PHILOSOPHY
Larry Harvey, the guru-like driving force behind Burning Man, the globally celebrated anti-establishment, anti-consumerist festival that he and a friend began 32 years ago on a San Francisco beach, died on Saturday at a hospital in the city. He was 70.
His death was announced on the Burning Man website. Harvey had suffered a stroke on 4 April.
Burning Man is now a revered week-long annual event that takes place in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, north of Reno, but there is no firm consensus on whether it is a spiritual retreat, performance art, a music festival, a construction project or just an excuse to party in the middle of scorching heat and dust storms.
Last year’s celebration drew roughly 70,000 people, who were free to bring or build their own arts projects, perform their own music, dress any way they liked (participants in “drag races” ran on foot, dressed in drag) or go nude – and dance and chant “Burn the man” during the big finale. That’s when a skeletal five-story-tall wood and neon man-shaped statue, stuffed with fireworks, is set ablaze.
Burning Man is run by Burning Man Project, a non-profit organisation that has an annual operating budget of about $30 million (£22m), according to the website. At his death, Harvey’s title was board president and chief philosophic officer. The festival’s ten official principles, written by Harvey, include civic responsibility, communal effort, gifting and immediacy. But the one cited most often is radical self-expression.
Early on, the event became popular with the digital subculture, lending credence to the belief that primitivism – even ironic primitivism – and great technological leaps make happy bedfellows. Harvey saw a connection. “Both Burning Man and the internet make it possible to regather the tribe of mankind,” he said in 1997. He also saw a “deep parallel between desert and cyberspace”.
The festival’s so-called gift economy is central to the experience. There may be whisky bars and sandwich shops at Burning Man, but everything is free. Burners, as the participants call themselves, offer their products and services as gifts. (The only things for sale, by the organisers, are coffee and ice.) No one is allowed to display a corporate logo or even wear one on a T-shirt.
Harvey preferred to call the system a “gift culture,” because visitors spend plenty of money ahead of time on the supplies they bring. But he believed even a temporary experience with that culture was worthwhile, to counter economic norms.
“If all your self-worth and esteem is invested in how much you consume, how many likes you get or other quantifiable measures,” he said in 2014, “the desire to simply possess things trumps our ability or capability to make moral connections with people around us.”
Harvey was adopted as an infant by Author Harvey and the former Katherine Langford. His parents were farmers near Portland, Oregon, and his father also worked as a carpenter. In an article that Harvey wrote for the Independent in 2014, he said that he and his brother, Stewart, who was also adopted, “felt like exchange students: everyone treated us well, but we didn’t quite fit.”
Rural life did not suit him, and his parents were not exactly spiritual adventurers. “The heart can really expire under those conditions,” Harvey said in 2012. “I always felt like I was looking at the world from the outside.”
He escaped by serving in the Army. He gave college (Portland State University) a try, but was disillusioned by what he saw as his professors’ smallmindedness.
He and a girlfriend, Janet Lohr, now a Burning Man executive, moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, and he took jobs as a bike messenger, a taxi driver, a cook and eventually a landscape gardener. He made friends with artists who were making a living as blue-collar workers.
The first Burning Man, held at Baker Beach (famous for its Golden Gate Bridge views and nude sunbathing section), was a cosy affair hosted by Harvey and a friend, Jerry James. It consisted of burning a scrap-lumber statue of an 8ft-tall man and was attended by fewer than a dozen people – including Harvey’s son, Tristan, who was five – although a crowd soon gathered to watch. It was a summer solstice celebration; Harvey sometimes said it also commemorated a romantic break-up. Harvey was married once, briefly, to Patricia Johnson, and he raised their son, Tristan, who survives him, as a single father. He is also survived by his brother, Stewart.
Harvey remained fully involved with his creation until his stroke, supervising design decisions and choosing this year’s theme, “I, Robot.”
The 2018 festival, scheduled for 26 August-3 September, will go on, the organisation said: “If there’s one thing we know for sure, Larry wants us to burn the man.” New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.