All right, perhaps this is overstating things a bit. Still, the likenesses are astonishing.
This year's Venice Biennale is assembled under the vague but warm 'n' fuzzy rubric "Plateau of Humankind," which, according to exhibition curator Harald Szeeman, is "a raised platform offering a view over humankind... there is no longer the intense affirmation of one's own identity, but rather an appeal to what is eternal." This year's Burning Man, of course, took place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert on a high-desert plateau offering a view of humankind--a mostly naked, weirdly and temporarily spiritualized version, but humankind nonetheless. This year's theme, "The Seven Ages of Man," was a Shakespearean appeal to our eternal and archetypal similarities, and was loose enough to be easily ignored and present enough to be applied, theme-park-style, if you wanted to. And over both the Biennale and Burning Man, the ghost of Joseph Beuys drifts like benevolent smoke: the art-shaman, the transformer, the everyday creative act.
While the Biennale is lucky enough to have an actual Beuys installation, Burning Man was truer to his spirit. Various reports and articles reveal that the Biennale is mediocre and static. This is nothing new; jousting at the quality of big international exhibitions is nearly an Olympic sport. That the art at Burning Man fell under the same fire is no surprise, but the context of the festival allowed for a loosening of conceptual standards: The installations could simply be nice to look at, stranded as they were in an austere and unforgiving landscape. But where Biennale president Paolo Baratta makes a claim for the show's interactivity, writing, "the visiting public is not only the spectator but also a leading participant in an ample space that affords an encounter between public, artists, and their works," Burning Man was that encounter--Beuys-like, everyone became an artist.
Therefore, spectators are not tolerated lightly in the Black Rock Desert, and the death of Burning Man may very well result from parasites that go only to take drugs, look at tits, and dance to throbbing beats all night long. A not-terribly-humble solution to this annoyance: Cross Dress for Less.
CDFL was born this past spring when Seattle artists Susan Robb and Linda Peschong bought huge bags stuffed with clothing for a few dollars at a rummage sale. All summer long, Robb, Peschong, and other artists (occasionally joined gratefully by me) haunted the Goodwill Outlet Store, where clothes no one wants sell for 99 cents a pound. Armed with over 200 pounds of castoffs, we set out to redress Black Rock City, with startling results.
The cross-dress process is not simply a short trip from male to female, but a transition from normal style to what Robb dubbed "playa style." ("Playa" being shorthand for the desert, the temporary city, a fuck-the-normal state of mind.) In a matter of seconds, we could identify our subjects' inner gymnast, inner matador, inner puppy, inner brat--and then we created it. When clothes didn't fit, we ripped them apart and reassembled them with cable ties, duct tape, safety pins, wire, rubber cut from bicycle tubes. We turned tiny little skirts into rakish capes, tote bags into loincloths, modest sailor dresses into peekaboo fetish gear. We were goth, Little House on the Prairie, prom, new wave.
The greatest pleasure of CDFL was not our artistry, but rather seeing average boys in khaki shorts turned into participating members of the community. Their interaction with CDFL staff--a very bossy and opinionated group--forced them out of their passive peeping-Tom roles. On the last night, we invited our customers to burn their khakis in a hibachi, and it was most gratifying to see these former conformists chase down passersby and urge them to join in.
What's the lesson here? Perhaps we should reconsider the meaning of "interactive." Perhaps Beuys is more present in a desert freak-festival than in Venice. Perhaps art is most powerful not when it tells us what we already know, but when it radically fucks things up.
