{"id":1002,"date":"2011-06-27T12:36:31","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T16:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2012-07-15T19:57:20","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T23:57:20","slug":"burning-mans-burning-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/burning-mans-burning-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"Burning Man’s Burning Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What impetus would lead to the construction of a twenty-ton, five-story high Trojan horse? Why, the 2011 Burning Man Festival of course. The festival, which will take place this year from August 29 to September 5, is held each year in Nevada\u2019s Black Rock Desert, a participant-driven exercise in transitory civilization-building in which 40,00 people temporarily set up themed campsites and art installations. This year\u2019s theme is entitled \u201cRites of Passage\u201d with a Trojan horse planned as the gigantic emblemazation of that (I have not been able to discern quite how, exactly).<\/p>\n

Nothing says \u201ccommunity, art, self-expression, and self-reliance\u201d (Burning Man\u2019s apparent focus, according to their website) quite like a $100,000 wooden horse. Designed by Vancouver-based art director, Douglas Bevans, the horse will be a contemporary Cubist sculpture of sorts, with \u201csurrealistic rooms\u201d possessing \u201cspectacular lighting effects\u201d laying as histrionic innards within the gigantic horse\u2019s skeletal structure. According to the planned design, there will be a room where a mysteriously vague \u201cabsinthe ceremony\u201d will take place and an oracle room modeled after that of the Delphic oracle, through whom the god Apollo spoke via \u201cecstatic prophecies\u201d that priests would thereafter translate for human consumption.<\/p>\n

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What the horse will look like at night<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And there\u2019s more\u2026<\/p>\n

The beast will be towed by the tens of thousands of free-spirited men and women in attendance across an ancient lakebed known as the playa, where, allegedly, \u201cit will be set on fire with flaming arrows.\u201d In addition to the flaming spectacle, Burners (the term for Burning Man festival-goers) will don the garb of Greek gods and goddessess and march alongside a corps of brass-players, drummers, and percussionists, who will play director Bevans\u2019 latest musical composition.<\/p>\n

After reading about the Trojan horse, I was more irked than enamored, more confused than logically in-step with the idea. How could anyone possibly justify spending $100,000 to construct a fake horse, only to set it on fire in a brazen act comparatively as juvenile as when you spent hours as a child constructing miniature cities out of cardboard that you summarily blew up with firecrackers? In the name of art? In the name of fun, camaraderie, spiritual fulfillment? In the name of what, I must ask?<\/p>\n

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Burning Man is more than just an annual festival constructed within the still expanse of the Nevada desert. Additionally, it\u2019s a belief system, a culture (again, according to their website) that espouses \u201cTen Principles\u201d that believers can abide by year-round: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. All of these principles seem lovely in isolation, but we are<\/em>, remember, talking about spending a multitude of peoples\u2019 hard-earned, one-tenth of a million on a horse to be disintegrated into a mass of un-usable embers. If Burners believe that they must \u201cresist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience,\u201d how can they simultaneously, I argue, spend, expend, and destroy <\/em>in such a blatant, bizarrely unapologetic fashion?<\/p>\n

The Burning horse doesn\u2019t exactly abide by the \u201cLeaving No Trace\u201d Principle. When you make a fire, either in your domestic fireplace or when you shoot flaming arrows into your Trojan horse, the fire emits carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides into the air, which, when exposed to sunlight, create ground-level ozone, a noxious air pollutant (which is different that the ozone in our stratosphere, which absorbs dangerous UV light). Fires affect both your fellow man and the natural environment, and not in the manner that the creators and
\n<\/a> participators in the festival advocate, the lofty production of \u201cpositive spiritual change in the world.\u201d Burning Man\u2019s horse is not so innocuous, not so environmentally-friendly, not so much \u201cLeaving No Trace.\u201d One Burner admitted\u201cwhen we look at the 10 principles even the people running Burning Man admit there are some seriously blurry lines on those principles and for everyone they blur on different levels.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It is understandable that rule-makers will tweak past words over time to fit their current agendas, but in a festival that is so focused on spiritual harmony free from the fetters of the \u201cdefault world,\u201d the Burner term for the rest of the universe laying outside the perimeters of the festival, how can the creators assemble a piece of interactive \u201cart\u201d that can only be transformed into a reality via the commodity-transforming currency of that default world? With the theme of this year\u2019s festival being \u201cRites of Passage,\u201d a premise that purportedly \u201cobliges us to face our innermost insecurities\u2026a willingness to leap off the ladder of ordered existence,\u201d I can only question if there is any type of productive transformation actually taking place. If there is one, it\u2019s from blind idealism to self-imposed naivet\u00e9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What impetus would lead to the construction of a twenty-ton, five-story high Trojan horse? Why, the 2011 Burning Man Festival of course. The festival, which will take place this year from August 29 to September 5, is held each year in Nevada\u2019s Black Rock Desert, a participant-driven exercise in transitory civilization-building in which 40,00 people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214],"tags":[156,157],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3028,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/3028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}