Interview of John Law by d-program circa 1996
PAGANISM AND BURNING MAN
Does the ritual burning of the man have pagan connotations?
We have a large contingent of the pagan community that comes out, and it seems to dovetail with some of their beliefs. Personally, I'm agnostic, so I don't adhere to pagan beliefs any more than I do to my former Catholic roots. But if I were to be religious, I'd say that the general pagan religion is one I'd adhere to - any religion that entails drinking lots of wine and running around naked in the woods can't be all bad!
I've been in San Francisco for 20 years doing these underground, weird events and over the past two or three years there seems to have been a real up swell of these kinds of events.
They all seem drawn to the desert, for the Burning Man event because its a completely blank environment - a forty-mile long, flat desert playa. People come out the first year and they see what other people are doing, get grand ideas, and come out the second year with a lot of supplies and materials and build their fantasy in the desert. We've ended up with an incredibly diverse group of very strange performances and interactive pieces.
THE SUICIDE CLUB
Robert Louis Stevenson is one of my favorite writers. The story of the Suicide Club is about a group of Londoners who got together and put their worldly affairs in order, in order to live each day as if it was their last. That's been a credo that I've tried to live by.
The Suicide Club was pretty underground and clandestine, The Cacophony Society is more of an umbrella group. We have a section in our newsletter called Sounds Like Cacophony which lists events that other people are doing that are similar or might have the same spirit.
THE CACOPHONY SOCIETY
Cacophony Society is a very loosely formed group of individuals. There was an earlier group called The Suicide Club which we actually started in '77 in San Francisco and that was a group of urban adventurers. We ran a monthly newsletter and anyone could list an event and that could range from people going to see a movie they liked with other people and talking about it afterwards to elaborate costume pranks downtown, to infiltrating cults, which we did quite a bit of. We stayed with The Moonies for three days and did a little dissection of that later...To climbing buildings, rigging sections of abandoned skyscrapers, that sort of thing. And then that group sort of imploded in the early 80's, due I think to the fact that the Reagan administration had come in and we were all depressed and drinking heavily. But then we got over that and formed Cacophony back in 1986 and it was a similar format, monthly newsletter, no restrictions on events. The only thing we dissuade in the group is commercialism - you don't charge for events except to pay for your costs of putting the event on. Its not a commercial endeavour at all.
This is one of the reasons that Cacophony coincided so well with Burning Man - it was a participatory experience. I mean when we first saw the Burning Man on the beach, the entire group of people there were participating, they were raising the man by pulling on a large pull-rope, dozens of people had worked on the construction. Larry's concept was one that developed into a real community of activists. That's the reason why its still going, with no commercial support.
We now have 4 chapters in cities on the West Coast - Portland, Seattle, they all have their own flavour. The LA chapter is decidedly more theatrical, being in Los Angeles. They do a lot more street pranking than we've done up here. One of my favourites was infiltrating a GI Joe convention in Pasadena with a small diorama in plywood with GI Joe dolls and Barbi dolls in various states of disarray and disembowelment doing nefarious things to each other. They brought it in covered, got it into the convention and then were thrown out by real GI Joe collectors - who were sort of offended. They preferred GI Joe's with Flags and Iwagima types of things.
We interact with various other groups like the Art Car contingent which is a fast growing movement in the States right now where people hand-modify their vehicles and drive round. We also interacted with the burgeoning Mechanical Art underground in San Francisco - many of them come out to Burning Man to do performances, or on-going machine debacles in the desert.
PRANKSTERS
dprogram: Do you see what you're doing as following in the footsteps of pranksters from other times?
Personally I'm a fan of some of the Situationists stuff, that came out of France and the Surrealists and Dadaists - Alfred Jarry is a big hero of mine - and they were all effectively doing pranks, and many of them have been termed ‘artists’ in retrospect. Whether they would accept that cage, I don't know, and they're dead now so you can't ask. I'm a prankster myself, I've been called an artist but I don't really accept that box.
The stuff you're talking about doesn't usually get into art galleries. Art galleries are big commercial clearing houses, basically, and I'm not terribly interested in them and I don't think most of the people I work with are either.
PRANKSTERS
dprogram: Do you see what you're doing as following in the footsteps of pranksters from other times?
Personally I'm a fan of some of the Situationists stuff, that came out of France and the Surrealists and Dadaists - Alfred Jarry is a big hero of mine - and they were all effectively doing pranks, and many of them have been termed ‘artists’ in retrospect. Whether they would accept that cage, I don't know, and they're dead now so you can't ask. I'm a prankster myself, I've been called an artist but I don't really accept that box.
The stuff you're talking about doesn't usually get into art galleries. Art galleries are big commercial clearing houses, basically, and I'm not terribly interested in them and I don't think most of the people I work with are either.