In the low-lit, second-floor room of Washington’s Renwick Gallery, a cluster of three ceiling-height plastic mushrooms glows in a shifting kaleidoscope of neon colors. At each mushrooms’ base is a pad that users can press, causing the sculptures to heave, sigh, and expand in and out.
The installation, Shrumen Lumen by the FoldHaus Art Collective, was initially on view under the night sky at Burning Man, a week-long annual festival in the Nevada desert that celebrates the various joys of communal living, 24-hour dance parties, public art, provocative costumes, substance use, and a potpourri of spiritualties.
The event, wherein a 70,000-person temporary city is erected in a week and disassembled faster, is so singular that attempts to recreate it at other times of the year have fallen flat.
This is why organizers for the exhibit “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” (March 30-Jan. 21, 2019) faced a steep challenge when trying to transfer pieces of art from the desert to a museum context, specifically to the Renwick Gallery branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. What proves to be the show’s saving grace is that it doesn't try to be about Burning Man; it aims simply to evoke what it’s like to interact with the festival’s art.
“We’re in an 1860s building in the center of Washington, D.C., and it transforms these pieces,” says Nora Atkinson, the show’s curator. “I’m not trying to recreate the desert, but I do want people to really get a sense of what [being there] means, because that’s what the work was created for.”
I went to Burning Man once, in 2006. I didn’t really plan for it, and I’m not sure I could have. The location (a sun-baked expanse of white sand roughly two miles across), the expanse of the crescent camp-city, and the endless stream of activities and parties that run until dawn and beyond were so fantastical that it beggared belief.
Aside from the immense cost required to attend the festival (easily, thousands of dollars), what struck me most were the sculptures littered across the desert. The distances at Burning Man are so vast, and the desert (or “playa,” in Burner terms) is so empty, that objects which appear as dots on the horizon slowly reveal themselves to be massive, fanciful pieces of art as you approach. Often as not the art is interactive, or at the very least, something you can climb on or go inside of, and the sense of discovery and playfulness can be genuinely thrilling. Much of it is burned before the end of the week.
The art at the festival is either commissioned by Burning Man, or donated, and every year there are contributions from dozens of artists. Over time, much of the sculpture has taken on some unified stylistic and structural components.
First, most of the art at Burning Man is big. There have been, for instance, seven-story-high wood statues of embracing human figures, a 26 foot-high flame-throwing metal octopus, and a full-scale replication of the shell of a gothic cathedral.
Second, the art almost always lit-up. Much of the action at Burning Man takes place at night, and so the lighting, while admittedly dazzling, also helps people avoid running into sculptures by mistake.