Burning Man awards art grants and resolves final ticket issues

It’s been a tough year for Black Rock City LLC (aka the Borg), the SF-based company that stages Burning Man, particularly with its ticket fiasco, the heaps of criticism that followed, and uneasiness about what this year’s event will look and feel like. As word of its annual art grants has gotten out over these last couple weeks, the grumblings of discontent have returned, this time mixed with early twinges of excitement about the event.

On the positive side, the Borg is giving away more than $700,000 – its most ever and a $100,000 increase over last year – to 47 art projects, many of them to Bay Area artists such as Michael Christian, Zac Carroll, Gregg Fleishman, Krysten Mate/Jon Sarriugarte, Otto Von Danger (whose Burn Wall Street project was inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement), Flux Foundation (whose 2010 Temple of Flux we profiled), and David Best (the original Temple-builder who will do this year’s Temple after a three-year break).

Yet with 349 applicants seeking almost $5 million, there are lots of great local projects and artists that didn’t make the cut who will now be forced to aggressively raise money or consider scaling back or abandoning their plans. Among those are longtime artist Charlie Gadeken, Marco Cochrane (who for two years has been trying to complete Truth is Beauty, his follow-up to the spectacular Blissdance, the 40-foot tall nude woman who currently dances on Treasure Island), and the all-hands-on-deck Bottlecap Gazebo project that has been the subject of near-constant work by dedicated teams in San Francisco and Oakland.

The Bottlecap Gazebo crew has already been tapping its communities to collect and process about 100,000 beer bottle caps that are being smashed, stitched, and shaped into an ornate gazebo that incorporates the caps’ colors into its swirling design. Now they also need cash to complete the project, which you can give here.

Same thing with Cochrane, who is offering a unique opportunity tonight for you to help and watch how this amazing artist works. “Art & Politics: A Fundraiser for Truth is Beauty and Alix Rosenthal” will feature Cochrane doing a live sculpture of Rosenthal, with proceeds split between the project and Rosenthal’s DCCC campaign (she’s also a longtime burner, Borg volunteer, and friend of mine). Such sculptures are the first step in making his larger pieces, like Blissdance and his new 60-foot-tall nude woman. The event, which also features some great burner DJs, is 7pm-midnight at Project One.

Bettie June, who runs the Artery program for the Borg, said they had some very hard choices to make this year. “We had a huge jump in the number of people who applied for art grants, and the quality was really high. They were really strong and well thought out proposals,” she told us.

The Borg should be officially announcing its grants anytime now, but the applicants have all heard. My Flux family is hurriedly finishing other projects in its bay at American Steel in Oakland so it can focus on Zoa, which will combine fire-spewing steel seedpods with a wooden exterior that will burn away (in truly colorful and spectacular fashion, I hear) halfway through the week to reveal the inner core, which will go through it own metamorphosis, making it three sculptures in one. Yet, like most of the funded projects, they still have fundraising to do to cover the full project cost, and they currently have a Kickstarter campaign underway.

Bettie June singled out Zoa as one of the pieces she’s most excited about, also mentioning Burn Wall Street, Pier 2 (a bigger version of last year’s Pier by Carnelian Bay artist Matt Schultz, which this year will have a galleon crashed into it, which visitors can explore), Universe Revolves Around You (the latest kinetic project by Zachary Coffin using large boulders), and Circle Of Regional Effigies (35 installations by regional groups, up from 23 last year, that will burn simultaneously on Thursday night).

Some of the projects that got funded this year are updates and modifications of existing artworks, including Carroll’s Front Porch and Serpent Twins by Mate/Sarriugarte, although Bettie June said both have great new features (the latter project, a pair of mythical serpents that travel the playa, will have new lighting and sound systems to better tell the story of their interactions with one another).

“It was a big discussion and we’re pretty pleased with the results,” Borg board member Marian Goodell said of the art grants. “They’re funding a lot of great art.”

As for her other major preoccupation of the year – dealing with the fallout of a new ticketing system that left many veteran burners without tickets – Goodell said they’ve been sorting out that situation as well: distributing the final 10,000 tickets, which were going to be sold generally, through established theme camps.

Some sources have told us that demand from the theme camps had actually been less than anticipated, but Goodell said they still need to get tickets to various performers, volunteers, and art car crews. “We have a lot of people to take care of,” she said.

She also said that she’s been pleasantly surprised by the number of tickets that are being sold through the STEP ticket resale system that the Borg hurriedly established to redistribute tickets, with more than 500 being offered so far. “It’s a trickle, but it’s not stopping,” she said.

Yet there could still be a bit of grumbling to come over the tickets. The final decision for the Borg to make was whether to require ticket holders to register by name to control scalping – a decision it would need to make before tickets are mailed out in June – and sources say the Borg has decided not to do so.

With demand for tickets far exceeding anyone’s expectations this year, tickets selling out for the first time last year, and with a new system that many said could easily be gamed by scalpers, the unknown factor is how many were snapped up by scalpers who are charging exorbitant prices. The Borg has maintained that they think that number is fairly small, but we’ll see this summer.

Nonetheless, it’s good to see the anguish over tickets now starting to give way to excitement about the art projects now getting underway throughout the Bay Area, many of which are still looking for help. So go make some art.

Steven T. Jones, aka Scribe, is the author of The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture. He’ll be doing a reading and leading a discussion on the state of Burning Man from 6-7:30 pm on April 25 at the Bay Guardian office, 135 Mississippi St., SF.  

Here’s the complete list of this year’s funded art projects: