My very first year at Burning Man, and my very first participatory art piece for the Burn – the Green Duck. I was part of Ze Frank’s old online community that supported The Show back in 2006, and he encouraged us all to conceive and develop our own participatory projects. This was mine. I built the Duck from branches off the maple tree in our back yard, and invited people from the community the world over to write messages for the Duck on cloth “feathers” and send them to me. I got feathers from as far away as France and Israel.
I had no idea what to expect on playa. I parked the Duck at its marker, left a bucket of blank feathers and sharpies, and hoped for the best. I checked on it every day, refilled the feather bucket, and cleared away any detritus. I discovered a fundamental principle of Burning Man structures: “if you build it, they will fuck in it!” It is my dearest wish that today there’s a teenager somewhere walking around who was conceived inside the Duck. I hope his parents named him Howard.
When we went to pitch the Duck into a nearby burn bin at the end of the week, I found a carefully wrapped nugget of high quality marijuana left as a gift inside it, and also a half gallon blueberry juice bottle full of piss. These gifts pretty much evened each other out. This here video is of the Duck’s last moments. We had intended to place him gracefully on the pile in the bin, but he ended up beak-first as if he were a meteor streaking into the bosom of the planet.
The heart I’m cutting out of the Duck in this video was burned ten years later in the Temple of Awareness, my last project for Burning Man.