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The Dreamer Deferred
Pedaling through Golden Gate Park the other day, we noticed the conspicuous absence of the giant purple half-head that has graced a lawn near the de Young for a few months. We had all kinds of mean things to say about the head (adolescent pseudo-profundity, like something constructed for a Led Zeppelin album cover), but on the other hand, we smoked enough pot in high school to think, hey, awesome, a giant half-buried purple head with a 1000-yard stare!
Its proximity to the DeYoung led us to decry the Burning Man-ification of the art world -- we figured there was some connection between the museum and the purple head. Turns out that the head was, in fact, made for Burning Man, but its appearance in the Park had nothing to do with the arts establishment. The Black Rock Arts Foundation installed the head -- known officially as "The Dreamer" by Pepe Ozan -- as part of an experiment to "to explore the issues and challenges associated with placing artwork created for the Burning Man festival in new contexts." The issues and challenges, apparently, include extensive damage to the artwork itself: the sculpture was removed ahead of schedule, leaving a bare oval in the turf, like a featureless dirt CAT scan.