MSNBC Larry Harvey Interview | Burning Man 1997
The light behind Burning Man’s fire Larry Harvey, mastermind of the desert bash, expounds on his brainchild
By Sharon McKenna
Larry Harvey at the 1996 Burning Man event, pictured here with a parody of Joe Camel.
Larry Harvey recently had to change his phone number. Too many people — journalists, sponsors, volunteers, friends, critics — were calling. It seems that Burning Man, the gathering he started 12 years ago, has reached that intangible, but inevitable, point where the aura surrounding the festival threatens to supersede the event itself.
More on Burning Man 1997 from MSNBC
But despite the hype, Harvey’s perspective on Burning Man is the same as it has always been. He views the event as an opportunity for anyone to help invent an instant community and, in the process, reinvent themselves — if only for a weekend.
“Burning Man is founded on two things: a shared struggle for survival, and radical free expression.”
Sharon McKenna: Last year the media paid more attention to Burning Man than ever and some are saying the event is now over hyped. What do you think of all the press coverage?
Larry Harvey: I think that we’re progressing from a story that was simplistic to one that is more manifold. The old story is that we were the “party in the desert” story, which translates into the “neo-pagan hippie freak-fest” story — which is not only a simplification, it’s completely erroneous. Now the press is beginning to cover it differently. They have exhausted the surface and are delving deeper. We’re getting more stories about the human reality behind all those gaudy appearances.
McKenna: You’re making a huge effort to focus on “community” this year. What exactly does that mean to you?
“We moved primarily because we had inadvertently reproduced Los Angeles in the Black Rock Desert.”
Harvey: Burning Man is founded on two things: a shared struggle for survival, and radical free expression. Community always begins when people struggle to survive together in an immediate way. Today, we live in an environment where our relationships with one another and the world are passive, anonymous, and we are insulated by all kinds of institutions and mediate steps. What people encounter at our event is that they suddenly must confront their own survival in the most immediate way and confront the forces of nature.
Burning Man attendance has grown quite a bit. We’re growing at more than a double rate, but what’s interesting is the creativity quotient. We have gone from 60 theme camps last year to nearly 200 this year. That means we’re not attracting a load of passive spectators. We’ve always grown by leaps and bounds. Part of the reason for that is word of mouth. Now the word of mouth has moved onto the Internet. The Internet has fueled our growth enormously.
We are offering people something they can’t get anywhere else ... there is no competition. There is much to consume in America, but there is no other gathering like ours that is noncommercial. No event demands quite what we do of people in terms of survival, and no other event provides them with the experience that we do. We have people coming from all over Europe, people from Turkey — everywhere. Now that people can register over the Internet, the response is global.
McKenna: Did you move the event to a new site because of public opposition?
Harvey: We moved primarily because we had inadvertently reproduced Los Angeles in the Black Rock Desert. We had at least 5,000 cars in an unmarked, trackless environment. The problem wasn’t that people were behaving in a criminal fashion; the problem was the automobile — it began to dominate our community. We needed to create a larger boundary around our settlement so that we could control automobiles. So we’ve created a 19th-century city, which is to say we’ve taken the automobile out of it. When you do that people begin to notice one another as human beings and treat each other accordingly.
McKenna: A tremendous amount of work goes into creating the art installations, building the theme camps and villages, and, of course, constructing the “Burning Man.” Then it’s all destroyed. What’s the significance of this?
“People ask me if I ever thought we’d get this big, and I thought, ‘Sure.’ The part that I never anticipated is that I would feel so responsible. You never imagine that in dreams of glory.”
Harvey: We’ve been out in a blank, featureless terrain all these years, and every year, we erase the slate and reinvent civilization the next year. It means that rather than being hostage to our ideas of how people should live or how society should be organized, we carefully watch it as if we were studying a fungus in a petri dish to see what really happens, how people really behave. Though we put up great art monuments and boulevards, it means we aren’t hostage to our own history.
McKenna: Can you see yourself running Burning Man 10 years from now?
Harvey: We’ve endured for 12 years, and we’re growing ... Right now, Burning Man is right up there with nose rings, if you want to look at it as a trend. But it is more than an event — it is becoming a social movement, and that has enduring value.