Christine Kristen (aka LadyBee) has, for years, been a powerful force on the Playa, Black Rock City in Nevada and today she cut a fine silhouette on the trail to Beach Kehoe. We have admired her work as Burning Man's art curator and are so happy that during this last year our friendship has grown. It was a special thrill to spend a day at the beach where the conversation rolled in like the waves.
Back in 2003 Richard met up with LadyBee when she and Larry Harvey came to Richard's Trillium Press in Brisbane about doing prints of David Best's Temple of Honor as a fund raiser for the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF). Trillium had long been leveraging print projects to help pay for artworks, large and small. David Best officiated at our wedding in the Temple of Stars in 2004 (we like to say attended by 35,000 of our closest friends—the caterer never showed up but the band was awesome).
In the whoop-de-doo of Burning Man, Best's Temple functions as a somber memorial for the dearly departed. It is burned to ashes the last night of the event. Best wanders slowly around the gathered circle of 1000's and quietly says, over and over, "It's not your fault" while on this night, the thump of dance music blaring from giant speakers is replaced by the voice of Diva Marisa Lenhardt echoing across the otherwise silent desert. Anyone dry-eyed? Not a chance…give a listen to Marisa singing here at the Ghost Ship Elegy at Grace Cathedral. Get out your hankies.
From 1999 to 2008 LadyBee helped to shape all things large and small of the Burning Man visual aesthetic. Today for the large — she continues as the archivist and manager for the Burning Man art collection. And for the small — she has the definitive collection of Burning Man jewelry and recently co-authored with Karen Christians and George Post The Jewelry of Burning Man. Selected pieces are included in "No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man"at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, in Washington DC, March 30, 2018 - January 21, 2019.
Although Burning Man is best known for the transitory, the ephemeral, the jewelry Lady Bee has collected are enduring artifacts of the creative and generous spirit of the event. When she talks about the artists who gifted her the pieces for the collection, her face shines with admiration of their skill in crafting rare and beautiful work but it is their generosity that touches her heart. In this gift economy, trade is not expected in return. The gift is the gift.
The ethos of Burning Man has been codified into ten guiding principles that include gifting, radical inclusivity, radical self-reliance, participation, and de-commodification and leave no trace. The costume play and jewelry are a way that people can freely explore and express who they want to be.
It has been a bone-dry December, with below average precipitation for the season, so there was not much plastic on the beach. Even so, during our afternoon stroll, each of us brought back a bag full of trash and treasure.
Since any plastic on the beach, even one piece, is heartbreaking, Richard and I have developed fun categories that help turn the despair of our task into a game. We compete to find:
the hardest to see (the color of the sand, or entangled in seaweed),
the rarest (ballot box lid from the 2001 election)
the most (candy wrappers)
the distance (a water bottle from India)
our top ten (what we find most of the time)
Lady Bee's keen eye and curatorial skills made her a champion beach plastic collector. Not only did she find this toy car - almost exactly the color of the sand (the hardest to see) she also found the head of a soldier and a full figure of a solder (the rarest and the most - 2 in 1 day).
Just before dusk we headed back, skirting the edge of the Kehoe Creek inlet - a place that often harbors lots of plastic. We stopped to chat with an intense young man, poised with his camera focused on a pile driftwood. He said that by 3 AM he leaves his home in Oakland, arriving at the beach before dawn where he spends the entire day, until sunset then dark. In the last three years he has made that trip at least 75 times describing his wife as "a Point Reyes widow." The beach offers respite from intensity of his life as a writer. Coming out in February his latest novel In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees.
Often serendipity is at play at Kehoe so it was not exactly a surprise to run into Annie Hallett on the trail, in a hurry to get out to the beach before sunset. Annie, a long time Burner, artist extraordinaire, crafts masks and performance pieces who along with Pepe Orzan staged elaborate operas. Including the Omphalos Ritual of 2003.
Lady Bee's panoramic picture sums up the day — full of expansive vision on Playa Kehoe and of Playa Black Rock City.
Lady Bee's panoramic picture sums up the day — full of expansive vision on Playa Kehoe and of Playa Black Rock City.
