Wow! Its been a week since we returned from Black Rock City, dusty and exhausted. My visual brain has been blasted with information, this year over 400 art projects on the playa. I did put up photographs of my drawings at center camp and also participated in a group art project called "Up the Garden Path". The group art project was interesting , it was an example of art by committee with a bunch of untrained artists, but very creative people. The process of putting the piece together was interesting.
Art , especially a sculptural piece is impossible to really see until its in the actual space. This requires a certain flexibility, as decisions are not always about the mathematics of how far something should be spaced, but also primarily about how it looks. We were a group of four couples. Three of the men found it very difficult to have to stop and change things, I kept having to say this is not like building a house. I worked very well on the decision making part with one of the women. The disappointing part was that the human sundial needed uniform pillars, we were only able to get different sized ones, the sundial part did work and was in fact very accurate. The bamboo stalks worked very well as they moved in the almost constant wind. Wind as an element in outdoor sculpture is very pleasing. My main fear was that the piece wouldn't work in terms of scale. It worked, partly because unlike many other outdoor venues there were no other natural elements like trees to distract.
I learned that by reducing my drawings to a small size , I could put up 10 drawings on a wall roughly the size of 4'x4' and it really took away the impact of my work. Next time I will try for one piece done in material that will survive the elements maybe specially made for Burning Man.
I did meet a women on the playa repairing her piece, the playa is hard on art. She had made a piece about the two halves of the brain. The viewer could walk between the halves and be inside the brain. She told me about a book called "Portraits of the Mind, visualizing the brain from antiquity to the 21st century", that inspired her. I got the book and the drawings and close up photographs are indeed inspiring. I may use this as a jumping off point to explore the inside of the brain. As I moved from outside the body to inside, now maybe its time to move from the outside of the brain to exploring inside ,to what makes up the mind of a human being.
