Art, Ritual, and Play
excerpt from "Turn Your Life Into Art" by Caveat Magister (Ben Wachs)
Art, Ritual, and Play - the person who really cracked their connection open for me is a UCLA anthropologist with whom I once fought a war.
That is not a metaphor.
Back in 2012, Dr. Megan Heller, known as "The Countess," was the leader of the Burning Man Census team. And I, in my guise as Caveat Magister, was the volunteer coordinator of Burning Man’s Media team. One of their senior volunteers, Trapper, had wanted to come over to my team, and so I’d made her an offer and we’d gotten her set up ... and then the Census started trying to get her back. They were guilting her like crazy, telling her how important she was and how they couldn’t get their work done without her, and Trapper started telling me that maybe she was going to try working shifts on both teams – more than doubling her workload – because she couldn’t let them down.
"Oh no," I said. "No no no. We’re gonna handle this. Come with me."
So I got a dangerous looking hook cane and a bottle of Chimay, and I grabbed Trapper and we walked right into the Census camp, where at the top of my lungs I demanded to see The Countess. When the three of us were all together, in the middle of her camp, I issued a dramatic proclamation: I had in my left hand a bottle of beer brewed by monks, and in my right hand a weapon. Trapper was ours, she’d defected to the Media team, and one way or another theCensus would have to accept that. They could either accept it gracefully, in which case they could drink the beer with my compliments, or they could accept it in anger, in which case we would go to war, and the streets would run red with blood! What was it to be?
"Oh," the Countess said, without blinking. "War!"
I realized, in that moment, that I had miscalculated. I’d had no idea they were so ready to do this.
Two years later, in her dissertation on adult play, the Countess would describe this incident from her own perspective.[1] In fact she had been just as stunned by my theatrical posturing as I’d expected her to be. But instead of backing down, she’d thought "Oh, geez, I guess this is what the Media team does! Well, in that case ..." and jumped right in.
Thus began a week-long conflict in which we raided each other’s camps, "vandalized" one another’s stuff, enlisted allies among other camps, and engaged in psychological warfare and dirty tricks. I got the Burning Man radio station to run promotions saying that there was an orgy in the back of the Census camp, and that you could get in by asking for the "long form." So many people showed up demanding to get the "long form" that the Census team eventually created one just because as long as those people were here they might as well provide supplemental data. I also got jumped by three guys in lab coats, which is just a weird and fascinating experience in its own right.
While open hostilities ceased at the end of the week, they simmered for years ... which brought members of both camps further together in common bonds, because we had a very fun game going. Formal peace was declared four years later, after a summit that was somehow even funnier than the war. We exchanged knives. There was an apology mooning. I did a ritual happy dance. People on each team bonded even more closely. But best of all, I became friends with the Countess, who later would talk with me about her work, and give me a key insight into what makes experiences like this tick.
Turns out you can learn from your enemies.
The title of this chapter calls Art, Ritual, and Play the "holy trinity" and that’s not just because they’re three things that are important. It’s because, in vital respects, they are the same thing. They are three, and they are one.
All three are examples of what can be termed "metaconsciousness" – each is an imaginative act that has the potential to significantly reframe the way we look at the world. This connection is particularly clear in rituals and in play: the only difference is that we take one as solemn and important and adult, and the other as frivolous and childish. But at a crucial level, they’re doing the same thing. Think about highly ritualized endeavors: if you "play" a religious "ritual" effectively enough, aren’t you really doing a religious ritual? While if you perform a religious ritual in a slapdash manner, aren’t you just playing at it? If you "play" soldier hard enough, aren’t you in fact being a soldier, while if you are a soldier who screws around at it, aren’t you just "playing" soldier? Ritual and play are fungible. The major difference is not that one is good or bad, adult or childish, effective or ineffective – it’s that society recognizes one as official and the other not. But they are in fact made up of the same ingredients, and can play much the same roles as one another. The feeling you get when you are deeply enmeshed in play and ritual is the same, as is the feeling you get when you are just going through the motions. In the former cases you are fully present, while in the latter you are forcing yourself to suspend disbelief. When fully lived, both give you a sense that there are new possibilities that you can access – the world works this way, not that way, while at the same time creating new rules and procedures you need to follow to access it. The Census and the media team would never, under other circumstances, have even considered fighting over a volunteer – but doing so actually made everything better, not only solving the problem but building bridges.
Being moved by a piece of art has much the same effect. It can cause you to see the ordinary in a new way, or imagine something you’d previously never conceived of.
The design element to incorporate here isn’t just that art is awesome and play is awesome and ritual is awesome, it’s that they are transitive: they are at their most potent when they are put next to one another, sequence into one another, and reinforce one another.
Use them. Use them a lot. Have them reference one another, turn into one another, inspire one another.
And when you have multiple rituals going on, and multiple kinds of play, and many pieces of art, all different from one another, and people can choose what to engage with, and how to mix their experience up ... it can become an incredibly potent magical garden.
And when they’re all part of a unique and non-benign experience of engineered disperfection in which participants have to make meaningful choices? Pull something like that off, and people who go through it will never be the same again.
On the other hand, and this is an important warning, it’s easy to over-rely on them.
"Dance party at the Gates of Hell" is probably about as engaging as "picnic at the Gates of Hell." But if the next thing you do is "movie night at the Gates of Hell," and then "clothing swap at the Gates of Hell," and then another "dance party at the Gates of Hell" ... suddenly you’ve stopped designing experiences and started doing shitty party promotion. Eventually you want to cram more people in the space, because if you’re not actually doing anything potent you’ll probably try to make it bigger, assuming "more potent" and "bigger" are the same thing, and it’s also not technically legal to charge people for access to public art, so you do pop-up events at a club with a giant cardboard cut out of the Gates of Hell. And when that is accidentally lit on fire by a DJ who thought he was good at flame effects, you just start calling your event "the Gates of Hell," and nobody even knows why, except that it’s a good name.
Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve seen it happen.
While art, ritual, and play are in many ways the building blocks of an infinite psychomagical garden, too many people start there and stop there, because the other stuff ... creating unique non-fictions and engineered disperfections and encouraging meaningful choices and keeping it non-benign ... is all much harder than slapping some art on a wall and playing Twister.
But the hard stuff is ultimately more important to doing this well, especially at a high level. Art and ritual and whimsy are great at reaching the unconscious, but just being near art is the least effective way to access that capacity, while play and ritual that are neither inspired nor carefully designed (or best of all, inspired through design) generally don’t offer the daimonic anything that it thinks is important.
For Robin Ziiro, coming to the art already in a state of ritual and play is a way of both heightening its impact and creating these other important conditions:
"Build a world with your collaborators by connecting and amplifying your own shared schemas, stories and symbol narratives, and then approach the art," she said.
An infinite psychomagical garden is what museums and dance parties dream of becoming, not what they are. It’s important not to mistake the building blocks for the final shape.