John Law (Burning Man)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
artist, culture-jammer
Culture jamming
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...
, and co-founder of the Cacophony Society
Cacophony Society
The Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco....
. He is also a co-founder of the Burning Man
Burning Man
Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...
Festival (AKA Zone Trip #4, AKA Black Rock City) which evolved out of the spirit of the Cacophony Society when a precursor solstice party was banned from San Francisco's Baker Beach and merged with another Cacophony event on the Black Rock desert in Nevada
Nevada
Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...
. He is from San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
.
Cacophony Society
John Law is one of the co-founders of the Cacophony SocietyCacophony Society
The Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco....
, a Culture jamming
Culture jamming
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...
group with open membership, inspired in part by his earlier participation in the Suicide Club
Suicide Club
The Suicide Club was a secret society in San Francisco credited as the first modern extreme urban exploration society, and also known for anarchic group pranks.-History:...
, which was in turn influenced by dadaists and situationists. Cacophony Society
Cacophony Society
The Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco....
began in San Francisco, California, but eventually spread to most major cities in the United States and some outside the US. Claims have been made that Cacophony Society
Cacophony Society
The Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco....
no longer exists, although some chapters are still active.
Burning Man
Law is one of the five co-founders of two events that merged to form what became known as the Burning ManBurning Man
Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...
Festival, AKA Black Rock City.
The three most well-known founders and present partners in ownership of its name and trademark (Law, Michael Mikel, and Larry Harvey
Larry Harvey
]Larry Harvey is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach, which then...
) were known as "The Temple of the Three Guys" (a phrase coined by Chris de Monterey, when he proposed 3 large plywood cartoon cutouts of the founders as a comic honorarium to be installed at Burning Man) according to the Brian Doherty
Brian Doherty (journalist)
Brian Doherty is an American journalist. He is a Senior Editor at Reason magazine. He is the author of This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground , Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement and Gun Control on Trial: Inside the...
book, This is Burning Man (Little, Brown, 2004).
Artistic contributions
Law, a neon sculptor and artist, originated the concept and design of installing neon on the Man at Burning Man, an act which at once created an invaluable navigation aid and an indelible, omnipresent symbol. At an event which, at that time had no streets, street signs, fences, or any other artificially imposed boundaries, and which took place in the virtually featureless deep playa, on which it was very easy to lose one's bearings or misjudge distances and wind up stranded alone in the desert, this navigation aid certainly saved a lot of people a lot of trouble, and may well have saved lives. The early years of the festival allowed driving throughout the city and eventually curbed the practice back to only art carArt car
An art car is a vehicle that has had its appearance modified as an act of personal artistic expression. Art cars are often driven and owned by their creators, who are sometimes referred to as "Cartists"....
s. The symbol of the Burning Man, which had been added to the desert event later and was not part of its initial inception, became more and more identified with the event, in part because with the addition of the neon it was always universally visible, becoming the single unchanging reference point psychologically as well as physically.
Founders' conflict
1996 was the last year John Law attended the Burning Man Festival. That year Law's friend, Michael Fury died in a motorcycle crash while setting up the event and later a couple were run over in a tent by an inattentive driver attempting to get to the distant "rave" camp. John Law and Larry Harvey had fierce disagreements about these incidents and other issues and Law left in disgust proclaiming that the event should not continue. In 2007, the three partners were engaged in a legal struggle over control of the name and symbol of Burning Man. John Law's response to this struggle was to sue to dissolve the controlling partnership and release the name and symbol into the public domain. The final outcome was arbitrated out of court with John's interest being bought out by the current organizers which also ended the "Temple of the Three Guys" partnership.External links
- Cacophony Society main website (includes links to local chapters)
- History of Black Rock City, perspective of Cacophony Society
- History of Black Rock City, perspective of Burning Man Organization,(AKA BMorg)
- news article: Burning Man Founders Mired in Dispute
- John Law speaks: Is Burning Man a Brand or a Movement?