Just a quick note here. Burning Man Media team is opening up a dialogue about digital rights and has invited people from within the community to expose their views about photography at the event.

A few weeks ago, they sent me a prompt to react to. And here’s my take they posted on their blog:

http://blog.burningman.com/digital-rights/photography-can-also-be-art/

Susan Sontag

Background

Susan Sontag, American author, artist and literary theorist, lived from January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004, but her work lives on in art schools around the world. In 1977, Sontag wrote the essay On Photography, which continues to provide media students and scholars an entirely different perspective of the camera in the modern world.

Our Prompt

We sent Olivier the following prompt to respond to:

“Review these excerpts from On Photography by Susan Sontag (1977):
1. To collect photographs is to collect the world.
2. Photographs furnish evidence.
3. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption — the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed — seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures.

Review this excerpt from Burning Man’s Ten Principles:
‘Our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.’ Burning Man Website (2010)”

Olivier’s Response:

Yes, there might be a problem on how we try to document every single thing we see, but that problem is sourced in the way we consume, in the way we are as a society: it is entrenched into our contemporary culture. To change the way we photograph, is to change the way we live almost. It’s all inter-connected… a giant neurosis, that we need to work on all together. And of course I think Burning Man is part of the solution if it demonstrates a bigger interest in the method of doing art together…

On Consumerism
Burning Man prides itself not to participate in consumerism, but to go to Burning Man is to consume. Each person that goes to Burning Man has to spend a lot to be self-reliant for one week in the desert. To create a city in the desert, is to transport everything to this environment. To truly reflect on our consumerist society would require minimizing our exposure to it, but that’s not what a deserted dry lakebed calls for.

Budget Truck in Line for Burning Man, ©2007 Dust & Illusions

I would even go further, and say that escaping consumerism was never was part of the original intentions. The need to escape the traps of our larger society was definitely there, but I believe the original intentions of the Burning Man project were to create a temporary site to simply relieve us from the constant attack on our senses of the mainstream cultural Act. It was a place to create our own reality, and express ourselves freely in the rawest manner possible without the need for it to be judged worthy of any value by our society’s standards. It was only later than Burning Man started to be associated with an anti-consumerist alternative, but the resistance to consumption has ever only been expressed through the lack of commercial sponsorship, transaction or advertising, and not necessarily through deeply dealing with the consumption that occurs pre-event.

In the depth of the event, you can of course find a real call from its participants to recreate a world where community is more important than capitalism. There are many examples in the artists’ group, and the theme camps, but these examples need to become the driving principles behind the event in order to effectively alter the consumerist reality. Where Burning Man really thrives is in offering an open stage for anyone’s artistic expression. And that is the single reason why Burning Man is still an important event today. The event has produced important artistic content, and truly inspires people to create! Let’s focus on this aspect to create a community with strong and deep artistic values, and the rest will follow.

Cameras at an Impromptu Show (©1993 Peter Goin)

On Photography
With 50,000 participants at Burning Man, there are at least 25,000 cameras on site, documenting each micro-event dozens and maybe even hundreds of times. Photography is embedded into our lives just like eating. We can not fully express ourselves, and do not feel complete without the documentation of our every moments. We consume photography even more than we consume water. Our fast-paced, highly consumerist world reflects the way we takes pictures, thousands of pictures. We click, click and click, to create a massive database of visuals that we end up browsing through without ever taking the time to reflect on the meaning of our experience there.

We often bring photography into a situation without any care for what we’re trying to photograph, since most pictures are simple snapshots. When “taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption”, we might have been more thoughtful about what we were capturing, and might have always tried to bring real cultural value into each photograph. This is not the case with “sleek pocket cameras” (in Sontag’s words).

The real value in cheap and “sleek pocket cameras” might be that more people with deeper intentions have access to them, enabling for a small subset of higher quality output in the midst of so much noise.

And so there’s no way to escape photography, nor to control it. Those who will engage in photography in manners that the community of Burning Man doesn’t approve, will always find a way to do so. We should accept all cameras even if we don’t like them. This phenomenon is new, and the community will have to learn the best way to keep some spaces and moments sacred away from the cameras. The current set of rules established by the Burning Man organization hasn’t prevented excesses from happening.

I have been to the desert on six different occasions, and have been filming on every single one of them. I have always been very aware of my position as a photographer/filmmaker. My presence can directly interfere with other people’s experience there, either preventing that experience to happen, so preventing me from capturing it, or more often altering the truth of a situation (in the end, preventing me from capturing what is really happening when the camera isn’t there). I have continued filming, and created my own way to immerse myself into the event, and film a less altered reality. I decided to connect truly with the culture, and fully participate with my camera to become an integral part of the experience, instead of being simply an observer of it.

Olivier Bonin Filming Rosanna Scimeca, ©2004 Dust & Illusions

That’s how I came to join the Flaming Lotus Girls (FLG). I first chose to document the FLG because of their ethos. They create art for Burning Man, but their main goal is to teach the art of metal and fire with a focus on women, and create a strong group of artists that can then go do the same. That inspiring model inspired me to go look much deeper into the Burning Man experience and history. I became an integral part of the group as their documentarian, producing short film pieces to help them promote their work or present it for education purposes to institutions like Stanford. With such an integration, it created a situation where I the filmmaker wasn’t a voyeur but rather a full participant. I belonged to the group, who in return gave me full access. I was able to film without disturbing, and I wasn’t just taking since I was producing a lot of videos for them. It became a very fruitful relationship, which allowed me to understand what was happening at Burning Man in its deeper strata. And I worked with another half dozen groups with which I have shared all my footage. Filming the Burning Man experience in this way was enlightening for me and non-intrusive for the subjects.

I would hope that Burning Man would start considering photographers and filmmakers as part of their community by modifying certain aspect of their approach:
1. The contract between Burning Man and photographers and filmmakers should simply state what is not allowed to be filmed, and what context such footage should never be used in. This would prevent abuse from both sides, and open up a real freedom of speech.

For issues of privacy, photographers and filmmakers should always have to ask first, and that should be clearly stated in the contract. For such content, the Burning Man organization could have a “veto” if the content is not used in a respectful grander context.

2. Considered like artists: All artists at Burning Man are allowed to sell their artwork, and this is true for granted artists by contract!

Photographers and filmmakers should be given full freedom to sell their work. Even the most successful will certainly never be able to cover the costs they have engaged to produce the artwork. And if one were to be successful, then we should celebrate her/him rather than engage into pitiful battles of who the money should go to. This would be an economy we should embrace as a community, since all it does is support an artist, so she/he can continue what she/he’s doing, and potentially provide food for thought for the community.

Black Rock LLC makes it harder for photographers to sell their work, when they support all sorts of businesses (see: Jack Rabbit Speaks Resources Edition) without taxing them (most commercial use of photography is taxed by 10%), some of them who are far from engaging in sustainable practices. But the reason the LLC allows this is “Burning Man is NOT anti-commerce. We’re against commodification, which is quite a different thing. We recognize that commerce makes the world go around, and we believe in the creativity and drive of small business owners.  Those are the folks we seek to support here, in the face of mass market consumerism. (JRS: Volume 14, Issue #18, June 18, 2010)”. So why can’t photographers do the same, they are also part of the small-scale economy, the ART economy at that!!

3. Since commercial sponsorships is forbidden, preventing any business or corporation to use the Burning Man event to sell or promote their product, corporate media should never be given access to the event as well.  Black Rock LLC said that this is a great way to spread the word about BM, but isn’t that simply engaging with corporate media, that are being paid by the very commerce the 10 principles try to keep out of BM. These medias are engaging in commodification of our values, and are banking on the popularity of the subject to get us to watch commercial advertising. And as independent photographers we still have to go through considerable hoops to sell our work. No corporate TV stations, or internet media outlet, or commercial papers should be allowed on the ground. If members of these organizations wanted to film there, they could do so with financial, editorial and logistical independence from them. This could prevent from the superficial news style content that comes from these organizations and that usually doesn’t help our community to progress. That content is too often simplistically consumed rather than used to bring dialogue and progress. There’s enough simple content produced by everyone else with their pocket cameras.

On the other hand, thoughtfully produced content by photographers who come from the community could be sold at the photographers discretion to those commercial outlet, allowing a more thoughtful portraying of the event to come out in those bigger media outlets.

4. If limiting the number of camera crews at Burning Man is needed, then only the crews who are already seriously integrated within some artists groups, theme camps they plan to document should be allowed, since this would voucher to their level of seriousness.

[Born in France and educated with an engineering degree in microelectronics, Olivier Bonin showed an early interest in photography and film. He studied photography in San Francisco, where he found his way into filmmaking. Starting with short fictions, he quickly found a perfect symbiosis between his interest and knowledge in social movements and filmmaking in the documentary form. Attending Burning Man, he knew he had found a great subject combining film photography in such a beautiful environment, and a complicated human story of community building.]

An artwork central to the culture of San Francisco, whose crew have been active and important participants in the art of Burning Man since the beginning. Here’s Defenestration:

OPERATION RESTORE DEFENESTRATION
Fundraiser and Solo Show by Brian Goggin
Opening Reception: Friday March 5th, 2010 6-10 pm 1:AM Gallery 1000 Howard Street

How many times have you driven by Howard & 6th Streets and looked up at the seemingly animated furniture, tables, chairs, lamps, grandfather clocks, couches, their bodies bent like centipedes, grasping the ledges, hanging off the roof and climbing out of windows like escapees? Have you wondered who put them there? In 1997 with an NEA grant and over 100 volunteers it was Brian Goggin who created this site-specific sculptural mural called Defenestration. While expected to be up for only a year, those tables, chairs, lamps, clocks, and couches have weathered the elements for nearly thirteen and have fallen into unfortunate disrepair.

Operation Restore Defenestration needs $75,000 to repair the artwork making it again safe and beautiful during the day, and vibrant and illuminated at night. Brian Goggin has already begun working with a structural engineer, volunteers and assistants to return “Defenestration” to its original magnificence.  But they need your help. The restoration is a fiscally sponsored project of The Black Rock Arts Foundation where donors can make tax-deductible gifts or sponsor the restoration of an individual piece of furniture at www.defenestration.org. Your donation of $500 or more will be honored with your name on a commemorative plaque mounted on the Defenestration building and you will be awarded a certificate of sponsorship.

Operation Restore Defenestration will bring back a welcomed visual to the neighborhood where locals and visitors flock to this playful destination. With your support you can help put the magic back into this beacon that brightens its surroundings and is so deeply loved by the community.

I hope you will join me in revitalizing this unique San Francisco landmark. Come meet the artist, see the sculptural mural and learn more about the restoration project at the opening reception on March 5th, 6-10 pm at 1:AM Gallery, 1000 Howard Street, San Francisco. There will be a variety of prints, sculptural chairs and “Defenestration” memorabilia for sale. The show runs through April 2nd. For more information and to donate online please visit  www.defenestration.org.
Thank you in advance for your support!

Tonight concluded the 21st Post-Yule Pyre on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The 1st one occurred on January 1990 on the initiative of the Cacophony Society and more specifically Michael Mikel (aka Danger Ranger, who serves on the board of director of Burning Man). The group has started many other events other the past 25 years, including Santacon (or Santarchy) that has spread all around the planet, with a record of 11,000 santas in Dublin in 2009. This year’s Post-Yule Pyre attracted a good 200 people, and probably 50 trees. We all gathered at Java Beach Cafe and walked 4 blocks in the dark night with our trees. People were coming out of their homes wondering what the procession was all about… all these people walking in that dead neighborhood with a tree each in their hands. At the beach all the trees quickly piled up and random people fired different side. In no time the flames were reaching high above the dunes behind us, and we heard the first police siren. The cops did join us, but 5 minutes too late. It was all on fire. After 45 minutes, they finally yelled at us all to move, but while we were all starting to go away, one guy pulled a non-burning tree from the side 100 yards away and put it on fire, then did it again another 3 minutes later, without the cops able to catch anyone. It was fun. They eventually caught 2 people for unknown reasons.

Here is what Michael Mikel wrote back in 2007 about the event:

An annual San Francisco tradition occurs at this time of the year, when the last stand of sidewalk fir trees is logged by the Friends of the Rootless Forest and then piled up on the beach for some very rapid composting. Saturday, January 6th. Meet at the Carousel Diner, 2750 Sloat Blvd at 7:00 PM. (Look for the giant Doghead in the middle of the street.) We’ll hang out for half an hour and then head west when the coast is clear. Bring a christmas tree and libations. No glass containers on the beach, you assume the risk, no one is in charge, your mileage may very. And remember; “When fire is outlawed, only outlaws will have fire.”

During the spring equinox of 2007, the Friends of the Rootless Forest will plant an equal number of trees to offset the carbon footprint of climate changing gases that are released into the air by this year’s Post-Yule Pyre. After playing with fire on the beach, we will take up the torch for a much greater cause. This is a Leave No Trace event. All of the ashes from our ecstatic celebration will be removed within 24 hours

Flickr Pool Slideshow of many Post-Yule Pyres available here.
More info on Santacon: http://blog.burningman.com/?p=6196
Link to Michael Mikel: http://twitter.com/danger_ranger

© Cyril Gitton. (Photo by)

Excerpt from the Memorial webpage: http://www.suicideclub.com/memorial2/bio/default.html

A WAY TOO SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

David T. Warren (aka: Flamo LaGrande, R. J. Mololopozy) lived a strange and unique life.  After a tempestuous upbringing in the home of a prominent building contractor in Hayward, Dave left town with a traveling carnival.  Here he learned the art of eating fire as well as various sideshow skills including magic.  Later, he would apply his showmanship to selling Kirby vacuums and became tops of his team of salesmen.  Of other door-to-door items he peddled, perhaps the strangest were Venus’ Fly Traps — carnivorous plants that Dave touted as “organic insecticide.”

At a crucial junction in his life involving separation from his wife and children, he moved to San Francisco after the 1972 demolishing of the seaside amusement park “Playland At the Beach.”   Upset by the destruction of this park, Dave formed his one man Playland Research Center and initiated a series of Playland parties in the rubble of the park.   PRC was dedicated to collecting and archiving photos, film, personal interviews of and about the classic attraction out at Ocean Beach that served as a magnet for young and old alike. His mottos “Do It” and “Have Fun” were painted on a large wall at Ocean Beach to spread his message to passersby.

In 1978 David,  along with Gary Warne, Adrienne Burk and Nancy Prussia had a wild experience where they clung desperately to a heavy barricade chain atop the seawall under the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Point as thirty foot waves crashed down on top of them. Later, in the early hours of January 3 over hot chocolate the four friends decided to start a club where they would encourage members to “live each day as though it were their last” by creating events and experiences that would challenge their deep personal fears, expand their knowledge and understanding of their world and those in it AND be hella fun.  This group became the San Francisco Suicide Club.

Also in 1978, along with Chris DeMonterrey and Steve Mobia, David restored and operated the Giant Camera below the Cliff House at Ocean Beach. Dave considered the camera to be one of the last vestiges of Playland and so it fit into his grand scheme.  This spectral attraction, one of fewer that half a dozen surviving in the world, was often attributed to Leonardo DaVinci and became a popular curiosity at scenic tourist spots during the Victorian era.  Though both the GGNRA and the Cliff House restaurant wanted this bright yellow building demolished, David worked overtime, cooking up publicity for this interesting but strange place and it was his passion (and thousands of signatures gathered at the camera) that years later finally won for the camera the “official” designation as a national historic building (which is why it still exists, even after the remodeling of the Cliff House).

Though David, and the “Friends of Ocean Beach” fought a hard grassroots battle to stop condominiums from crowding out the public on the old Playland property, the developers got much of what they wanted.  However their plans to build right up to the rocky edge of Sutro Heights Park was halted.  The parcel of land where Dave painted his festive signs is even today free of buildings and this is due to the struggle that Dave and the “Friends of Ocean Beach” put up to stop the developers.

The Suicide Club morphed into the Cacophony Society in the mid 80’s, which in turn birthed the Burning Man Festival as a desert event in 1990. That year, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Dave was the first human to ignite the 40’ wooden figure, inaugurating nearly 20 years now of desert shenanigans.

David had a rough time of it the last decade or so. For someone who inspired people and brought humor and adventure into their lives, he could never seem to shake the many demons that plagued him and eventually brought him to his end. Many concerned friends searched out and/or helped to find David several times from the mid-90’s til 2008.) He would lapse in and out of binge drinking and usually end up on the street , sometimes making it into a group home or hospital/rehab clinic. Over the years some of us visited him at a graphics artist retirement home in Oakland, a group home in Oakland, a nursing home in Hayward as well as a couple of different camping spots in Castro Valley, Golden Gate Park and Hayward. His son put him up in an apartment in Sonora for a few months around 2002 but Dave’s weakness for drink always managed to sabotage any gains he might have made.  He lived in Golden Gate Park for various periods through out the early 00’s and with Richard Tuck in El Cerritto for a while as he worked on the upcoming museum. We always eventually found him.

About a year ago, we became concerned when Richard was notified that David’s storage space in Santa Rosa was in arrears and about to default. Over the years, whether David was living indoors or not, whether his rent checks cleared or not, he ALWAYS paid the rent on his storage. He placed great importance on the stuff he had stored though much of it (boxes of empty vodka bottles, hundreds of pounds of Encyclopedia Britanicas, stacks of wood, etc.) might strike the casual observer as being of little or no value. Regardless, David lived homeless many years in order to insure his storage fees were paid. So when we learned that after 10 years he missed the rent we were pretty worried that maybe this time we wouldn’t find him again. And, sadly, we didn’t.

It all seems pretty blue but one time a couple of years ago when I had tracked him to a disheveled camping spot behind a huge boulder in Carlos Bee Park in Hayward which was his home for several years . David explained why he was there. It was mid morning on a glorious day, sunlight was streaming through the thick canopy of pine trees across the streambed just below his camping spot. The park was beautiful and seemed much as it must have back before the 49ers invaded the West. I was pretty upset that David was living in such straits – sleeping in a soggy pile of blankets and cardboard. Being morning time, he was sober and, for the time being had regained more than a bit of his old eloquence and insight. He could see I was bummed and had started berating him somewhat for not staying sober and retaining his quite comfortable room in the nursing home on B Street. He gave me that intense gaze of his, eyebrows raised in mock sardonic judgement. “Just look at this” he said gesturing grandly with the old showman’s panache’. “ This park, these trees and rocks and that stream… it’s all mine. I sleep where I want. I walk where I want. NO ONE tells me what to do, where to go, what I can’t say, WHO I SHOULD BE! You should be so lucky, kid!”

That is how David T. Warren should be remembered.

Written by John Law & Steve Mobia

20 years ago… 1989. The Wind Sculpture Festival was being organized by Mel Lyons, a Berkeley artist, during the Labor Day Weekend on the Black Rock desert. Some people from the Cacophony Society attended the event then. Inspired by the event, and the desert environment, Kevin Evans and a few others started to make plans to come back to the desert the following year through one of their Zone Trips. A Zone Trip was a way to step out of reality, get out of this world and experience something extraordinary for the group.

The following year on June 21st 1990, the Burning Man event was preparing for their 5th burn on Baker Beach, but the SFPD caught the gathering, 600 people at that point, and stopped them from burning the effigy that had become pretty elaborate. This was going to be a major road block for the carpenters and their friend Larry Harvey that was “supervising” the construction of the man every year. The Cacophony Society that had been attending the beach event for 2 years now, offered generously to bring the humanoid effigy to the desert for the Zone Trip of Labor Day 1990, 2 months later. This was going to be the historic move to the desert, where many people actually think it’s always been now… and the 20th edition onto the desert flat is happening right now, with the burn of the Man tomorrow night.

The Cacophony Society was instrumental in helping Burning Man to continue and survive on the desert. The carpenters helped rebuilt a new effigy, but the Cacophony Society truly defined what Burning Man was going to be for the next few years, until another major influence came into play, but you will have to watch the film to know about this…

More information on that mythic 1989 Wind Sculpture Festival, and the 1990 move to the desert.

http://laughingsquid.com/its-so-empty-its-full/
http://laughingsquid.com/summer-of-1989/
http://laughingsquid.com/bad-day-at-black-rock-cacophony-society-zone-trip-4/

If you plan on taking pictures like 40,000 people at Burning Man, it’s a good idea to read this. Burning Man has a strict set of rules so participants can feel their privacy won’t be violated, and their image won’t be abused. The Burning Man organization (Black Rock Limited Liability Corporation) requires all journalists, and anyone with an intention to publish their photography/videos, to sign a contract that claims all copyrights of the journalists’ work, and forces them to request an authorization from the BM organization for each public use of the work they don’t own anymore.  In good faith the Burning Man organization has been arguing that this is to protect the participant’s privacy and filter medias they don’t want to see at the festival.  In practice it seems to have worked since only “News” style coverage has been published by the large media networks, and a lot of documentaries, and photography’s exhibitions have happened over the years, but we don’t know who/what has been denied. Here the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that the Burning Man organization makes an illegal copyright claim of work they don’t own, and that their contract with journalists is too invasive. The contract basically says that the BM org has full power to decide which work is allowed to be published and which isn’t without any other specification on the work. Judge on your own:

Snatching Rights On the Playa (EFF)
EFF Says Burning Man Usurps Digital Rights (Slashdot)
Protecting Our Culture? Burning Man and the EFF (Burning Man Org’s response)
Freetards bully Burning Man (The Register-UK, an example of today’s medias poor quality)

Eventually when the time is right, I will present the full details of my own experience making this film and working with the Burning Man organization.

Olivier Bonin. Director of Dust & Illusions.

UPDATE: Balsa Man, the tiny version of the “burn”, that happens on Baker Beach, like back in the old days… has also a copyrights policy… a tiny copyright policy:

Photography, Video, and Film

All people within the boundary of the Balsa Man event, hereafter assumed to be line-of-sight, accept that BALSA MAN RETAINS ALL RIGHTS TO ALL THUMBNAILS OF ANY PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO, OR FILM THAT IS TAKEN AT THE EVENT. Rights for full size versions of photographs and video remain property of the photographer/videographer/camera operator.

Touché, as the EFF said!

Dust & Illusions was the 1st film invited to the series that opened back in June 2008. Rough Cuts is an important tool and time for filmmakers in the Bay Area. If you are interested in the process that each filmmaker goes through, this is a great forum, where you can interact with a filmmaker and provide feedback to help her/him take the film to the next level. It’s really interesting to build a discussion, and is very different from the std post-screening Q&A. It’s a constructive discussion that will have an affect on the film!

CALL FOR ENTRIES FOR ROUGH CUTS SEPTEMBER ’09 SERIES
Tuesday, September 8th and Wednesday, September 9th
7:30 pm, complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided
$7 admission

Rough Cuts is a series of work-in-progress documentary screenings that are produced every other month at the LAB, a non-profit gallery/performance space in the Mission. For each evening, we screen one rough cut of a feature-length documentary and then moderate a conversation about the film. These post-screening discussions are designed to give the filmmaker a better, more objective sense of what is working and not working with his/her film, with particular attention paid to improving the film’s structure and narrative clarity. We hope that the series also provides a welcome space for local filmmakers, film professionals, and fans of documentary film to meet and talk.

The LAB is seeking feature-length works with a final running time of 40 minutes or longer. Principal photography should have been completed, and we encourage filmmakers to submit cuts that are in the later stages of post-production (i.e. NOT first or second cuts).

Friday, August 21st: Submissions must arrive at the Lab by 5:00 p.m.
Wednesday, August 26th: Selections will be announced and all filmmakers will be notified
Tuesday, September 8th and Wednesday, September 9th: Screenings, followed by discussions led by guest moderators

For an application and more details about Rough Cuts, visit: http://www.thelab.org/events/373-rough-cuts-upcoming.html

For questions about Rough Cuts, email Chris Holbrook at cholbrooke@yahoo.com

Update: May 2nd screening is a benefit for Tom Kennedy. Please join us!

Tom Kennedy left us on April 12th 2009, the birthday of my son. Tom became a close friend through our collaboration on his and my projects. We were planning new projects and were looking at the future together. Tom has always been very generous, and inspiring. His activism impressed me because he fought for what he believed. And surprisingly to me, he did it all with a smile, always happy and positive. I will miss Tom.

http://laughingsquid.com/goodbye-to-tom-kennedy-art-car-artist-activist-teacher-prankster/

guest post by John Law

We lost one of our very best. Tom Kennedy drowned at Ocean Beach on Sunday, April 12th at 2PM. Tom was an artist, activist, teacher, prankster – a strong friend, bright spirit and true inspiration to each and every of the thousands of people he touched through his powerful and loving art and his huge and giving heart. I first met Tom at Burning Man 94 when he came out from Texas with his amazing art car Ripper the Shark, forever raising the bar at that event for creativity and originality in personal expression. I was dumbfounded by the whimsical nature, bold concept and execution of the piece. But more importantly, I was floored by Tom’s unmitigated joy at just being there, alive and creating the world around him.

He went on, often in collaboration, sometimes alone, to create many of the most engaging and whimsical art cars you would find anywhere in the world. Tom was one of the kindest and sweetest men I have known. His big, muscular presence was that of a gentle giant, a protector and a gentleman. Tom’s sense of fairness and justice was as powerful as his creative urges. He was no push over, though. His work as an art provocateur and activist was tough, funny as hell and very “in-your-face” for those he saw as oppressors and forces of evil in the world. Greedy businessmen, slimy politicians and the like were the hapless targets of his art wrath. Along with his wonderful wife and partner Haideen Anderson and a cast of dozens in the political satire group Missile Dick Chicks, Tom stuck it to the high and mighty, often at personal risk. His courage and convictions were never in question. I saw him arrested in NYC for the 04 Republican Convention – an event that cost him greatly. This indignity only fired his passion to confront the injustices he saw and to mock and indict those responsible. Tom was generous, selfless and productive in ways that lesser men could only stand in awe of. He helped an untold number of aspiring artists with his powerful presence, practical fabrication knowledge and unique aesthetic. He did what the very best always do – he gave it away.

I spoke with Tom’s room mate Chris de Monterey and was told the basic facts regarding how this tragedy occurred. Tom and his friend Mike Tackaberry were in the surf about waist deep at Ocean Beach (stairway 24 – just south of the Cliff House) and were knocked over by large waves and swept out to sea by a very strong rip-tide. Both strong swimmers, they fought to swim back to shore. Mike made it and after coughing out water swam back out to try and help Tom back to shore. He was able to get Tom to the beach where he attempted CPR. EMT’s arrived and took over, eventually transporting Tom to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

In February all artists interested in getting funded to create an art piece for Burning Man have to send in a proposal to the event’s organization. After careful review, they attribute grants to a certain amount of projects, that they believe the artist will be able to create. The largest grants are often attributed to artists that have a history with Burning Man, as they are “trusted”, and the smaller grants will be awarded to anyone with a “good’ proposal. The selection process has always been a little obscure since it’s all about art and it’s not easy to define how to choose the best art. But the Burning Man office also has certain criteria beyond the artistic value, such as feasibility, safety, interactivity, as well as the collaborative aspect.

One aspect about the grants is that Burning Man doesn’t want the artists to reveal publicly how much they were awarded. There might a good reason for this, but it seems that opening the books is a better way to go. I don’t believe there’s any secret in letting the public know that recurring artists have more chances to get more money. Also depending on the artists, more money can be spent to create the art piece than awarded by Burning Man. Money that often comes from the pocket of the artist himself, and sometimes from fundraising.

One more note, the grants are only meant to buy materials, transportation for the piece. Nobody is supposed to get paid making the art pieces. And most times nobody does. The large majority of the collaborative groups that bring art are composed of people who have a day-job and work on their Burning Man projects nights and weekends. This is the huge invisible force that makes Burning Man worth it and interesting. All these people working for free all year-around so there’s something spectacular to experience out there in the desert. Working hard so it doesn’t just turn into a simple party.

The Flaming Lotus Girls have had grants from Burning Man since 2003. The first one was for the Hand of God followed, by the Seven Sisters in 2004, the Angel of the Apocalypse in 2005, the Serpent Mother in 2006, and Mutopia in 2008. In 2009 they sent in a new proposal called SOMA, which is getting a new grant.

The Flaming Lotus Girls are also making appearance at Coachella, the massive music festival in the valley of the 1,000 golf courses, i.e. Palm Springs, CA. They will be bringing the Serpent Mother.

Excerpt from Laughing Squid’s blog:

John Law just finished a book called the Space Between and had a release at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

The Space Between is a collection of three stories inspired by the author’s lifelong obsession with bridges. An avid urban adventurer and bridge historian, the author shares his passion for these engineering marvels while delving into their potential to fuel our dreams, fears, and nightmares. Part dreamscapes, part adventure tales, these narratives take the reader on an exploration of bridges to inspire their contemplation on a structural as well as metaphysical level.

John draws from his personal experience of admiring and ascending bridges in the Bay Area and around the world. He has a perspective that literally few people have on local icons the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. There’s no more fitting place to discuss San Francisco’s icons than City Lights, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and a landmark ever since in SF’s North Beach neighborhood.

The book is available now from Furnace Press.

John Law is Special Projects Coordinator for Laughing Squid. He is also a proud accomplice and associate of such noted cabals as Survival Research Labs, Dark Passage, and Cyclecide. And he is a known wrangler of The Dogminican Trinity, a trio of mysterious and ginormous canine heads which often appear in times of benign creative cacophony or unrepentant mischief around the Bay Area.

A true multimedia threat, John co-produced and appears in the film Head Trip a documentary about those same dog heads making the trip from SF to NYC for a Laughing Squid show and in the process fraternizing with every roadside attraction along the way.