Spinelli’s Burning Man hearkens back to the Maverick Festivals

Returning with a press pass, camera, and bicycle for the next two years, Spinelli knew he was onto something primordial yet futuristic, temporary but unstoppable. And there was something else that kept bringing him back — something he hadn’t named yet. For a guy who came of age in Woodstock during the sixties it all somehow seemed so familiar, like a high budget revamp of a old story about…well, the Woodstock that taught us to think and to dream. Gravitating, therefore, with any almost genetic sympathy to “the Burners,” Spinelli also invokes the objectivity of the photo-journalist. And what a feast of a photos! The art of the caption allows Spinelli an irony he deftly employs, and: “There is always the option to vote with your feet and walk away.”

While “mainstream media has routinely described The Burning Festival as a party of freaks, weirdos and hippies” Spinelli’s images hammer home off-the-chart art, ritual generosity, adversity-as-inspiration, mutant-vehicles-to-the-rescue, and yes — the mating dance of Earthlings voted most misunderstood at home. “From The Daily Playa Newsletter: ‘You: Wearing a spiked collar and gold shorts. You rode a motorized fetus board, passed our camp, and instantly I knew I had to see you again. You can find me at the Hour of Power at Spank of America at 4PM. Me: Tied down and ready to be used.’”    It quickly becomes obvious that nothing less than being there can convey the experience that is Burning Man; however Spinelli’s photos and prose perform the near impossible job with daring, compassion, humor and grace.

This alone would make for a fantastic book but that back in Woodstock…lightning struck. Frank purchased a book by Weston Blelock at the Library Fair describing the burning of the Ark Royal at one of the town’s famous Maverick Festivals. As he dug deeper, half-forgotten stories surrounding Woodstock’s “original hippie” Hervey White gathered mass, proceeding to throw a long, most remarkable shadow. Suddenly a lineage manifested: beginning with Thomas More’s half-cynical novel “Utopia” (meaning in Greek both “good place” and “no place”), furthered by English visionaries William Morris and John Ruskin who quite seriously took up the quest; transferred to America by Ruskin’s student — fabulously wealthy Englishman Ralph Whitehead — who, assisted by Bolton Brown and Hervey White built Woodstock’s first art colony, Byrdcliffe. Now come both Brown and White’s disappointment and hasty departure, and Hervey’s purchase of a humbler property with a purer goal. Standing firm, White seeks to create a sanctuary defying the dog-eat-dog precepts of capitalism while co-existing within a country totally devoted to such. He names his community after an untamable horse encountered in his travels. Very much a mirror of the man, White’s colony comes to be known simply as “The Maverick.” Inevitably the defining challenge emerges: how to financially support so lofty a humanitarian ideal in the cold light of American day? Here, I suggest, cultural history owes Spinelli a debt in so far as he coins a term deftly describing Hervey White’s deceptively profound accomplishment, in that, according to the author, White developed an “art-driven, transitory Utopia.”

In 1915, on the night of the full moon in August, Hervey assembled an all-volunteer, multi-media art festival in a gigantic bonfire strewn meadow. Costumed attendees paid half price. The large stage — built into the cliff of an old quarry — was ingeniously adorned, lit, and performed upon by local artists, while in the hollowed out “pit” a superb live orchestra performed. Before the “main show” jugglers and acrobats traversed the meadow; food, drink, and scantily clad revelers in ample supply.

Photographs of The Maverick Festivals are the stuff of legend. Each year Hervey (as opposed to Burning Man’s “Harvey”) would design an extravaganza to “top” the previous year — including the burning, one August night, of a three quarter scale ship “The Ark Royal.” Following this hugely anticipated event a costume ball often inspired dancing until dawn. The Maverick Festival hastened Woodstock’s local population’s marriage into the ranks of bohemian artist newcomers, resulting in a community the tolerance of which would hasten a second artistic revolution in the 1960’s — known as “Rock n Roll.” Back in teens and twenties, however, Hervey White inspired an army of often polarized artists into temporary cooperation, creating momentary harmony, and a fleeting artistic perfection, in order that the more disciplined attempts of his “hard-core” colony might carry on.

The genius of the book I review is that through gorgeous photographs and meticulous research Frank Spinelli has properly identified a thru-line showing Burning Man to be the present day keeper of a flame first lit by Hervey White in 1915. While Hervey’s festival can’t compare with the pyrotechnics of Harvey’s — our original Woodstock Festival — was the Burning Man of its day, and indeed the first bold such marriage of the arts in America.

Against the norm, against the odds, against the wind, and in Pursuit of Ecstasy, Burning Man: Towards a 21^st Century Utopia is the perfect holiday gift for every Woodstocker, everywhere.

Don’t miss Frank Spinelli’s presentation at the Woodstock Library Forum, 5 p.m. Saturday, Decemeber 13. And please note that his self-published book is only available at frankspinelliphotography.com. 

Tad Wise is at work on the first full length biography of Hervey White.