Larry Harvey Interview by Sylvie Myerson (1997)

This originally appeared at www.sandboxarts.org (defunct)

1995 Man | Photo by Bill Heisel

1. Introduction.

In 1986, Larry Harvey and a bunch of his friends set fire to a wooden human figure on a California beach. Attempting to exorcise his personal demons while recovering from a broken heart, Harvey hadn’t anticipated that people would come running from all over in response to a primal symbol. This action accidentally uncovered a dynamic of art, myth and ritual which seems to be immediately accessible, appealing to people regardless of whether or not their education gave them the tools of art appreciation.

Burning Man has grown exponentially since its inception, becoming an annual avant-garde arts festival which attracts participants from all over the United States every Labor Day weekend. Due to its growth the festival relocated to Nevada, first to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 and then to nearby Haulapai Playa in 1997. This interview was conducted during the summer of 1997 as more than 12,000 people were expected to come together on the remnant of an inland prehistoric sea for a massive celebration. For five days, participants inhabited a temporary city with all the key elements of urbanism and design for which the four-story high wood and neon sculpture of the Man served as a focal point.

We hope that Burning Man, The Body by Morissa Sherman and Jennifer Vermuts photographs will also give you a sense of what it feels like to spend Labor Day Weekend in the Nevada desert.

This interview was conducted by Sylvie Myerson, with Tim Cramer as sound engineer. Web-enabled by Vid Jain.

2. PLAY & THE ADVENT OF THE CULTURAL PROCESS.

LARRY HARVEY: I m interested in your whole notion of play. Actually, what are you saying about play?

sbox: The way we work is we pick a theme and we get artists and writers to explore it, then we have a release party and we do performances and installations around that. We also have a webzine. I guess the reason we were attracted to play to begin with was because we were convinced that it s a very primal human drive.

LH: We’re interested in a couple of activities that are related, that is we’re interested in both the experience of work and the experience of play. They both have something in common. They engross one’s attention. Play and work take you out of yourself, and when that happens our armor of self-consciousness tends to fall away from us.

Play in particular interests me because in many practical ways it s indistinguishable from ritual. Both play and ritual occur in a special space, set apart from ordinary activity, both involve a suspension of disbelief... When, for instance, an Aborigine in his ritual becomes a kangaroo we would say he s playing the kangaroo. He would say that he is the kangaroo. In point of fact, there s very little difference. We live in a culture that has been stripped of inherited traditions, and I have found that attempts to invent new rituals often fail because of a fatal self-consciousness.

sbox: Could you explain what you mean?

LH: Well, in traditional cultures, what you could call unselfconscious cultures, ritual traditions are the outgrowth of a spontaneous process that takes place over long periods of time, whereas our latter-day attempts to consciously invent a tradition are limited by the ability of any individual to create them. Consequently, what you end up with is a rather barren, and often ideologically burdened, terminally self-conscious artifact. I start from the assumption that culture is a naturally occurring process.

Like any natural process, it s highly ordered, yet at the same time informal and spontaneous. The advent of culture is a spontaneous phenomenon and so ritual practices grow up within a culture over a long period of time in such a way that, like beautiful metaphors, they have many levels of meaning. It s too much to expect that a single individual, acting independently, could invent such a thing for society. It s something that must evolve out of the interactions of individuals.

sbox: Isn’t that what you’ve initiated?

LH: That’s exactly what we re trying to do. What we plan is a social context but we do that in all humbleness, the notion being that culture will occur spontaneously in certain social circumstances. It will not occur spontaneously in public housing tenements, it will not occur spontaneously in line waiting for an automatic teller, although those are forms of social organization. But it will occur in social circumstances where people are put in certain kinds of vital relationships to one another. And that s all we do: we make the hive, but the cultural phenomenon that arises produces the honey. We ve been doing our experiment in community for twelve years now and we ve always regarded it as an empirical experiment. We do it every year then we look at what happens and we adjust our plans accordingly.

3. THE COMMODIFICATION OF CULTURE.

sbox: Why is there such a need for this kind of social context?

LH: Because today in what we call the developed world, the industrial world, we live under conditions that enforce an overwhelming passivity, isolation and vicariousness. Culture itself, I believe, has become an endangered species of experience. In fact, it’s under assault because there has grown up this economic apparatus that involves mass production and mass merchandising that actively intrudes upon the cultural process, that expropriates it, denatures it and destroys it.

Whenever any new piece of culture develops out of a real community it’s instantly appropriated by our economy and turned into a commodity. That’s what the French philosophers in the sixties and seventies were saying, that it’s a process of commodification in which the cultural process is turned into a product and the apparatus for exploiting that has grown very, very, sophisticated.

sbox: Yeah, well it’s almost overnight now.

LH: Years ago, you remember break-dancing... well, break-dancing occurred in a community that had few resources and was thus forced to draw on its internal and spiritual resources to entertain itself and invest itself with meaning. So, rather than watch TV, they hung out on street corners and on stoops in poverty-stricken neighborhoods and invented a new dance form.

Well, in a previous age that dance form would have been inherited by another generation and another generation and more and more meanings would’ve been attached to it. What happened to break-dancing of course is what happens to culture today. It was immediately appropriated and turned into a fad and an article of consumption so that within the span of a mere three or four years the younger brothers and sisters of the break-dancers who would ve been emulating them and adding to that tradition now perceived it to be a consumer item that was no longer available to them: it had been exploited, commodified and turned into a source of entertainment. This process I’m talking about, by which the process of culture is turned into a product, is now taking place in faster and faster cycles. It takes about five months now! Not long ago, it took five years!

4. AN EXPERIMENT IN JUMP-STARTING CULTURE.

sbox: Do you see Burning Man as posing an alternative to this process?

LH: Yes, I do! That has emerged as our main aim. What we do is create a temporary community designed for the purpose of jump-starting culture, causing the spontaneous process to occur. I believe that human beings are adapted to produce culture and if you can create a social situation that engages this level of our nature then culture will be generated out of it. Now what we do is merely an experiment, that is to say people aren’t living there all year round, but it is meant to demonstrate what social conditions are necessary to achieve this.

In the broadest way, I think three things are necessary for culture to occur: first, people have to feel that their inner reality is consonant with their immediate environment; second, I think they have to feel that they are related to their fellows and, indeed, that other people share that same immediate reality; and third, joined with their fellows, they must feel that everyone then is related to some greater power that is beyond them and yet immediately connected to their most intimate nature. And when these three feeling states are combined, like beads upon a string, you create a social milieu in which culture in all of its superabundance suddenly occurs and begins to organize a whole human population.

sbox: To what extent has Burning Man accomplished this?

LH: In a sense, I think we’ve proven this. We have a festival which is, in fact, not a festival but a community and we employ very little in the way of the normal measures of public control. Normally, a group our size would swarm with security cops and people s liberty to act would be severely restricted. Most of their time would be ordered or taken up by consumption activities and they would be made passive and more manageable. We do the reverse of that. There is no commerce at our festival. We do not vend. People are encouraged, instead, to become very active, the idea being that you haven t come here to be entertained, you are the entertainment. We don t have legions of security and yet we do things that under any circumstance would be considered potentially dangerous. We have found that, in a milieu where the majority of people are actively employed in a cooperative and creative pursuit, populations become very well behaved. In fact, a kind of spontaneous civility prevails.

sbox: Because they have a role?

LH: Because they feel connected in themselves to what s around them; that is, there is this arc of meaning. I like to say that things mean something when you feel that there’s something deep within you that is connected to something outside of you and there s this spiritual arc that happens, say in your heart, or in your gut, or in your head. Your being says, I am that. You belong to them, and everyone collectively belongs to something that is greater than them. That’s why the Man is there!

The Burning Man is there for a functional reason. Just as an axle is necessary for a wheel to turn, so the Man is necessary to connect the spokes of all these individual and disparate experiences. He is purposely made larger than life. He s roughly the scale of your parent as you remember them, when you were first a child, and he s placed atop a pyramid. As a symbol, he s immediately, I would say primally, accessible. It requires no explanation and we ve never given one, on purpose.

5. EVOLUTION AND RAMIFICATIONS OF THE FESTIVAL.

sbox: To get back to the idea of commodification, I wanted to ask you the following question: how are you going to make sure that Burning Man itself does not become commodified? You’re receiving more and more media attention, and it’s difficult to avoid commodification under those circumstances.

LH: We have been so oppressed by the consumer regime that we live in that we think that popularity immediately leads to mass society. This isn’t true. Mass society and mob behavior occur when individuals in a group have no relationship with one another, they live in conditions of isolation and anonymity. It’s really the problem of connectivity. If people can connect in a vital way then they do not behave like a mob and the conditions of mass society cease to have power. We’re certainly growing larger and every year people are saying, “Well, can you support this kind of thing with five thousand, or ten thousand, or twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand people?” Well, my Lord! In the past there were whole civilizations that involved hundreds of thousands of people. Cultures, they were called [laughs]... Indeed, that is what primarily organized human activity until the last two hundred years. Of course, it can be done! But the difference between us now, and the world since before the Industrial Revolution is that, formerly, this happened unselfconsciously. Our challenge today is to become sufficiently conscious of that process and its value so we can create conditions where it will happen.

sbox: How has the festival evolved over the years?

LH: Well, it’s evolved greatly. It started with a group of people gathered around a fire on a beach, in the form of a human figure we set on fire. There were about a dozen people. What happened when we lit the figure on fire at the beach, originally, back in 1986, is that people from all over the beach came running. There was a spontaneous response to this primal symbol and it was our excitement over the response of the people to what we did that led us to do it again. That is to say, what we have learned to value as we ve gone along is the natural vitality of it.

Look how fast word of us is spreading and we ve not advertised. It’s been primarily through word of mouth and now word-of-mouth is augmented by the Internet. A corporation, to achieve the kind of profile we have would have to invest, millions upon millions. That is a testimony to the vitality of the cultural process itself. The only income we get is directly contributed by participants who engage in the experience, period.

sbox: It sounds like you put your finger on a kind of pulse or energy which is bearing you forth. But if Burning Man is limited to five days what are the ramifications all year long?

LH: It s leading to a revival of public art in San Francisco. Numerous groups have arisen, directly inspired out of the Burning Man experience. It attracts people very much the way a religious conversion would, leading to great life changes: they quit their jobs, they divorce, they marry... More than that, they come away from it with an enormous sense of empowerment, having felt so dynamically connected to their own aims and experience, to the people around them, and to the sense of something greater than them, that they suddenly begin to feel that they can do great things in the world quite independently of us and on their own.