Zone Trip 9

On Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009, over 20 people gathered in a secret desert location for Zone Trip #9 - Destruction in the Zone of Mass Destruction. The purpose was to commemorate the end of analog television broadcasting. About 30 old picture-tube-style televisions and a couple of computer monitors were gathered by the participants and creatively destroyed in a somewhat spectacular fashion. The next day it was all swept into piles, loaded into trucks, and hauled to the dump, leaving no trace of the chaos. See a 2-minute video of the mayhem.

There is something about the love/hate relationship people have with TV that prompts a few of them to smash them. There are a number of short videos online showing people smashing individual TV's. A few videos show more coordinated efforts involving large numbers of televisions.

The seminal event that spurred a lot of television abuse was a 1975 film short called Media Burn. An art collective called the Ant Farm produced this video as a parody and critique of modern media. The film concluded with a modified 1959 Cadillac driving through a flaming wall of TV's. I recently found a YouTube video with an excerpt from the film.

I suspect this groundbreaking (and TV breaking) event inspired at least one other similar event. In 1982 The Plasmatics made a music video for their song "The Damned" where they upped the ante by driving a school bus through a wall of televisions.

One year later, in 1983, Godfrey Reggio created a movie called Koyaanisqatsi which has a sequence in it of a wall of televisions being destroyed. I don't have any evidence to suggest that he was inspired by the Ant Farm or the Plasmatics but the timing suggests that the previous videos could have been an influence. I don't have a clip of this one.

This is the end of an era. Television equipment has changed. The old style pictures tubes pop explosively when smashed which is particularly satisfying. Today's TV's no longer use big, heavy, glass vacuum tubes. These new types of screens won't be near as much fun to smash.

Glass in the Desert

Although this is a "mainstream" attraction, the Dale Chihuly glass exhibition at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix,AZ was so uniquely beautiful that I wanted to share it with you. There was really a lot of blown glass artistically placed in the gardens amidst the plants. The best part about it, for me, was how it fit in and enhanced the gardens. The shiny, brightly colored glass pieces added a surreal feel to the desert and, although temporary, is reminiscent of some of the outsider art environments that I described in my previous blog post. The exhibition will be at the Desert Botanical Gardens until May, 2009 See more photos.

Building a Visionary Environment

For many years my wife, Nita, and I have had the dream of building a habitable, sculptural art environment. An art environment (also called a visionary environment) is a permanent, large-scale, art installation that reflects the visions and inspirations of the people that have created it. There are many of these around the world mostly hidden away in rural areas where neighbors were unlikely to complain.

The photo above is one of the structures at Eliphante - an art environment in Cornville, Arizona.

Most of the environments of the past were created by dedicated, even obsessed, individuals who spent upwards of 20 years building them. Many of the creators were unschooled in the arts and some did not even think that what they created was art.

One of the most famous examples of a visionary art environment is Watts Towers, in Los Angeles, CA. It was built over 33 years by Simon (Sam) Rodia. He built tall towers out of re-bar and scrap wire that he found and then cemented them with shells, broken 7-Up bottles, broken dishes and other bits of colored pottery that he found. The only thing he had in mind was "to build something big." When it was done, he gave the property to a neighbor and moved away, never to return.

In the 1959 the City of Los Angeles declared the towers unsafe and tried to pull them down. They couldn't do it. The towers were too well-built. The only thing that happened was some of the mosaic pieces popped off. The site was saved from the wrecking ball and, now, Watts Towers is the smallest National Monument in the United States - 1/10 of an acre.

An example of a religiously inspired environment is Salvation Mountain. Leonard Knight has poured and painted over 100,000 gallons of paint on a mud hillside for over 20 years. He has sculpted caverns out of hay bales, tree trunks, and painted adobe. The whole hillside is covered with religious slogans revolving around the idea, "God is Love."

Salvation Mountain, near Niland, CA, was begun in the mid 1980's when Knight decided that was the place to build his monument to God. Sometime in the 1990's the site was declared a toxic hazard and seemed destined for destruction. In 2002 it was entered in the Congressional Record as a National Treasure. Leonard, now in his late 70's, can be found painting on his mountain most days during the winter months.

A few art environments are the work of inspired sophisticates, rather than art world outsiders. The Tarot Garden, in Italy was created by Niki de Saint Phalle, a famous mosaic artist. Along with another well-known artist, Jean Tinguely, she created a garden of gigantic mosaic covered structures that represent the major Arcana of the Tarot Deck.

The Tarot Garden was begun in 1979. During much of the construction Niki lived inside the Empress, one of the largest sculptures. The site was opened to the public in 1998 after almost 20 years of work. Niki de Saite Phalle has created sculpture gardens internationally. One of them is in Escondido, California - Queen Califia's Magical Circle. Niki died in 2002.

THIS IS OUR DREAM - to begin building a habitable, expanding environment of whimsical buildings, gardens, pavilions, and sculptures. We need a place to build it. We are hoping there is someone out there with 3 or more acres of flat-ish land that they can spare, in a location somewhere in the Western U.S. that has good rainfall, soil, and growing season for gardening. It would be a plus for the site to be within or near a progressive, artistic community that would be supportive of our efforts or, at least, not complain about having something unusual in their midst.

The photo at left is a garden gate Royce welded together out of found objects. See more of Royce's steel work at Cosmic Steel.

We expect that it will take 20 or more years to achieve the scale and wonder that could turn the site into a destination for the public. With our combined artistic and construction skills - Nita with concrete and mosaic and myself with steel, I know we can create something grand and unusual. We hope our creations will also make people smile and maybe even be uplifting or inspiring to others.

The photo at right is Nita's latest project - a mosaic wall on the roof deck of The Raven Cafe, in Prescott, AZ. See more of Nita's concrete and mosaic work here.

To read more about our dream, about us, and about how you may be able to help, Click Here.

All Souls Procession 2008

A couple of weeks ago we participated in the 17th annual All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona. This amazing event attracts over 10,000 people in costume for a procession to honor the dead. It is held on the streets of downtown Tucson beginning at dusk. The procession route winds through downtown for about two miles. Thousands of people participate in the procession and thousands more line the streets to watch, many of them in costume, too.

We dressed up like fluorescent moths and brought the Seussian Pedal Tractor down for the event. The pedal tractor had blacklights mounted on it so we could all glow by flocking around it. The tractor performed well although, when we went through a tunnel under a road, we needed people to hang onto the back to slow it down. It's brakes don't work very well at all. In the photo you can see Nita walking at left, Robert and myself pedaling in the back of the tractor and Shelley pedaling and steering up front. I snagged this photo off the web. I don't know who took it.

The procession finishes at an area of loading docks where a performance by Flam Chen ensued. They had two huge cranes hoist performers 80 or 90 feet up in the air. The culmination of the event is the burning of the Urn. The Urn represents the dead and the burning of it represents a release of their spirits. There was music and smoke and fire and EVERYTHING! It was great!

This is one of my favorite events, mostly because it is so inclusive and participatory. Not only do people dress up to be in the procession, they also dress up to watch the procession. We burners love to dress up and play together so this is another fun opportunity to get together. There were a lot of spectacular costumes to see. You can see our friends, Betsy and Kristin, in costume at right.

This was our third year participating in the All Souls Procession. We love it!

Thanks to Clint and Janabanana for the photos.

Arcosanti - Behind the Scenes

A group of us went on a drive in the Cadwac yesterday. Destination: Arcosanti. This is an experimental urban design project started in 1970 by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri is a visionary architect. He has designed entire cities (none of them built) with the idea to concentrate human activities in massive structures which would provide more area for nature and agriculture.

Arcosanti currently takes up about 10 acres of an 860 acre site in the high desert of central Arizona. The plan was to build a concentrated urban community as an alternative to suburban sprawl. When complete, Arcosanti is supposed to house 3000 to 5000 residents. It's only about 5 percent complete and progress has slowed to a crawl in recent years due to lack of funding. Arcosanti manages to maintain itself at a minimal level by offering tours, selling ceramic and bronze bells, and hosting performance events. They also hold regular five-week intensive Arcology workshops where you get to live and work at the site while learning. Arcology is a word Soleri made up to describe the merging of architecture and ecology.

Thanks to our friend, Cabiria, we got a special tour of the back sides of the buildings, the insides of storage rooms, construction zones, and behind the scenes at the amphitheater. Maggie, another resident, gave us a special agricultural tour of the greenhouses, gardens, fields, chicken coops, and the funky experimental structures built over the years by the residents. We had a picnic down in camp and were joined by many of the residents who weren't working. The weather was beautiful and we had a wonderful and relaxing visit to a unique and interesting place.



There are several residents who live in the completed structures as well as in an area called "camp" down below the main site. Camp is an earthy, more organically grown area that was where everyone lived when building began on the bluff up above. Camp has fields, gardens, greenhouses, and various cubical residences made out of concrete slabs. There are also some nice indoor and outdoor gathering spaces.

Soleri's designs are sculpturally beautiful and the concept of combining ecology and architecture is a great idea. One of the potential problems I see is that there are a lot of people, maybe most people, who would not enjoy living in identical housing units crammed tightly together in huge multi-story structures. I believe human desires for intimate contact with nature, personal control over the appearance of their dwellings, and the desire for privacy and outdoor living spaces need more consideration when designing residential structures. For example, the feeling in "camp" is more vital and human than the feeling in the structures of Arcosanti which have a commercial feel to them.

Soleri is 89 years old. Who knows what will happen to the place when he is gone. It would be nice if it could be opened up for more creative participation and attract the funding needed to complete it in some form. For now, we will enjoy visiting an interesting place and fun people.

See more photos of our visit.

Further Adventures in East Jesus

I just got back from a three-day re-visit to East Jesus. East Jesus is a "suburb" of Slab City. Charlie Russell is the mayor of East Jesus - population: 1. He is building a live-in found-object art installation there and has made a lot of progress since I last visited about a year and a half ago. It's about five or six times as big. The sculpture garden has been expanded and it's getting more interesting all the time. I wanted to take a bunch of pictures and post them on the web but, unfortunately, my camera's battery was totally dead and I didn't bring the charger with me. oops!
You can, however, see a 15-minute video I made of my earlier visit called Adventures in East Jesus. I plan to visit again sometime in the next two or three months and I will make sure my camera is charged up and ready to go.

Below is a quote from Rabelais that Charlie has on his East Jesus web page. It's indicative of the spirit and philosophy that has informed and driven zone trippers and anarchical thinkers for centuries.

"All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us." -- François Rabelais,Gargantua and Pantagruel (16th C.)

"Be The Man" Burns

The "Be The Man" sculpture/structure is now just a tiny pile of ashes. The structure was assembled at Gateway Ranch on Friday in about four hours. it went very smoothly. Janabanana made a mask that people could put on when they climbed the tower. That way they could be The Man in Burning Man style.

The fire took a long time to catch hold. Thanks to Gary for tossing more fuel on the fire to get it going properly. In spite of the slow start I thought it burned beautifully. It's amazing how such a large structure could burn down into such a small pile of ashes. You could almost put all of it into a five gallon bucket.

See more photos of the whole process, from drawings to glowing embers.


The whole decompression weekend was a lot of fun. Lot's of dancing, laughing and hugging. We had a great time, even though it rained on Saturday afternoon. I am guessing about a hundred people attended.