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BLACK ROCK DESERT — Some of the nation’s most avant-garde performance artists are skipping this year’s Burning Man gathering in the remote Black Rock Desert, a wild counterculture festival they usually relish for its celebration of the unorthodox.
They’re a continent away in New York City for this week’s Republican National Convention, seeking a national audience for an increasingly political message growing out of what had been a determinedly apolitical cross-pollination of artists and techno-wizards.
One of the most publicized protest groups, Greene Dragon, grew out of last year’s event — a weeklong celebration involving eclectic artwork, music and games.
Jonny America, a 29-year-old Brooklyn resident who goes by his Burning Man nickname year-round, was watching a woman with pink hair roller-skating through the desert as parachutists drifted down through the smoke from a fire sculpture behind her.
“I just thought, wow, this is human potential right here,” America said by telephone from New York City. He went home and founded Greene Dragon as a more positive, creative way of registering dissent, while showing that protesters are patriots, too.
The troupe wears costumes America describes as “Burner meets colonial,” including tri-cornered hats wired for special effects. Members rode “horse-cycles” down Lexington Avenue last week warning, “The Republicans are coming!” They re-enacted Gen. George Washington’s historic crossing of the Delaware River, posing like the famous painting on the Staten Island Ferry crossing New York Harbor.
“We are a Burning Man theme camp running year-round in the political world,” America said, referring to the extravagantly engineered desert oases that bloom for a week before Black Rock City returns to ashes and dust in one of the nation’s strangest annual rituals.
Burners have been torn about adding politics to the stone soup that bubbles every year when more than 30,000 bizarrely or barely dressed participants bring their wildest imaginations to an area where there are, by design, few rules or inhibitions.
Some view their week in the otherworldly location as a sacred break from civilization and the politics and problems that go with it. But many are, not surprisingly, of a liberal, free-spirited bent, and oppose President Bush’s re-election.
The unofficial shift came only last year when New York City’s Bill Talen donned his guise as the Rev. Billy and led his Church of Stop Shopping in nightly shows featuring satirical songs and sermons denouncing Americans’ rampant consumerism, the nation’s energy policy, and Bush administration policies in general.
Burning Man organizers gave the Rev. Billy and his choir a grant this year to tour California in opposition to a planned influx of Wal-Mart superstores.
That’s the model for how Burning Man founder Larry Harvey would like to see his creation’s impact spread from the self-imposed isolation of the desert 120 miles north of Reno into the rest of society.
The Rev. Billy hit a chord with local Wal-Mart opponents of all political stripes, Harvey said.
“I’m not talking about lefties. I’m talking about someone who runs a local store and sees their doom spelled out” by Wal-Mart’s competition, Harvey said. “You get this unlikely assortment of types coming together — where they probably wouldn’t usually give each other the time of day — all bound together by what we call ’radical participation.’ ”
That is manifesting itself at the GOP convention, Harvey said.
“You will see theater and politics combined in the streets, and I think that’s good for democracy.”
Harvey, 56, was an artist who burned an 8-foot wooden figure on a San Francisco beach in 1986. The idea caught on as an annual ritual of renewal, moving in 1990 to the blank canvas of the desert north of Gerlach. It has grown larger every year since, as has the increasingly elaborate Burning Man figure that will be torched Saturday night.
He’s trying to keep the politics fairly bipartisan at this year’s event, reflecting the debate over how much of the outside world should invade a make-believe city.
Toni Wallace and Cory Mervis are bringing their school bus painted like an American flag to the desert as part of a 10,000-mile venture to spell the word “Vote” on a continent-wide scale. The nonpartisan “Voter Drive” project started in New York on July 22 and plans to wind up in San Francisco later this month.
Returning from last year’s burn, cyberspace philosopher and pioneer John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote an essay. It questioned whether so much cutting-edge artistic and intellectual talent was wasting its time isolated in one of the most remote places in America, when they could be influencing the nation’s culture and politics at a critical juncture.
His query helped spark this year’s Real World Greeters Project, a play on the greeters who meet every arrival at the gates to Black Rock City.
JX Bell, a San Francisco technical writer and political activist, is recruiting volunteers to “greet” participants as they depart Sunday and Monday, urging them to join the political process as they rejoin reality.
“If we walked around with John Kerry signs, people wouldn’t like it. People don’t want to see icons and signs from the real world,” Bell said. But, “if everyone at Burning Man left the event thinking, ’Wow, it’s a moral imperative I get involved in my community,’ they’d be very powerful.”
