Nomad Codes

like Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, or the moiré patterns and perceptual tricks of ’60s Op Art, or the gothic lightning bolts of the almighty Tesla coil. Even the high beams and sirens of law enforcement vehicles weave themselves into the virtual scene, especially on Sunday night, when a bit of the old-school fire chaos returns. It’s bardo time: the street signs are stolen, familiar structures are gone, and you are forced to navigate by nothing more than a hazy constellation of confusing lights, slowly shutting down.

THE CULT OF JUXTAPOSE

    Like the institutionalized postmodern art it both imitates and mocks, the aesthetic language of Black Rock City is a language of juxtaposition. A potential effect of all collage and assemblage, the energy of juxtaposition is released especially where heterogeneous elements are yoked together without the intent to smooth out their differences. Juxtaposition is the fundamental strategy of surrealism and its postmodern descendents, which most certainly include Burning Man.
    One often hears Burning Man dismissed as a theme park, but what’s more important is that it contains thousands of theme parks—a host of pocket universes butting heads. Space-time itself seems to morph into a flea market, a masquerade of memes, or the Mos Eisley spaceport from Star Wars . Even though many of Burning Man’s camps and costumes are, in themselves, devoted to a particular theme—the bayou, Bedouins, octopi—these elements inevitably crisscross in the turbulent, constantly flowing serendipity of playa life. Here juxtaposition is revealed as the formal playing field of synchronicity, as two apparently unrelated events or elements suddenly form a secret link that strikes, in the mind of the perceiver, an evanescent lightning bolt of meaning. Even lame or boring costumes or vehicles can be redeemed through the chance collaborations that define Black Rock City’s densely layered polyurbanism, where synchronicity becomes a basic operation of social and cognitive reality, a kind of “grace” that emerges through clashing fragments.
    Juxtaposition is also the chief strategy employed by many art installations, costumes, art cars, and theme camps. As in the case of Arcimboldo’s Mannerist paintings, which depict human heads made out of fruits and twigs, many art objects derive their power through the juxtaposition of image and material: Dana Albany’s recurrent Bone Tree , say, or her 2001 Body of Knowledge , a cross-legged man, built from old hardcover books, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Arcimboldo’s Il Bibliotecario . Other surreal contrasts arise through the placement of objects—huge red fuzzy dice, a bed, a lone piano—against the stark minimalism of the playa itself. Theme camps like Elvis Yoga stitch together elements associated with divergent classes or cultures; costumes are often thrift store patchworks featuring bold clashes of color, material, and evocations of forgotten subcultures.
    These different modes of juxtaposition generate many of the well-loved effects of the festival: absurdity, instability, irony. But they particularly inform the festival’s treatment of spiritual and religious forces. In this context, juxtaposition allows people to invoke sacred forces while sidestepping issues of belief, or seriousness, or responsibility. I can think of four recent examples here. For his recurrent center camp piece Twinkie Henge , Dennis Hinkamp used the perennial Hostess treats to construct a small-scale version of the famous megalithic monument. In 2002, the esplanade was blessed with a huge seated Ronald McDonald, a golden inflatable who sported a Nepalese third eye and smiled beatifically onto the crowds. And since 1998, Finley Fryer has occasionally presented an incandescent chapel built of nothing but recycled plastic. And in 2000, David Best began a series of enchanting and celebrated Temples that came to demarcate the most authentically reverent spaces on the playa; with the exception of 2003’s paper mosaic Mughal confection, he conjured the exotic filigree of these structures from the pressed-wood scraps left over from the manufacture of kids’ dinosaur puzzles.
    The apparent irony of these gestures is actually a doorway into a deeper and subtler movement of spirit. Modernity has bequeathed to many of us a profound disenchantment with both the cultural and institutional forms of religion as well as the beliefs that sustain them. At the same time, many feel