scholarly journals Wurst Storm Rising

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Graham St John ◽  
Botond Vitos
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Burning Man ◽  
Alfred Jarry ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Black Rock Desert ◽  
Black Rock City ◽  
Worldwide Network

Our subject is the legacy of Dada implicit to the Burning Man phenomenon. Animate in the provocative output of fin-de-siècle French Symbolist writer and puppeteer Alfred Jarry, and filtered through the antics of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, Dada is foundational to the cultural aesthetic of Burning Man, by which we mean the event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert playa (Black Rock City) and a global network of “burn” events. We address the significance of the Cacophony Society expedition that inaugurated the desert phase of Burning Man in 1990, “Zone Trip # 4: Bad Day at Black Rock.” Integral to the surreal tourism ventured by Cacophonists prior to the inception of Burning Man, and pivotal to its desert phase, the Zone Trip kindled “Burner” culture on the Black Rock playa and abroad. Exploring the Dadaist impulse affecting Black Rock City and woven into a worldwide network, informed by interpretative and applied methods, the article addresses art projects (including those designed and implemented by Vitos) at three regional events—Israel’s Midburn and Germany’s Burning Bär and Kiez Burn—visited in 2018 and 2019 as part of a multisited ethnography of the Burning Man movement. As these projects illustrate, the ghost of Jarry haunts, as the spirit of Dada animates, the transnational “burnscape.”

Civilised Tribalism: Burning Man, Event-Tribes and Maker Culture

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham St John
Keyword(s):  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Burning Man ◽  
Maker Culture ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Black Rock Desert ◽  
Will Self ◽  
Modernist Project ◽  
Black Rock City ◽  
Cultural Movement

Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is an artistic event, that, mounted annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has become the inspiration for a global cultural movement. While it has been the subject of considerable attention from ethnographers and sociologists, Burning Man has persistently resisted classification. In this article, I undertake a tentative approach to Burning Man via a concept integral to Maffesoli’s postmodern social philosophy popular within Anglophone sociology: the neo-tribe. Ethnographic attention to Burning Man illustrates spectacular aspects of neo-tribalism. It is cyclical, immediate, sensual, enchanted, collaborative and offers multiple sites of belonging for participants, many of whom will self-identify as ‘tribal’ or ‘neo-tribal’. And yet Burning Man is also demonstrative of an optimising modernist ‘project’ complicating, if not incongruent with, postmodern tribalism. With Black Rock City theme camps, art projects and build teams echoing a design-orientated maker culture, and an organisation – the Burning Man Project – dedicated to propagating and scaling (making) the ethical, civic and progressive dimensions of this culture, this article demonstrates the paradoxical proclivities of Burning Man’s tribal character. The objective of the article is to forge a fuller understanding of Burning Man and other ‘transformational’ events illustrative of an alternative tribalism, and to explore ways the phenomenon both approximates and deviates from Maffesoli’s thesis.

Spatiality and Subjecthood in Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, and Jarry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Shtutin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Alfred Jarry ◽  
Cross Pollination ◽  
Guillaume Apollinaire ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Cross ◽  
One Act

This study explores the interrelationship between spatiality and subjecthood in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. Concerned with various modes of poetry and drama, it also examines the cross-pollination that can occur between these modes, focusing on a relatively narrow corpus of core texts: Mallarmé’s Igitur (c.1867–70) and Un coup de dés (1897); Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ (1912) and various of his calligrammes; Maeterlinck’s early one-act plays—L’Intruse (1890), Les Aveugles (1890), and Intérieur (1894); and Jarry’s Ubu roi (1896) and César-Antechrist (1895). The poetic and dramatic practices of these four authors are assessed against the broader cultural and philosophical contexts of the fin de siècle. The fin de siècle witnessed a profound epistemological shift: the Newtonian–Cartesian paradigm, increasingly challenged throughout the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled, with ramifications beyond physics, philosophy and psychology.

scholarly journals Ephemeropolis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-322
Author(s):  
Graham St John
Keyword(s):  
Burning Man ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
Black Rock Desert ◽  
Black Rock City

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is adapted to comprehend events with intentional transformational agendas. An ephemeral community installed annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Burning Man is an exemplary evental heterotopia. With the shortcomings of the romantic-utopian “transformational festival” label identified, the article considers Black Rock City as a heterogeneous threshold and contested space. This hyperliminal weave is redolent in a complex ethos known as the “Ten Principles.” Informed by Michel Foucault’s ambiguous entry on heteroclite spatialization, the article explores the paradoxical “other space” of Burning Man in which the “default world” is simultaneously neutralized, mirrored, and resisted. If Burning Man is transformative, this is therefore an enigmatic aesthetic. Adapting Foucault’s six “principles of heterotopia” and modulating Victor Turner’s “liminality,” the article navigates the hyperliminal dynamics of Burning Man. In the process, a provisional framework is suggested for the study of transformative events.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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