Desert DIY
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Last week I was at Burning Man.
Built the yurt we lived in all week. Dust-proof, rain-not-so-much space hut in the desert.
All we had were a couple of Rust-Oleum cans from Home Depot. Graffiti rule #1: you solve it with what you’ve got.
At Burning Man they always build a Temple. People pin photos of their loved ones who passed away, or write letters to them. I was there on my bike with one black can of paint. And I wanted to paint something for my father.
It’s funny, spray paint is a tool that carries this stigma. People see it like a weapon, like destruction. At the Temple, I could feel the looks: why is he tagging here? But for me, spray paint’s always been the number 1 tool, the way I learned to find beauty in chaos.
Always thinking of you, Carlos.
Way before the pandemic, back when people weren’t really using QR codes—I used to hide them in my paintings.
There’s a certain Optichromie that had a QR code pointing to a video of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He’s giving a speech in a dumpster, and he says…
“The difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality, in this dimension” ... “To recreate, if not beauty, then aesthetic dimension, in things like this, in trash itself. That’s the true love of the world”
I kept coming back to that phrase while I was at Burning Man. It takes a lot of energy to try to build something beautiful in a dead desert.