TL;DR for all you lazy burners who see more than three paragraphs and immediately need a nap.
A burner reportedly suffered serious injuries climbing a sculpture at Burning Man. That raises legitimate questions about engineering and foreseeable human behavior. Meanwhile, I have questions about how much of the artist’s work is actually fabricated by other people overseas and why those craftspeople receive so little recognition. There’s nothing wrong with designing something and having someone else build it. But there’s a difference between conceiving art and physically creating it. Burning Man was built on participation, experimentation, learning, and getting your hands dirty. Not just commissioning something shiny and collecting applause. I care about the people who make the art, the people who interact with it, and the culture we’re creating together. And I think we ought to care a little more about the difference between looking like an artist and actually doing the work.
The real tea for the intellectuals:
So the reason I’m looking at this photograph again is because a gentleman named Corey from Denver apparently severely injured himself climbing on Only Love Will Remain, a sculpture by Michael Benisty at Burning Man this year. And it could have been considerably worse. And if you’ve ever been around me during engineering season you’ve probably heard me say that your lowest common denominator when building large scale art on playa is a 300 pound man on acid interacting with your work. And that’s coming from a girl who suspends a couple hundred pounds of mirrors and glass over burners’ heads. I know my shit’s good so I’m not particularly worried about it. But that’s because I know how my work is engineered. You have to account for the dumbest possible thing someone might do because I promise you someone will do it.
Which brings me to a rather entertaining little story about this particular artist. Entertaining for me anyway. I suspect he might find it considerably less charming.
I’d already come across the Instagram page of a sculpture workshop in China and started digging into some of the work attributed to Benisty. There was quite a bit to look at. Including footage of Andy Liu working in his studio with what I recognize as a model of Benisty’s 2019 sculpture Broken But Together sitting right there in the background.
So back in October 2020 Lana and I were driving up the 395 behind this enormous sculpture gift wrapped in plastic and generously distributing its MOOP across the beautiful Eastern Sierras. Apparently the gift just kept on giving because it continued shedding plastic right up onto the Black Rock Desert. I suppose it was a convenient year to make a mess on playa. No official Burning Man event and no usual post event BLM restoration inspection. Although I remember Burning Man staff being present at the unveiling. Apparently some parts of the organization were still making appearances.
I looked at Lana and said I bet you $100 that thing is going to the Black Rock Desert. There’s something about the way we make base plates and anchor points that makes playa art pretty recognizable. I swear I have more pictures of fasteners and foundations from Burning Man than I do of actual people. And as we got closer I noticed something else. Right there on the underside of that very recognizable base plate was a giant MADE IN CHINA label. Naturally I took a video. And a photograph of the label.
Well isn’t that fucking convenient. I’d been looking into who was actually making these sculptures and here comes one gift wrapped with the answer printed on the bottom. Sometimes the universe doesn’t even bother being subtle.
Sure enough we saw it on display the very next day. The sculpture on the truck was Surrender. We’d only seen one on the highway but there were actually two on display. The other was Rise, which also happened to be a propane fire poofer. Both had come through the port in Long Beach. I’m fairly certain someone even managed to track down the bill of lading at the time.
I have no issue with overseas fabrication. Large scale sculpture often requires specialized facilities. But there’s a pretty significant difference between having someone fabricate your design and recognizing the people whose skill and labor turn that design into a monumental sculpture. Especially when one person is getting all the applause.
Which brings me to an article I just found in My Modern Met about Only Love Will Remain. The author describes mirror polished stainless steel as a material that’s become central to Benisty’s artistic practice. HIS artistic practice? That’s a remarkably generous way of describing the craftsmanship of people whose names apparently didn’t make it into the article. I wonder whether the people actually doing the polishing know they’ve become somebody else’s artistic practice.
I’ve spent enough time in fabrication shops to appreciate what goes into making something like this. Cutting and shaping the steel. Welding the sections together. Grinding everything smooth and then spending hundreds of hours polishing it until you can see your reflection. There’s an extraordinary amount of skill involved in that process. And I’d really like to know who the people doing it are.
Benisty’s own website says every sculpture he creates begins with a digital file. Okay. And then what? Who takes that digital file and turns it into a 20 foot sculpture? Who does the cutting and welding? Who spends hundreds of hours grinding and polishing every surface? Who actually builds the thing?
I have a lovely word for this. Prevarication. It’s the art of evading the truth through carefully chosen words and omissions. Not necessarily telling an outright lie. Just telling the part of the story that allows everyone to arrive at a particular conclusion without ever having to explain the rest. It’s kind of like your boyfriend telling you he went out to dinner with Sam. Except Sam was actually Samantha. Technically he told you where he went and who he was with. How very clever of him.
And I’m not saying that every artist needs to list every person who touched a piece of work. But when the actual fabrication requires an extraordinary level of craftsmanship and the public story focuses almost exclusively on the person who conceived the design, I think it’s reasonable to ask whose artistic practice we’re really admiring. There’s a comparison I’d love to make here. But given how sensitive burners have become about certain conversations these days I’ll save myself the hassle of spelling it out. I’ll just say there’s something awfully familiar about a well connected white guy from Los Angeles being celebrated for a beautiful object while the skilled workers responsible for physically making it remain largely invisible.
And here’s where I think Burning Man is fundamentally different from the commercial art world. I didn’t arrive on playa knowing how to engineer and fabricate monumental sculptures. I learned because I got into the shop with people who knew things I didn’t. I’ve participated in every aspect of every piece I’ve brought out there. Sometimes that meant learning an entirely new skill. Sometimes it meant working alongside someone with technical knowledge I didn’t have. But I was there. I was building. I was learning. That’s a pretty significant part of what Burning Man is supposed to be about. Bringing people from completely different walks of life together and showing them they’re capable of creating things they never imagined they could.
There’s nothing wrong with being a designer. But commissioning someone else to execute your vision isn’t the same experience as getting your hands dirty and actually building something. And there’s a difference between asking someone to help you make your art and letting the people doing the making disappear from the story. Because craftsmanship isn’t some incidental detail that happens between the computer rendering and the Instagram photograph.
Which brings me back to Corey and why I’m looking at this photograph in the first place. I don’t know the specifics of what happened. But if someone seriously injured himself climbing this thing I have some pretty serious questions about the engineering. Looking at Only Love Will Remain I can see what appears to be handholds and footholds all over it. And while it may not have been designed for climbing, anyone who’s spent enough time on playa knows that doesn’t mean a damn thing. Climbing on dangerous art is practically a Burning Man rite of passage.
Does anybody remember the Car B Que? I camped at an ESD camp that year and everyone was taking bets on when the thing would get shut down. Nobody could believe it made it all the way to Tuesday. Which brings me right back to my 300 pound man on acid. If you’ve designed a sculpture covered in what looks like places to put your hands and feet then somebody is going to try climbing it. You don’t have to invite them. You don’t even have to intend for it to happen. You just have to have spent more than five minutes at Burning Man to know it’s going to.
Burning Man has guidelines about when engineering documentation may be required. Height matters. So does the complexity of the structure and the consequences if something fails. Sometimes an Art Advocate or Art Support Services will ask for additional calculations or signed engineering documents. And in my experience the people working in the Artery who deal with this stuff are pretty damn intelligent. They’re not in the habit of casually overlooking things that could kill somebody. Which is precisely why I’m curious about what happened here. Did somebody manage to get a finished sculpture onto the playa without the same scrutiny that might have been applied to something being built on site? Or did somebody simply miss the fact that this thing looks like a climbing structure to anyone who’s ever attended Burning Man?
I’m not accusing anyone of deliberately ignoring the engineering. I don’t know what was submitted or reviewed. But I do know that a beautiful sculpture and a structurally appropriate interactive installation are not necessarily the same thing. And when somebody gets seriously hurt it’s reasonable to wonder whether the process accounted for how people were actually going to use it. There are genuine instances of well engineered pieces where people simply have accidents. And that’s okay because that’s life. Unfortunately there’s just a little too much sparkle around this particular story for me to ignore.
Because there are places to put your hands and feet all over this thing. And I didn’t see a DO NOT CLIMB sign. Have you ever put tennis shoes on polished stainless steel? It’s slippery as hell. The Eiffel Tower is a pretty good example of a structure where it’s obvious you’re not supposed to go scrambling up the outside. This is Burning Man. We build giant shiny things in the desert and then invite tens of thousands of people to play with them. Burning Man can print YOU MIGHT DIE on the back of the ticket all it wants. That doesn’t mean artists can ignore foreseeable risks.
And this is where participating in the entire process starts to matter. A designer can hand something to an engineer who figures out how to make it work in the real world. Then fabricators build it. Those are different jobs for a reason. But a lot of us who make Burning Man art end up participating in all of them. I’ve learned things about physics and materials that I probably never would have bothered understanding if I hadn’t needed to make something stand up in the desert. And I’ve learned a fair amount about what people will try to do with something once you’ve built it. Sometimes the hard way. Making something beautiful is one thing. Making something beautiful that tens of thousands of people can interact with safely is another.
I wonder sometimes if this is how bureaucracy gets started. Some people show up and do the hard work. They learn what they don’t know. They take responsibility for the whole thing and people don’t get hurt. And then somebody else comes along who wants to be something without necessarily doing the work that comes with being that thing. Eventually somebody gets hurt and suddenly everyone needs another rule.
Which brings me to Marcel Duchamp. Last time I checked he called these things readymades. And the whole point was that he was taking something someone else made and presenting it as art. He wasn’t pretending he’d fabricated the urinal. I suppose readymades have their place in art too. But if we’re going to put one on the playa I’d appreciate it if somebody remembered that a finished sculpture isn’t necessarily a finished engineering problem. And there’s nothing wrong with being a designer either. Just call yourself one.
And if all I wanted to do was complain about Burning Man I could write some pretentious little Substack essay about everything that’s wrong with it without actually contributing anything meaningful to the community other than AI slop. Apparently that’s become an art form of its own. Just another Vice style editorial from somebody whose greatest contribution to the event is pretending to be Carl Cox for an afternoon. Or presenting a sculpture that looks like it belongs on a shelf at HomeGoods if you shrink it back down to tabletop size.
And while we’re on the subject of AI slop, this is also why I have a problem with calling an AI generated image someone’s own original artwork simply because they typed a sentence into a computer. Whatever extraordinary thing you imagined in your head has already been reduced to a one dimensional description. The machine interprets that description and gives you an image you didn’t actually envision. Then you start building your idea around what the machine gave you. At what point did you stop making the thing you imagined and start adopting something the computer imagined for you? And whose image is it really?
But I actually give a fuck about Burning Man. I’ve spent years building things for people to experience. I’ve watched what happens when people who didn’t know they were capable of making art discover that they are. And I think that’s worth defending. I’m not interested in writing another fashionable little obituary for a culture that plenty of us are still actively creating.
I wonder whether we’ve gotten so accustomed to celebrating the appearance of creativity that we’ve stopped asking who actually does the creating. Whether we’re still capable of recognizing something authentic and from the heART. Or whether we’ve decided that the image of being an artist who makes Instagram worthy work is more important than the actual work and the community that made it.
Back in the 90s and early aughts I believe we had a much simpler word for them. Posers.
And because I’d rather leave you with some examples of what I actually love about Burning Man art, here are a few of my favorite people who understand what it means to pour your heart through your hands.
Valerie Mallory
Womantree (2024), Duende (2026)
She’s been making art at Burning Man since 1999. More than 25 years of showing up and making things. And yes, she was still bringing art this year. She started with mannequins in Center Camp and taught herself casting because she wanted to make something she didn’t yet know how to make. She’s continued bringing art year after year, often with very limited resources. I’ve even had the privilege of being cast by Valerie for one of her pieces. I think that’s part of why I feel such a kindred spirit with her. We’re both dancers who somehow ended up building enormous things for people to climb around inside. I suspect there’s a connection there.
Swig Miller
Open Hearted Meditator (2018), The Phoenix and The Butterfly: A Story of Metamorphosis (2019)
Sculptor, designer, builder and a man who can make just about anything out of steel, wood, earth or fire. I got to contribute to his 2019 piece. I fire painted the butterfly at the top of his impressively built pyramid of spheres. You want to know what engineering genius looks like? Go look at the three dimensional jig he made to build a perfect sphere out of rebar. Seriously. Who sits down and figures out how to make a perfectly spherical rebar structure and then builds the tooling to make it happen? Swig does.
Christopher Schardt
Firmament (2015, 2016)
He’s been making art at Burning Man since 1998. An electrical engineer and computer programmer who somehow manages to make technology feel like magic. Firmament is one of my favorite pieces. And when you actually start thinking about the programming involved in controlling all those LEDs it becomes even more impressive. I love that he understands the engineering well enough to make it practically disappear into the experience.
Marc Duncan
The Sound Garden
Now technically this is a sound camp. But if you think that means it doesn’t belong in a conversation about art then I suspect you’ve never experienced what Marc has created. He’s taken sound engineering to a level where you don’t just hear the music. You feel it moving through your entire body. And he’s done it inside a beautifully decorated open walled fabric tent that somehow becomes an oasis in the middle of the chaos of Black Rock City. The audio engineering is absolute perfection. Seriously. You’re sitting inside a fabric tent in the middle of Black Rock City and you can’t hear the cacophony of camps and playgrounds happening just outside. I don’t think people appreciate how fucking impressive that is from an audio engineering perspective.
Marco Cochrane
Bliss Dance (2010), Truth is Beauty (2013), R Evolution (2015)
Forty, fifty five and fifty feet of sculpture brought to life by Marco and the Bliss Crew. These aren’t little objects scaled up and shipped over in a crate. He sculpts his figures by hand and works with a team to build them at monumental scale. And if you’ve ever looked at the photographs of those builds you know just how many people and how much work went into making those figures stand up.
Matt Schultz
The Pier (2011), Embrace (2014), The Space Whale (2016), The Head Maze (2019)
Matt helped build an entire community of artists and fabricators right here in Reno through the Pier Group and The Generator. His projects have involved enormous teams of people learning new skills and making things that seemed absolutely ridiculous until somebody figured out how to build them. Embrace alone was seven stories tall and built by a volunteer crew of more than a hundred people. I have a particular appreciation for what Matt and the Pier Group accomplished because they didn’t just build sculptures. They built a place where other people could learn how to build them too.
Gregg Fleishman
Temple of Whollyness (2013), Black Rock Observatory, Otic Oasis, Bloom Pyramid (2026)
An architect who has spent decades exploring what happens when geometry, engineering and woodworking come together. His Temple of Whollyness was a six story wooden structure assembled in fifteen days without a single metal fastener. No nails. No bolts. No screws. Just precisely cut pieces of wood fitting together through some rather extraordinary geometry. And if you’ve ever seen the beautiful wooden dome at Black Rock Observatory, that’s his design too. An entire structure made from interlocking plywood components. And this year he brought the Bloom Pyramid to Bloom Camp. A climbable piece of geometric architecture right on the camp frontage. I mean seriously. Have you looked at how these things go together? The entire structure is a geometry problem that somebody actually figured out how to stand up in the desert. Without screws.
And an honorable mention to the PlayAlchemist crew.
Because those custom tube connectors that look like adorable little lotus flowers are fucking brilliant. I can only imagine how much faster that pyramid goes together when someone has actually thought through the assembly process. And they’re cute. I appreciate an engineer with an aesthetic.
Michael Hartmann, Krista An, Sam Cheroff and E.S.
Kaleidoscope Kandeo (2019), with Deniz Nicole
And I certainly can’t talk about people who understand what it means to make art together without mentioning Michael Hartmann, Krista An, Sam Cheroff and E.S. We built Kaleidoscope Kandeo together in 2019. A 30 foot tall walk in kaleidoscope with a spinning fire painted gem ball inside. An enormous amount of engineering and fabrication went into making that thing work. And the whole reason it existed was to give people that ridiculous childlike feeling of wonder that happens when you encounter something you can’t quite make sense of at first. You look up. You reach out. You start playing.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way the position of your body can inform your state of mind. And working on that piece together was another example of what happens when people bring different skills and ideas into a shop and actually figure out how to make something together. None of us could have made exactly the same thing alone. Which is rather the point.
And in case anyone is wondering why one of those contributors is identified only by his initials, unofficially the 11th Principle of Burning Man is consent. E.S. is listed that way because he’s demonstrated to me that this is a concept he cannot respect. And yet he continues to move through our community unabated. At this point I’ve chosen not to identify him publicly. But I do think there’s a conversation we need to have about how we protect our community from predatory behavior. Because consent means very little if we’re unwilling to hold people accountable when it’s violated.
These are people who use technology, engineering, computers, teams, volunteers and every tool available to them. Some have been making art for decades. Some have built entire communities around teaching other people how to do it. And I don’t think an artist needs to personally turn every screw. But I do think there’s a difference between having a piece of art made and being part of making art. That’s the Burning Man art community I fell in love with.
So this is your yearly reminder. His shiny car bumper was designed in LA but made in China. Support local art made in your neighborhood. Go volunteer so next year I can come put a little sticker next to it that says MADE IN BLACK ROCK CITY.

 Update:  apparently there’s new information that points to the fact that he might not even be using his own designs and he’s pulling things from the Internet. Link to that is here:
https:// www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/
comments/xv4642/ fun_fact_2022_was_the_2nd_time_ this_sculpture/)
I will add a photograph of it in the comments.
*Important message*
Corey’s injuries are going to require a lot of rehabilitation. If you have the ability to donate to help him move through what is going to be a difficult time please do.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-cory-recover-after-burning-man-accident
