Desert Flowers: Legendary Burning Man festival gets an eco-conscience

[marmar]

Desert Flowers
Legendary Burning Man festival gets an eco-conscience
By Judith Lewis
03 Aug 2007

Armen Zeitounian leads the way up the staircase of the house he's living in, a two-story colonial nestled in the smoggy hills north of Los Angeles, complete with a view and a pool and a black Ford Explorer in the driveway. In a room on the top floor, a two-by-six-inch plank, painted white, protrudes about five feet through a hole halfway up the wall; in the next room, the other half of the plank emerges, painted black.

"It's called the No-See-Saw," Zeitounian says. "It's a play on perception and psychological issues. Who are you trusting when you sit down? You don't know. So do you sit down anyway?"

Zeitounian once had a plan to exhibit the No-See-Saw at an outdoor festival in France, reimagining the piece so the plank would jut through a fabricated, free-standing tree. He would call it the "Tseesaw" -- a seesaw in a tree. But last September, when the Burning Man Festival declared that its 2007 art theme, "The Green Man," would examine humanity's relationship to nature, Zeitounian changed his destination. He answered the organization's call for contributors to its 30,000-square-foot "Green Man Pavilion" with a proposal for the Tseesaw. The Burning Man art staff not only approved the project, they gave him "more than a couple of grand" to build it.

Thirty-one years old, with wide green eyes and a mass of curly brown hair gathered in a ponytail, Zeitounian describes himself as a "conscious person," but not an environmentalist. "I'm not one of those Greenpeace types," he assures me. "I recycle as much as I can, and I try to be conscious, but I'm not into alternative-energy vehicles or anything." High on the wall of his studio he displays his basic mantra: "Oh arrogant man!" it says. "You think you can balance nature?"

Nevertheless, when he constructs the Tseesaw on the hardened sands of Nevada's Black Rock Desert (also known as the Playa) this month, he will do it in a way that pleases even the most zealous champion of sustainability: The 24-foot tree and its plank will consist only of recycled cardboard, chipboard, and wood; just a few metal fixings will be new. The resulting Tseesaw, Zeitounian explains, becomes about "the give and take, the Yin and the Yang. It's about a clean environment and pollution; about how we're trying to balance nature and instead end up destroying everything around us." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2007/08/03/burningman/index.html

[lynnertic]

1. Burning man organizers/participants always had an eco-conscience

largely anyway.