A brief history of Burning Man
Burning Man might evoke images of 2023’s unprecedented flooding or snapshots of celebrities in eccentric costumes, but the event is much more than these surface impressions suggest, with a rich history that goes deeper than many realise. At its core, Burning Man is a radical celebration for those seeking to break free from the constraints of consumerism and reconnect with their natural state, fostering a sense of community and a profound connection to nature.
Although the last edition of Burning Man attracted 87,000 revellers, its origins were humble. It all started in 1986 when friends Larry Harvey and Jerry James built a human effigy and burned it on the summer solstice on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. They decided to do so after sculptor Mary Grauberger, a friend of Harvey’s girlfriend who had held solstice gatherings there for several years prior, stopped doing it, so they decided to take up the torch.
The pair built the man out of scrap lumber in a basement in the city’s Noe Valley, with it an eight-foot wooden structure, accompanied by a smaller wooden dog. It was an act of radical expression, and in addition to the pair’s friends, the spectacle attracted others in the area. From a hippie playing the guitar, singing a song about the fire to a woman running at the figure to shake its hands, it was a transcendental moment that affirmed burning the effigy’s profoundly communal significance.
The following year, the man grew to nearly 15 feet, and it took a couple of weekends to work on, with the additional help of girlfriends and roommates. Burned again on Baker Beach, it saw the number of attendees grow to 80.
Speaking at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center in 2000, Harvey discussed the countercultural motivations behind burning the effigy and the community surrounding it. He explained: “The Bohemians have a kind of erotic sense of property. They share with one another. They cooperate with one another. They collaborate with one another. What Bohemians reflect is the natural life of artists, how they behave in their authentic environment. And these were the principles we followed.”
Continuing, he added: “We didn’t worry about getting a venue or asking permission. We started out guerilla. We were illegal, going down to the beach to burn this thing. And we depended for our resources, not on grants, and not on sponsorship, and not anybody’s funding, but on our own communal efforts undertaken together.”
In time, the event would come to be guided by ten simple principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
In 1988, Harvey named the ritual Burning Man, formally doing so by describing the event as such in flyers. Reportedly, this was to dispel references to the pagan practice of burning the wicker man, which was notorised by the 1973 horror flick The Wicker Man.
The event’s move to the Nevada desert came after John Law and Kevin Evans held a separate event in 1990 on a little-known playa – a dry lake bed – in the Black Rock Desert, 110 miles north of Reno, Nevada. Wanting a Dadaist temporary autonomous zone with sculptures burned and other performance art, he asked John Law, a founder of the countercultural activist and culture jamming group, the Cacophony Society, to organise it. In their newsletter, it was dubbed ‘Zone Trip No. 4, A Bad Day at Black Rock’, referencing the 1955 noir film.
Back on Baker Beach, Harvey and James’ burn was stifled by the park police as they did not have a permit. The man was disassembled just in time to move it to Evans and Law’s event. There, the present site of Black Rock City formed as a fellowship of minds. It was organised by Law and Michael Mikel – who formed the Black Rock Rangers to assist attendees unfamiliar with the arid environment – based on Evans and Grauberger’s concepts and used Harvey and James’ man as the centrepiece. Following this convergence, Burning Man has been held across the week leading up to and including Labor Day.
During these formative years, the community grew by word of mouth, and all were deemed participants due to participating in a situationist milieu. A shared space developed, with no paid or scheduled performers or artists and no barriers between art and living spaces. Due to the Bureau of Land Management, in 1991, the event acquired a legal permit and saw its first art director, Crimson Rose, attend.
In 1992, the Desert Siteworks event was held nearby, attracting a small number of participants. A more intensive undertaking, it was several weeks long and held over the Solstice at hot springs. Law and Mikel were involved, and its driving force, William Binzen, was Harvey’s friend. It ran for three years before a formal partnership was instituted to own the Burning Man name in 1996. That was the last year the Black Rock Desert side had no fence.
Things were starting to grow beyond anyone’s expectations during this period. Due to a worker, Michael Furey, dying in a motorcycle crash and a couple being run over in their tent by a car on the way to the rave camp, John Law broke with the festival and maintained it should end for good.
In 1997, Burning Man was forced to move due to land speed trials taking precedence at Black Rock and relocated to the nearby Fly Ranch. As they were now under the remit of Washoe County and faced many more permit requirements, they formed Black Rock City LLC with revered business professional and arts organiser Dana Harrison to comply with new requirements and liability. Black Rock City, in its present guise, was born with a Department of Public Works formed to build the settlement’s grid. Elsewhere, a speed limit of 5mph was enacted, a ban on driving apart from official “mutant vehicles” and other service ones was instituted, and art burning was undertaken on approved platforms henceforth. Animals and fireworks were banned, too. Signifying this official shift, the iconic 9.2-mile plastic fence was debuted.
In 2013, Black Rock City LLC became a subsidiary of the new nonprofit organisation, The Burning Man Project, which Harvey publically described as “the next step”. This followed protracted infighting among the six board members and separate lawsuits from Mikel and the estranged Law. To stop a legal split between them, Harvey said the nonprofit was formed to stay in line with its original values and keep the event going despite the schism. Control and assets were handed over to The Burning Man Project, which was comprised of a group of senior BRC employees that had formed after the board devolved. Harvey said: “We want to get out of running Burning Man. We want to move on.”
It was a controversial move, attracting the ire of many involved with Burning Man. “Nonprofits can go bad, so the real challenge is creating a rugged framework,” Mikel maintained in the face of such critiques. “This thing needs to run beyond us.” In 2020 and 2021, Burning Man was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with smaller unofficial events happening in its place, attracting much controversy. The rains and mini humanitarian crisis of 2023 were looming close on the horizon. For 2024, though, it looks set to return to its kaleidoscopic hippie norm. Who knows what the future might hold?
