A Warm-Up Party in Hell / SoMa bash heralds Burning Man festival

JESSE HAMLIN, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, July 19, 1996

In the mood for some weird and amusing neo-Dada antics this weekend?

If so, check out the SOMAR Gallery & Warehouse on Brannan Street tonight and tomorrow, where the loose collective of artists, performers and pranksters who put on the bacchanalian Burning Man arts festival every summer in Nevada's Black Rock desert will stage a "satirically satanic evening of insanity."

It could be fun for those who like mingling in an artsy atmosphere with minotaurs in chain-mail chaps, spider ladies dangling from the roof, fire-spewing robots, Butoh dancers and human cockroaches.

This "circus of the absurd" is an urban warm-up to the big Burning Man conclave in the desert Labor Day weekend. That ever-expanding bash -- a freewheeling experiment in collective creation that suggests a mix of ancient Celtic fire ritual and Halloween on Castro Street -- draws thousands of people to the blazing desert north of Reno, where a tent city blossoms overnight.

Sculptors build giant structures of mud and wire, hippies dance naked in the sun, artists shoot lasers into the black night sky. There are stilt walkers and funk bands and guys dressed like Zeus. Last year, gun enthusiasts in cars blasted stuffed animals set up along a drive-by shooting-range (Barney, of course, was the target of choice).

The festivities culminate with the torching of the Burning Man, a 40-foot wooden figure whose first incarnation was set afire on Baker Beach in San Francisco 11 years ago.

"We're beyond weird, we're beyond strange, we're wholly other," says Larry Harvey, the man behind the Burning Man. He's talking in the cavernous SOMAR space where the giant wooden figure -- a human Trojan Horse -- is now hanging from the rafters.

"This is all about collective participation; it's not a show, it's an environment, a little world. You don't just sit and watch, you do it. People come and do what they want. We're not exactly the art establishment. It's managed chaos."

HOW BURNING MAN STARTED

Harvey, a former landscape architect who now makes his living running the Burning Man project, first torched an eight-foot wooden figure on Baker Beach in 1985 with a few friends to celebrate the summer solstice and exorcise the lingering sadness of a lost love affair. [Ed note: Harvey began reporting Burning Man started in 1985 in the mid-90s. Some speculate this error was spread in connection with establishing an early time line as the result of litigation with John Law]

"People started appearing from all over," recalls Harvey, 48, a slyly humorous chap who smokes cheap cigarettes and is rarely seen without a hat. "There's nothing that attracts people like fire. Naked bodies come in a close second."

Every year the Burning Man, which is built by volunteers in South San Francisco warehouse, got bigger and bigger. And so did the crowds at Baker Beach. In 1990, the cops put a stop to the communal torching. That's when Harvey hooked up with the San Francisco Cacophony Society, a gang of fun-loving provocateurs, and moved the fiery scene to Black Rock Desert.

"When we began we didn't know we were artists," says Harvey, who based this year's festival theme on Dante's Inferno. "We kept burning, and the whole thing kept growing. It was a ritual, but we never told people to believe anything. We never said what it was about."

At SOMAR, revelers can wander through a series of live-action tableaux, such as the Vestibule of Hell, run by Helco, "a supra-national corporation that has taken over Hell."

Red-blazered sales reps provide contracts for the sale of souls. The horned man himself -- "We've got three devils working temp," Harvey says -- will sit on the Throne of Satan, chatting up the crowd.

THE SOUL EXTRACTOR

Sculptor Al Honig has devised a Soul Extractor machine. You sit in the chair, a helmet comes down over your head and smoke pours out the top as your soul is sucked away.

There will also be video projections, live electric music, weird dances along the bridge that crosses the main hall and the usual "scantily clad lovelies," promises Harvey. He wants the Fire Department to know that the fire play will take place only in the courtyard. Says Michael Michael, who bills himself as the Burning Man's director of genetic programming, "This is a randomly gathered network of free spirits, united in pursuit of experience beyond the mainstream."

'SATANIC EVENING'

The Burning Man Project's "satanic evening of insanity," featuring music, interactive theater and art installations, runs from 8 p.m. to midnight today, tomorrow Saturday and July 26 and 27 at the SOMAR Gallery & Warehouse, 934 Brannan St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10. Call (415) 985-7471.