Former foundries in Oakland serve as the base in a fight against economics and red tape to continue creating works featured at the iconic Burning Man festival. Part two of a three-party series on the annual happening.
A remote control hot tub still sits in the NIMBY’s yard. A giant cereal bowl with pillows in magical, delicious shapes lay in waiting for Burning Man. Earlier this week, a semi-truck hauled them from industrial Oakland to the desert plain of Black Rock City and Burning Man.
“About seventy-five percent of the art from here has already reached the desert,” Michael Snook, founder of NIMBY, said. “We helped create 10 large scale installations.”
That these artworks got this far is a small miracle. NIMBY, a do-it-yourself art warehouse, has had trouble staying open for its artists. After it opened in West Oakland in 2004, they had a small fire. Then the City of Oakland said they had to move.
Dave Pedroli, NIMBY business consultant, hated to leave his West Oakland neighborhood. “Pals lumber was our next-door neighbor and that’s the only place you can get custom cut wood. They don’t sell that at Home Depot.”
But by the end of 2008, NIMBY found a home in East Oakland, in so-called warehouselandia. Zoned as an M-30 Heavy Duty manufacturing space, the former wood manufacturing plant’s 64,000 square feet of space now house NIMBY tenants. The move cost more than $50,000 and set up a fundraising necessity upon move-in.
Luckily, Burning Man organizers threw down some cash. “The Black Rock Arts Foundation really helped us in our transitional times,” Dave said.
Many tenants at NIMBY are self-described burner artists. Pedroli, or “Super Dave” as he is known, worked for BRC’s Department of Public Works, the planners who lay the groundwork for Black Rock City.
“They also give away great, bizarre grants every year. Once you get a grant from BRAF, you reach a whole new level of opportunity as an artist,” Dave said.
Snook nodded. “Burning man is the gateway grant,” he said.
Both managers stand more than six feet tall and burly, like brown bears in a den of manufacturing equipment. Their art factory, which embraces Burning Man’s “radical inclusion” principle, is run a bit like the Island of Misfit Toys. Volunteers materialize to turn a loose screw or run tools for fellow artists even as they fight to remain on the cityscape.
“For newbie artists inspired by Burning Man, this place is a great place to learn,” Super Dave said. “And Oakland has everything you need.”
A few feet from where Snook and Super Dave stand, and scuttled in between stacked shipping containers was a parked ‘59 El Camino. Sparks fly as Bruce Tomb and his crew readies their homage to the car industry: a transforming car with the likeness of Maria, from the utopian film “Metropolis,” perforated on the hood. That the original Squeegee factory stands a few blocks away from Maria Del Camino seems fitting. And while the Oakland warehouse scene isn’t making any cars these days, the parts are all within city limits.
“They spent about $6,000 on the frame from a shop right around here,” Dave told me as welders soldered parts to their Ave Maria, “and an another $5,000 on the retrofit and welding equipment, electrical components—all of it purchased from Oakland businesses.”
NIMBY isn’t the only art foundry in Oakland. Several warehouses, like Vulcan, Kinetic Steam Works and the Crucible function as art-event spaces to keep creating. But it is hard to build utopian dreams in a city with dystopic bureaucracy. Every year, NIMBY pays some $10,000 in permit fees.
“We’re still paying for our Haiti benefit,” Super Dave said. The fundraiser, held last February, necessitated several police, security dogs and a lot of dead time waiting for a green light.
“In the end, all the money we raised went to the permits,” he said. “I think we sent about 16 palettes of clothes for Haiti’s earthquake relief, but not much cash.”
The road to permit compliance for any artist is marked with detour signs. City Council member Larry Reid, whose District 7 houses the NIMBY lot, took issue with the space. He could not be reached for comment but did claim that NIMBY was nothing more than a party gang.
So, NIMBY holds onto its ten-year lease and waits for their assembly permit (they’re optimistic) as Reid refuses their invitations to visit. Meanwhile, NIMBY reaches out to its neighbors.
“For National Night Out, we had the kids from Tassafronga housing complex. Communities across Oakland took to the streets to see each other and build neighbor relationships. NIMBY “They were really into seeing the fire art displays.”
These kids probably couldn’t swing the $360 ticket price at Black Rock City gates. Displays of a grandiose magnitude have risen on the playa.
And Snook couldn’t be happier. He’s looking forward to another quiet season at NIMBY, when the city of Oakland simmers in post-production burner blitz.
“In the next few months, we’ll be moving out everyone’s stuff,” he said. “And then next winter, we start all over.”
This is the first in a three-part series produced by Patricia Eagan, edited by Oakland Local with the support of The Daily Casserole and the Spot.Us community. Hooray!
Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito displayed many metal sculptures at Amerian Steel, home of Big Art Studios and Sand by the Ton.
Dan Das Mann called me from his 40-foot school bus, on his way to the Black Rock desert, the location of the annual pilgrimage known as Burning Man - the art event of radical self-expression that this local artist approaches in earnest.
This participatory community waiting for him on what is known as "the playa," can grow to nearly 50,000 citizens. It's also what Das Man, co-founder of Big Art Studios of Oakland, calls his art school. For 2010's "Metropolis" theme, he and his partner Karen Cusolito have fantasy in mind.
"We have a new project this year called 'Infinarium,'" he said. "It's a scrap metal forest of funky plants. The pieces range from 5 to 30 feet tall and each one of them is smoking, misting, shooting fire and water. And the forest is interactive, something you might experience in 'Alice and Wonderland.'"
He's also bringing two of the recycled metal sculptures featured at his recent Sand by the Ton party - an electronica, fire art beach party, for which he carted 200 tons of sand into the old American Steel warehouse. These human figures towered over the West Oakland carnival, where dumpster diving in the container pools was encouraged.
The recent event had a similar vibe to Burning Man, with the element of spontaneous fun coming from riding down water slides or scoring at the Cherry Poppin' Skeeball booth. Ever since a San Francisco artist burned an effigy on Baker Beach more than 10 years ago, this and infinite displays of radical self-expression are what makes for utopian moments — in Oakland and on the Burning Man playa.
However, artist Lee Harvey does not consider Black Rock City a paradise.
"I've never regarded Burning Man as a utopia," he once wrote. "Utopias have always seemed to me a little dreary. They are one-size-fits-all propositions. They are rigid schemes that make little allowance for the pluralism of reality. How can we expect to inhabit a perfect society when no human being has ever been perfect? In practice, utopian efforts often reduce down to a search for the 'like-minded.' But by what cheap signboards are we to know the like-minded?"
Since its inception in 1986, Burning Man has shown evidence of like-mindedness in its fashion. Oakland-based costume designer Katherine Becvar sold some of her handmade burner designs at Sand by the Ton. She said she struggles with the standard burner look — a seeming combination of the movie "Waterworld" and burlesque — that tends to make individuals appear more or less the same.
Becvar deviates from the "tribal fur, black leather and hangy things" and instead focuses on Victorian-inspired, LED-lit butterfly tops and utility belts. She gets a lot of her materials at the East Bay Depot for Creative Re-Use and enjoys the handmade hipster craft scene that thrives in the Bay Area.
"In Burning Man fashion, there are all kinds of niches, but beyond that there are no limitations," she said. "If there is a utopian place called Black Rock City, it is this ethos of self-expression, and the way that people dress is wrapped up in that."
At Sand by the Ton, around the corner from Becvar's booth and across from the Cock Toss, stood a display of another installation headed to Burning Man. "Megatropolis," a six-building skyscraper park stationed near the man. Otto von Danger, one of the engineers of the spectacle, had a more apocalyptic notion of Metropolis. The Lift Tower and cityscape centerpiece will feature an elevator that raises people 50 feet to Black Rock City's highest vantage point. But like the man, its future lies in flames.
"It's the only structure on the playa that's going to burn and explode," he said.
Oakland - with its port container cranes and industrial ghost towns - has become a burner city and one of the epicenters of the movement. A sunny city in a dystopian moment, Oakland faces a projected deficit of $50 million next year and has an unemployment rate that hovers around 17 percent. In the throes of recession, art faces eviction from the cityscape.
Yet, the city's artists continue to rise from the pyre. As Das Mann points his school bus toward one contentious utopia, he remarks on another.
"There's a lot of interest in creating work/live spaces that artists tend to congregate in," he said. "Rising costs in San Francisco have turned many artists toward the East Bay. I think that politics of this city are very accepting of the artist's way and the way we want to live and create. Oakland is more like the Wild West."
Suddenly, Das Man's 22-foot trailer carting generators made a lurch.
"I'd better pull over and take care of this," he said. Like every burner, he was willing to work for Black Rock City, even before his arrival.
"To some it seems hostile and frightening, its past known for violence and hardship. To others it is a bright and friendly part of this earth, a place where men have found adventure.
It is spectacular and strange, a vast barren plain which, though enclosed and shaped by rugged mountains, stretches for more than one hundred miles in a southwest-to-northeast direction. Geographers consider it a playa, the dry bed of an ancient lake lying within the large Great Basin Desert. But a modern dictionary gives it individual status by listing it, along with the Sahara, as one of the forty-seven major deserts of the world.
At one place jutting mountains pinch its width to a narrow corridor so that early pioneers considered it two deserts. The smaller southern section took the name of a stream, Smoke Creek, which periodically flows to the playa's edge. The northern section is named for a dark rock hill, approximately four hundred feet high, which in the early days provided a travelers' landmark. At a distance, contrasted with the lighter background of its mountain range, it resembles a massive black rock."
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