Nomad Codes

the sneaking suspicion that such forms may be necessary as temporary vehicles or containers for the visionary insights and sacred energies they continue to crave. Though these forms can successfully channel the spirit for a time, inevitably they fail: they become consumer idols, or safety blankets, or cheesy parodies of themselves. By affirming an ironic relationship to such forms, we draw attention to their incompleteness, to their inability to satisfy our yearning or sustain the disenchanting movement of spirit. This sort of irony is more than a cynical operation in cahoots with the secular disavowal or mockery of spirituality. It is, rather, a sacred irony, one which itself marks the margins, and sometimes the core, of historical religions. When Ramakrishna donned ladies’ clothes, or Yunmen proclaimed that the Buddha is a shit-stick, the point was to shatter form through contrast. Ironic juxtaposition, in this context, is revelatory. For minimalists of the spirit, such irony may clear the air for the formless beyond; but the maximalists at Burning Man heap together the broken shards of forms into a fallen Humpty Dumpty bonfire of apocalyptic collage.
    West Coast spiritual culture has long shown an affinity for juxtaposition. Part of this is rooted in California’s syncretistic religious supermarket, especially in Los Angeles, where Hindu onion domes and Mayan Masonic halls fit in just fine alongside eateries shaped like oranges or hats. But this sensibility also emerged from the plastic arts of the place, particularly the love of appropriation, collage, and assemblage (or structural collage). (See “The Alchemy of Trash” in this volume.) During the late 1950s, Beat artists such as Bruce Conner, George Herms, and Wallace Berman constructed objects and made collages that strongly engaged images of sex, fetishism, and spirit. Hearst Castle showed that even the wealthiest Californians yearned to sample and slam together times and places. But the iconic grass-roots example remains Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, three famous free-form spires built, without plans, from pop bottles, tiles, and teacup handles.
    The bohemian economics of making art far from New York partly drove this bricolage—artists started playing around with bits and pieces for the same reason the Merry Pranksters were driven to scavenge thrift stores—and hence history—for clothes. An alchemy of trash emerged, one that not only made a virtue of necessity but also suggested a new kind of aesthetic pleasure. Today we enjoy some Burning Man artworks simply because of the low cost and crappiness of their materials. But such regenerative work has deeper implications. According to the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, who used collage techniques in his gnostic modernist verse, “The trivial is as deep as the profound because there is nothing in creation that does not go to the profound.” [10] If Burning Man needed a slogan for its spiritual esthetics, Duncan’s alchemical insight will more than suffice.

AU REVOIR LA CONTESSA

    One Friday night in 2007, with a full moon glowering waxy from above, a feline and freaky crowd gathered on a toxic finger of San Francisco’s bayside no-man’s-land to bid adieu to one of the most powerful works of art that the Burning Man arts festival has ever seen: the great dame La Contessa . A massive Spanish galleon encased around a bus, with crow’s nests and rigging and a scuttlebutt for all I know, La Contessa was, on the playa anyway, a manifest dream, a fully realized mobile archetype that featured such fetishistic and finely grained detail that it became a vessel in more than a literal sense. Standing on the bow at night, with the Dutchman sails flying above, a bardo-shaking brass band drowning out sense, and some unseen meth-head driving too fast or erratically for your own cowardly comfort, one did not need drugs to achieve the escape velocity of full imaginative transport. And last December, this great vessel of the wayward spirit, its forty feet parked on a ranch in Washoe County, Nevada, was torched to ruin by a local landowner who never hid his hatred of the event.
    The creation of Simon Cheffins, Greg Jones, and the bulk of the Extra Action Marching Band, La Contessa made her first appearance at the festival in 2002. It was the year of the “Floating World,” which is hands down my favorite Burning Man theme. Unlike so many themes, which are frustratingly abstract, and almost preachy, the obvious