By: JOYCE SLATON

SAN FRANCISCO – Some of the world's finest art installations inhabit the world's most inhospitable art gallery.

An elaborate copper fire-fountain, a detailed scale-model replica of a Reno casino, a two-story "stained-glass" chapel built entirely out of discarded plastic – these types of ironic, astounding contemporary art pieces can't be found at SFMOMA or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They're installed in the middle of nowhere, in the scorching Black Rock desert, at the annual Burning Man festival.

Though many consider the controversial week-long event to be a clothing-optional free-for-all, Burning Man has developed into a premier venue for the creation and appreciation of art.

"When you're a kid, everything is endlessly fascinating, and I'd like to try to recapture that feeling," said Kimric Smythe, a San Francisco artist who is creating a 35-foot exploding clock tower for performances revolving around this year's Burning Man theme, time. Smythe is also the artist who creates and deploys pyrotechnics for the Man, which goes up in flames the last night of the festival.

That quest for kid-like pleasure may be the payoff that entices artists to spend untold hours and dollars building elaborate installations and carting them, piece by piece, hundreds of miles into a harsh desert.

It's not an easy task, but somehow Burning Man artists have overcome distance, expense, and hostile desert conditions to create installations like a 20-foot flame-spewing Giant Ass, an adult-sized playground, and a towering Tesla coil that shoots static sparks for hundreds of feet across the desert floor.

The logistics of creating and carting these installations to Burning Man are simply enormous, and on top of all the bare-bones planning the average Burning Man trip requires, they seem insurmountable. To begin with, creating installations takes a heck of a lot of work even before heading to the playa.

"It's a lot of work, a lot of work," sighed Nikki Lastreto, a San Francisco writer and party organizer who's working on one of the most ambitious camps. HourLand's scenery will include a 32-foot lotus flower that will open during closing ceremonies, life-size Buddhas, a state-of-the-art sound system, giant artificial palm trees, and three camels rented from Reno."We do a lot to build our crazy summer camp," Lastreto said. Lila Drake, a Portland artist who is building a shade tent entirely from discarded CD-ROM software discs, estimates she's spent at least 100 hours on her project.

"You start to wonder why you're doing it," Drake said. "But when you get out to the playa and see all the other amazing art, what you've done looks puny in comparison."Kal Spelletich, a San Francisco artist who works in collaboration with techno artists Seemen, says he's put in thousands upon thousands of hours on Burning Man projects." I could be making $50 an hour at a machine shop, but instead I get really obsessive and work insanely long days on my art inventions," Spelletich said.

This year these inventions include an elaborate façade of The Last Victorian for Rent in San Francisco, a giant mechanical clock with a spinning, fiery human figure, and a six-foot, three-headed, flying steel dog with a 20-foot wingspan and its own lighting system.

Obviously, these types of creations don't come cheap. Spelletich and others get some grant money from Burning Man organizers, but much of the cost is absorbed by the artists themselves.

As much as possible, artists try to use found objects in their work. For instance, in creating the Burning Man, Smythe uses discarded lumber for the structure's wooden pieces and burlap bags donated by coffee companies and leftover wax from candle-makers to create the Man's pyrotechnic display."

For a little while we were throwing money at art projects, but we know how to scavenge," Smythe said. "My clock tower will have bell music played as it burns, and we went down to the junkyard looking for something that would do the trick: aluminum car rims actually play notes. "It would cost hundreds of dollars for real bells, but now they're free. It's cheating if you just go buy what you need." Transporting the art to the desert is also a challenge. Huge trucks must be rented for the endless trips back and forth. Not only is truck rental itself expensive, the insurance premiums are, too.

"We've done insane, sad damage to trucks. It's unavoidable when you're moving heavy machinery," Spelletich said, adding that he and his helpers plan to make about 10 trips back and forth to Black Rock to set up his creations. " One time we did over US$10,000 in damage."

Many trucking companies are even refusing to do business with Burning Man participants at all. Penske, for example, cancelled reservations for 1999 rentals that appeared to be on their way to Burning Man.

As if the twin hurdles of transport and expense weren't enough, artists must also battle the intense desert heat, wind, and sun. Installations are difficult to erect, and keeping them standing and undamaged in wind storms, rain showers, and merciless sun is even more of a challenge."

Building on the playa is just really, really hard," said Brian Doherty, a member of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society, which is building Small After All World, an ironic replica of a certain ride at a certain aggressively litigious theme park corporation."

You're building in intense heat with no shade, and [a lot of] dust. That can really muck up acetylene torches. And the wind blows everything down if it's not completely secure."

Not exactly the best of conditions in which to build, say, a tower of animal bones or an 11-foot ball of ice which slowly melts on the desert floor. But artists in past years have created these installations and plan even bolder ones for the future. The obstacles, it seems, aren't enough to discourage the creative, unorthodox artists who consider Burning Man worth the effort."The people who do this stuff, it's like they can't help it,"

Spelletich said. "An artist is driven to create, and Burning Man encourages that sort of overblown, ridiculous creation from artists. This is our life, our therapy, our religion, our way to leave a mark. That's why we do it.""Burning Man is like a Tibetan sand painting," Lastreto said. "We are putting in an amazing amount of time building objects that are meant to be destroyed, and that's because the structures we are building are not the point. Because what we're actually building is community."