Daniel Pinchbeck

• 

  print November 2003

  HEAT OF THE MOMENT: THE ART AND CULTURE OF BURNING MAN

  Mirroring the rise of indie culture’s techno-raves and the quasi-spiritualistic language of the ’90s digital revolution, Burning Man has evolved from a grassroots gathering on a San Francisco beach to an organized, annual congregation of some thirty thousand revelers in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Is Burning Man “over,” or is it just the beginning of some larger cultural realignment? With the festival at a crossroads, Daniel Pinchbeck—author of Breaking Open the Head, a study of shamanism and psychedelics, and a Burning Man veteran—argues that the event’s wildly idealistic underpinnings echo

• 

  previews May 2003

  Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest

  It is difficult to imagine two less likely bedfellows than Cartier (the French jewelers) and the Yanomami (hunter-gatherers from Brazil), despite their shared interest in personal adornment.

  It is difficult to imagine two less likely bedfellows than Cartier (the French jewelers) and the Yanomami (hunter-gatherers from Brazil), despite their shared interest in personal adornment. For the foundation’s current show, a group of artists including Tony Oursler and Gary Hill was sent to the Amazon to live and conceive art projects with the tribe, whose previous encounters with white Europeans have not always worked to the Indians’ advantage. In this case the foreign visitors found inspiration in shamanic practices while the Yanomami received satellite mapping of their forest preserve.

• 

  slant Summer 2002

  Daniel Pinchbeck on Peter Pinchbeck

  WHEN MY FATHER DIED, in September 2000, he left behind hundreds of paintings and sculptures in his rent-controlled loft on Greene Street. The work ranges from severe wooden constructions made in the 1960s to woozy zigzags crafted out of plaster, from icon-size images to rolled-up canvases of vast dimensions. My father’s art went ignored, essentially unseen during his lifetime. There were no career retrospectives, no solo museum shows, no fanfare. His artist friends were his only audience.

  In the aftermath of his life, I find myself compelled to fight his battle for him: I think that my father’s

• 

  film October 2000

  Jean Rouch

  “WE WANTED TO MAKE A FlLM of love, but in the end it came out somewhat impersonal,” sighs Edgar Morin at the end of Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a summer, 1961), the sociologist's collaboration with filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. Beginning with the question “Are you happy?,” the film documents a group of Morin's friends in Paris, following them to dinner parties, at work, and on dates and getting them to reveal their innermost thoughts. A sociological exercise, an experimental film, a passionate inquiry into the meaning of Parisian life ca. 1960, Chronique d'un été, like most of