Burning Man Quotes | Published 1997
"We lead lives that are deadeningly passive. Everyone is sorted out in a separate stall, like cattle in a feed-lock. Every time anything life real culture is produced by a creative community it's expropriated and flogged in the media and turned into a cliche - it used to be six years, now it's six months it's getting down to six weeks."
Our community will have a defining perimeter. We moving from the illimitable space of the Black Rock Desert to terra firma. This place has the permanency of real land. Until now we have floated in nothing.
"Nothing's going to trickle down anymore, so there's no point in sitting around waiting for a grant," he says. "Populism is in the air. There are amazing reserves of raw talent out there. Wonderful things have been achieved at Burning Man by people who have never done art before. Instead of doing art about the state of society, we do art that creates society around it."
--from Got A Light?
"It was started by a guy named Larry Harvey," I explained to the camping store salesman, whom I hoped could guide me to the spot. "He was getting over a love affair, so he and a friend built an eight-foot man, took it out to Baker Beach in San Francisco, and burned it. It took off from there." ... Ten years later, the Burning Man is a four-story wooden figure in the desert a hundred miles north of Reno. The premise: light it with neon, pack it with pyrotechnics, party around it for three days, and then torch it. --from Call of the Wild - A Year of Living Riotously
- Discovery Channel [1995]
Burning Man, when we met, was an arty attraction of San Francisco's creative underground; Larry and his friend Jerry James had begun, four years before, constructing a human figure from scrap wood, taking it to Baker Beach on the summer solstice, and burning it against the ocean sunset. The first Burning Man captivated an audience of unexpecting passers-by, and so a second, larger Man was burned the next summer solstice for the delight of friends.