, it needed to start
there.
006
Published
January 2016
Title
Black Rock City Heritage
Author
Allford Hall
Monaghan Morris/
David Lewis
Design
AHMM Comms Team/
David Lewis
The plaques arrive in Reno
I cycled around the city and across the
playa - the term for the open desert
- with a basket containing a dozen or
so plaques tied in with bungee cords,
ready to discover the good, the bad
and the ugly. A slow start saw Two
Stroke, a pair of desert golf-andwhisky-game inventors, awarded the
second plaque in the middle of a mild
dust storm. The third was to a group of
people who became our best ‘burner’
buddies for the week, proprietors
of our ‘local bar’. Another bar was
followed by a conjurer who stopped
to help at a tame bike crash near our
camp, but progress was slow.
to make, longer to package, longer to
ship and longer to handle at the other
end.
Size was significantly impacted by
cost. Whilst there was a finite budget,
there was no cap on the volume or
mass of material that it would buy;
some materials are very cheap
and, bought in bulk, can be mashed
together into a tower of trashiness.
However, finer raw materials, in
their unprocessed state, are not
economical to acquire and machine,
leading to something small. In the
expanse of the desert a modest
piece would be lost in the scale of it
all, so size was important. Getting the
balance between time, size and cost
right was imperative but seemingly not
straightforward.
1. Philosopher Martin Heidegger
I was guided through the parallel
poetic journey by the writings of
the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger. By chance I had been
reading about him around the time
I started thinking about applying for
the Travel Prize and I had been struck
by how Burning Man seemed to
embody his ideas in a distilled form.
Heidegger was a proponent of gaining
a sense of being through discovery
and experience, by understanding
how our attachments to ‘things’ gives
us the world we experience. Burning
Man, a festival without stages, with
infinite loci, a city that emerges in
an inhospitable, inhumane desert
landscape and disappears again in a
week, where people come to simply
be with others and share the tangible
weaving of souls, is an ephemeral
manifestation of his ideas of existence.
Heidegger is also one of few
philosophers to speak directly about
architecture, most notably in Building
Dwelling Thinking. He discusses
I decided to make project-specific
missions around the city throughout
the day, instigating the encounters.
Six plaques were awarded that
day, including the Bureau of
Misinformation, originally imagined
as a group of camouflage-clad
conspiracy theorists but eventually
found to be one young man and his
troop of scantily clad female friends.
The pick of the day were Deborah
Bloom and Steve Thompson, who
showed enormous gratitude when
awarded a plaque for simply relaxing
on a bench beside a lamppost.
A plaque ceremony took place during
a sunrise rave in the deep playa, with
nothing around but other ‘burners’
gyrating to the music booming out of
a large wall-of-speakers art bus. Then
the biggest dust storm in years hit and
wiped out an entire day as everyone
hid in their vehicles from the swirling
apocalypse. Once the dust had blown
through, I embarked on Big Saturday,
the day I would fulfil the project’s
promise. It started before dawn, with
a cold bike ride in the dark out to the
farthest place possible. There were
a few stragglers there, two of whom
were awarded a plaque for being
sunrise enthusiasts as we welcomed
dawn together.
In the morning plaques were awarded
to a peace maker up a geodesic
tower, a bogus brass band, a spiritual
game jester, a heavenly art car, a
taciturn costume swapper and, most
unremarkably, an enthusiastic bean
dip eater, all in quick succession. In
the afternoon, they were given to
free hot dog stand chefs, to a friend
from the seven hour night-time
queue to get into the festival, to
dedicated aluminium can recyclers,
to an amateur lewd puppeteer. They
were presented to sweet-dispensing
lifesavers, to a man who simply gave
me a high five as I cycled by and,
finally, to a man I found trying to steal
one of the city’s road signs.
means of measuring the world not by
using somewhat abstract scientific
characteristics such as mass, volume,
length and so on; instead he suggests
that we will find true solutions to our
myriad crises not through technology
but through a consideration of what
it is to be. He proposes a fourfold
of earth, sky, mortals and divinities;
each and all can be the focus of
our appreciation of our existence, a
measure of life.
Why Heidegger? Well, why not? The
more I read the more I was convinced
that to state that something
has become relevant to me, to
demonstrate that I am attached to it,
justified carrying his ideas forward.
Investigating these fundamental ideas
of postmodern thinking at their source
allowed me to both progress my
understanding of those other thinkers,
architects and artists he influenced,
and to uncover the meaning of
Burning Man and its inhabitants.
The two thought streams merged.
Prosaically, to make something small
seem big I realised I needed to take
what was there and use that to enlarge
whatever I was bringing. This was
first born as a physical piece, and
designs for a large balloon or kite were
drafted to describe artworks inflated
by the air. The idea then matured,
developing into one that enlisted the
greatest resource there: people. The
intertwined narratives of the Burning
Man faithful are the festival’s best side,
its true heart, and the artwork could
leverage this.
Poetically, I had gained a sense of
what was right. The artwork should
not be a static, boastful structure
standing proud. It shouldn’t be a mere
object; it should mean something
to others, it should belong to them.
I wanted to celebrate other people
for simply being. I wanted the project
to be ephemeral, to bring with me
something from my city to another,
and to be part of the festival’s
moneyless, gifting economy, indulging
in these expressive moments of
kindness.
In time, a clear idea emerged from the
mists of thought: I would establish
myself as a one-man-band, ad hoc
honour committee charged with
celebrating the people I would meet
on my journey by awarding them an
inscribed plaque to be positioned high
on their camp.
Playa Story:
Camp Mistakes Have Been Made
This was our local bar, and each
of my party discovered it by being
enticed inside whilst cycling back
from the toilet block. The invite came
screaming out of a megaphone and
we all succumbed, seduced by the
offer of their house cocktail, The
Suffering Bastard. That was one
helluva strong drink.
These plaques would create an urban
infrastructure of their own, one that
would disappear with Black Rock City,
done and dusted. Many slim discs
could be made and the cheapest of
shipping options used: they could be
taken as a second piece of baggage
on my flights to Reno.
The blue heritage plaques, and those
in other colours and shapes that
decorate our cities, are time portals
through which we can imagine another
moment, another person, another
achievement. They offer an alternative
addressee for a building, hinting at
an extra temporal dimension to our
urban landscape, one in which people
lived and died before us, busy making
our world. Establishing a blue plaque
heritage programme in a desert city
where people have just arrived, and
will soon leave, taking everything
with them, reinforces the desperate
ephemerality in our being, an exercise
in beautiful futility.
Anatomy of a Plaque
With the bones of the idea in place,
further design development saw the
right look and feel of the plaques
gradually emerge. The shape was the
first question to be answered, with
the circular plaque design chosen for
its strong sense of familiarity to me,
a Briton, but also for the potentially
unfamiliar sense to people across the
Atlantic. In addition, the Burning Man
urban plan is a truncated radial plan,
and there was a gentle nod to the
circle of life idea held by those who
have lived in Nevada since long before
the Europeans arrived.
This title would sit proudly on each
plaque, in the font used on the
Burning Man website, Rockwell.
This strong American typeface,
An English Heritage plaque
Heritage plaques play their part in
upholding the notion of The Great Men
of History, the idea that we should be
most grateful to a select few rather
than the thankful beneficiaries of the
labours of millions. They award the
winners in patriarchal times a neat and
tidy marker of their inflated magnitude.
Burning Man, in many ways simply a
survival festival, is a true leveller where
the whole city creates the whole city.
Thus plaques would be awarded to
anybody, for doing anything; any punk
in that fine mess would do.
Heritage plaques come in many
different colours depending on the
awarding body, so deviating from the
English Heritage blue was possible
without removing the link to such
schemes. Yet, after considering
many colours I returned to blue, but
not just any blue: International Klein
Blue. This vibrant, mesmerising tone
was developed by artist Yves Klein
and featured in scores of his pieces,
covering canvases, sculptures and,
rather famously, the naked bodies of
young French women used as human
brushes on large scale works.
His use of the colour that has long
attracted me - I also used this colour
in a project at university - was in his
exhibition titled The Void. A curtain
dyed in the deep, rich and inviting
blue marked the entrance to a gallery
containing no further works of art,
just bare walls and empty spaces.
On this thin sliver of land, a crisply
horizontal horizon dust-flat beneath
an electric blue dome, the giving
ceremonies would bring to the minds
and bodies of the awarded a sense
that there is something above us,
moments when Heidegger’s fourfold
of earth, sky, mortals and divinities is
apparent and complete.
3. Yves Klein’s Anthropométrie
Playa Story:
Claire & Jason Gilles
Friday was a wipe-out. An enormous,
horizon-filling dust storm rapidly
marched through the desert to cloud
everything in a swirling taupe mist. I
was far from the city when it struck,
caught cycling round in a dreamlike
abstract universe. Art cars and other
lost wanderers would appear from
nowhere and drift off out of sight,
leaving me alone in the beigeness.
Playa Story:
Reena Lazar
Even if you lay out a city as flat as a
pancake and provide acres of space,
people will always want to build high.
Up a tower formed from five stacked
geodesic domes I encountered Reena
Lazar, also there for the view.
In this gentle chaos I chanced upon
Claire and Jason, equally bemused
by the powdery world in which we
were encased. For a brief moment
we shared something, and it felt
their spirit should be celebrated;
their plaque reads Adventured Here.
I cycled off into the dust storm,
the perfect setting for the most
ephemeral of the plaque stories.
As with all the plaque awardees, I
asked Reena what she would like
written on the canvas and thought
she was just another damn hippy
when she replied Peace Maker. It
turns out that’s her real world job;
she makes peace as a consultant for
various organisations in her home
city. A chance discovery but one of
the worthiest to be honoured by Black
Rock City Heritage.
Playa Story:
Yujing Li
Playa Story:
Alex Matzner & Danny Hernandez
Playa Story:
Andrei Kuzin
Sometimes you can make gold if you
simply try to find it. A fitful night’s
sleep saw me leave my camp before
dawn to search out something special,
alone. I cycled as far as I could,
wrapped in all my clothes to fend off
the bone-chilling cold. In the deep
playa, beside a perception warping
house made from mirrors, I found Alex
and Danny.
Andrei came to mean a lot more to me
than most of the plaque awardees. We
had met in the queue of trucks waiting
to get into the festival, a ramshackle
metal snake held sixty miles out in the
middle of a pitch black desert for the
duration of a whole night.
To the side of us as we danced was
Yujing Li, a clean-cut kid just out there
by herself to dance the sun up into the
sky. A gentle, quiet and happy soul, her
plaque was inscribed with Sunshine
Bringer.
The English Heritage blue plaques
are made by a single, somewhat
idiosyncratic family in Cornwall.
They are crafted from fine clay and
delicately hand-painted, but I could
not follow this route; heavy ceramics
would be extremely difficult to
transport 5,000 miles without some or
all breaking apart, so other materials
had to be considered for the Burning
Man plaques. Polished blue mirror
stainless steel discs were one early
option; another was printed, blue-
I felt that the plaques should be
decorative, if not actually a little
ostentatious: a touch tonguein-cheek, part of a ridiculously
grandiose gesture at an event where
the earnestness of the default
world is put to one side. The honour
committee I was embodying was
thus given the grand title of Black
Rock City Heritage, making me
a punk grabbing his own part of
civilisation, normally out of reach, and
appropriating it.
An artwork at Burning Man
for the AHMM Travel Prize 2015
David Lewis
Painting the plaques
organisation; perhaps the committee
comes back each year, born anew to
celebrate a fresh set of good people.
A series of laser-cut stencils and white
spray paint were used to imprint the
design on each of the fifty plaques.
A stack of the best 35 – five a day
awarded for the seven days of the
festival - were then parcelled up into a
cylinder that, by just a few millimetres,
came within the airline’s maximum
linear measurements for a second
piece of baggage.
2. Artist Yves Klein
Their small but sturdy wooden beach
shack was our best shelter during the
Friday dust storm, and also the scene
of one of my group stripping naked
to become a human whiteboard. We
hung out many times over the week
and the friendship was cemented
when we travelled as one team to
watch the Man burn and sing bawdy
drinking songs.
We were told that the best parties
start around 6am, during sunrise when
the air is cool and the sky tinged with
pink and orange. We ventured out in
the pitch-black night, our way lit only
by the fairy lights on our bikes, into
the deep playa to find a hundred or so
people dancing by an art bus, its wall
of speakers blasting out the music
conjured by the DJ perched on top.
The colour has come to represent
absence and bodilessness, and for me
would represent the ephemerality of
a heritage scheme for a disappearing
city.
Together we celebrated the sunrise
emerging over the plateau before us,
eager for its rays to blast their warmth
through to our marrow. We were all
Sunrise Enthusiasts at that moment.
Andrei gave me advice then and
again the two other times during the
festival that I visited his camp. He has
the gravelly voice and biting, acerbic
wisdom of a New York senior citizen,
years before his time, and was much
loved by the crew he corralled. An
ephemeral friend I will probably never
see again, but one who shone brightly
for those brief moments.
Adding the crest and phoenix
dyed, biodegradable, pressed cotton
urns - neatly tying in with the name of
the festival; a third was bespoke blue
circular road signs. All were rejected
when found to be sadly far beyond the
reach of the budget.
The search for a far cheaper material
eventually uncovered pre-stretched
round canvases: light, thin and with
the perfect diameter, available to
buy in bulk. These could, of course,
be painted so a paint matching
International Klein Blue was sourced.
Bristol Paints mix the exact colour and
so one summer afternoon my kitchen
became an unreal sea of blue as a
total of 50 plaques were painted and
laid to dry.
Playa Story:
Trixxy
Amidst all the sonic and visual
noise, amongst characters giving
it all to fulfil one of the festival’s
ten commandments, radical selfexpression, some people stand out.
The embodiment of altruism, serenity
and tenderness, Trixxy, clad in a
whirling tie-dye outfit, was stood in the
centre of one of the smaller circular
plazas handing out red candy laces to
anyone she could distract from their
journey.
She seemed as effortlessly human
as a human can be. She belonged
to nearby Camp Nice and asked,
rather fittingly, to be titled Happiness
Ambassador on her plaque. Trixxy was
by far the most graciously appreciative
plaque awardee.
Playa Story:
Matt Winn
Matt ran a decidedly unprofessional
advice booth on the side of the one of
the quieter roads; he had a table and
a cardboard sign. I stopped by for a
session.
In the few minutes I was sat at his
booth, we went through some
seriously deep stuff and Matt, with his
powers of deduction, set the course
for the rest of my life, should I choose
to take it. Truth Seeker and Guidance
Giver did not seem too grand a title.
with straight, load-bearing serifs,
has an appropriately grounded,
wild west, non-modernist feel, but
was also chosen because it made
the unauthorised addition of urban
infrastructure in this project even
more like a cuckoo laying its egg in
another’s nest.
Other little touches finished
the design. A circular crest of
flames added to the tawdry
conspicuousness, and a phoenix was
added to form the Black Rock City
Heritage logo. The phoenix, and not
the death-signifying burning man
found elsewhere on theme camp
logos, was chosen to represent the
continual rebirth of the heritage
Each plaque would eventually be
unique, marked with the name of the
awardee, the date and their reason for
being honoured. This customisation
had to be quick and done without fuss.
It would have to work in all conditions
and when others might not have much
time to spare, so a handful of white
paint marker pens, normally used to
mark industrial equipment, were also
bought for the kit.
One final preordained flourish would
add a nod to the caring, tripped-out
nature of the festival and mark the
project as distinct in its own right:
instead of writing Lived Here at the
bottom to indicate that the blue
plaque honours someone who resided
at that particular address, the hippy
anthem sat just above the phoenix
would be
Loved Here.
Epilogue
Credits
Burning Man surpassed my high
expectations. The wealth of creativity,
all around you, shining brilliantly day
and night, was astonishing. Black
Rock City Heritage earned me so
many extra hugs, so many smiles,
so many cheers. People seemed
genuinely touched and to bring the
project to them felt like a privilege. I
must be honest and admit that whilst
many plaques were awarded I didn’t
see any in place afterwards save for
those at our camp and our local bar.
I also don’t know if anyone else there
spotted more than one or even a
pattern but, hey, it’s a very big place.
Black Rock City Heritage was my
artwork at Burning Man 2015. It was
wholly funded by the AHMM Travel
Prize I won at the Spring Conference
that same year. I am enormously
grateful to all who have helped me get
there and document it.
Yet I felt part of festival, the wacky Brit
in a blue tailcoat - or just shorts and
braces, depending on the weather
- who performed a silly but jolly
ceremony and then rode off into the
dusty distance.
If I was to go again I would love to
be part of a larger project. Some are
incredible but clearly take teams
working with greater resources for a
much longer time. There’s so much
to want to be involved with at Burning
Man but you can only experience the
little bit of it you make. For me, this was
the best project of which I have been
a part.
For videos of all the ceremonies and
more about the project, please visit:
www.blackrockcityheritage.org
Image credits:
1. Martin Heidegger in his hut at
Todtnauberg, 1968
bpk/Digne Meller Marcovicz
2. Yves Klein at the shoot for a film of his
Anthropométrie, 1960
bpk/Charles Wilp
3. Performance of Yves Klein’s
Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue, 1960
bpk/Charles Wilp
All other images by David Lewis
Though my eyes be closed by the final
Shadow that sweeps me off on the blank white day
And thus my soul be rendered up
By fawning time to hastening death;
Yet memory will not abandon love
On the shore where first it burned:
My flame can swim through coldest water
And will not bend to laws severe.
Soul that was a prison to a god,
Veins that fuelled such fire,
Marrow that gloriously burned The body they will leave, though not its cares;
Ash they will be, but filled with meaning;
Dust they will be, but dust in love.
Love Constant Beyond Death
Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645)
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
1
9
14
16
18
23
CAMP CHEEKY
BOLLOCKS
THE BUREAU OF
MISINFORMATION
BOGUS BRASS
OASIS ART CAR
LION TAMER
LOVED HERE
SOURCE OF RADICAL
RIDICULOSITY
ALEX MATZNER
& DANNY
HERNANDEZ
PLAYED SWEET MUSIC
HERE
CREATORS OF A
MOVING HAVEN,
LOVED HERE
CREATOR OF
APPARENT
HORIZON,
LOVED HERE
SUNRISE ENTHUSIASTS,
LOVED HERE
2
10
19
24
TWO STROKE
DEBORAH
BLOOM & STEVE
THOMPSON
MOMMA DOC
KAT THATCHER
& ERIC KREIDER
INVENTORS OF
BURNING GOLF
COSTUME SWAPPER,
LOVED HERE
RELAXED HERE
LIFESAVERS,
LOVED HERE
14
12
25
CAMP MISTAKES
HAVE BEEN
MADE
BLACK ROCK
CITY RECYCLE
CAMP
HOME OF THE
‘SUFFERING
BASTARD’
SORTERS &
CRUSHERS OF
ALUMINIUM CANS,
LOVED HERE
La
f
Ko fing
Sa
ok
l
Jol
ly
Illu
Ha sion
n
Ge ky P
e
a
k
Fre
nk
a
k
Er
Sh
s
ow
Do atz
nn
Ca
ike
r
r
Ba ny
l
Ar lyho
ca
o
de
Es
pla
na
de
3
10:00
4
9:45
HAIR OF THE
DOG
9:30
GAVE & LOVED HERE
13
Temple
2:00
18
TRIXXY
2:30
HAPPINESS
AMBASSADOR,
LOVED HERE
2:45
9:15
9:00
26
2:15
17
27
26
11
16
2
10
15
The Man
9
3:00
19
5
27
21
ADAM REI
SIEGEL
SPEEDO
3
8:30
MASTER CONJURER,
LOVED HERE
Center Camp
3:30
AMATEUR LEWD
PUPPETEER,
LOVED HERE
1
20
5
8:00
6
11
PEACE OF ASS
CHAMPAGNE
SNOCONE
PROTECTORS OF
THE BUM
DISPENSERS OF HIGH
CLASS SHAVED ICE
4
8
25
7:30
4:00
6
7
28 29
4:30
24
23
20
28
ANDREI THORP
MATT WINN
ENTHUSIASTIC
BEAN DIP EATER,
LOVED HERE
TRUTH SEEKER &
GUIDANCE GIVER,
LOVED HERE
22
7:00
5:00
6:30
30
5:30
6:00
7
12
21
29
PAPA WITCH
YUJING LI
GEEWY BEAR
PAINTER,
LOVED HERE
SUNSHINE BRINGER,
LOVED HERE
JELLY & LEAF E.
GREENS
8
13
15
17
22
30
ARCTICA
CLAIRE & JASON
GILLES
REENA LAZAR
JARAD KUFELDT
ANDREI KUZIN
JUICE
PEACE MAKER,
LOVED HERE
GAME JESTER,
LOVED HERE
GIVER, ADVISOR &
LINE COMPANION,
LOVED HERE
SPREADER OF LOVE,
LOITERED HERE
PROVIDERS OF ICE,
LOVED HERE
ADVENTURED HERE
MAKERS OF FINE
HOT DOGS,
LOVED HERE
LOVER OF
HUMANITY,
LOVED HERE