Written for Artforum in 2003. The essay traces Burning Man from Larry Harvey’s 1986 effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach to a thirty-thousand-person city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and argues that its gift economy and deliberately destroyed artworks, such as David Best’s Temple of Tears, place it outside official art-world judgment.
A survey of recent books written for Artforum in 2003. Pinchbeck sets Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder, Paul Virilio’s Crepuscular Dawn, and Andrew Kimbrell’s Fatal Harvest against Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, arguing that American consumption rests on manufactured false needs and that, per Hardt and Negri, cultural producers form a potentially revolutionary class.
Artforum, 2002. Pinchbeck writes about his father, the abstract painter Peter Pinchbeck, who died in 2000 leaving hundreds of unsold works in a Greene Street loft. The memoir covers the London Blitz, his father’s arrival in New York in 1960, his inclusion in the Jewish Museum’s 1966 Primary Structures exhibition, and SoHo’s gentrification.
A Wired dispatch from August 2002 on crop circles. It surveys the croppie subculture in Wiltshire, Gerald Hawkins’s geometric analysis, Colin Andrews’s magnetic-field claims, and Michael Glickman’s theory of a 2012 dimensional shift, and quotes SETI astronomer Seth Shostak dismissing the Chilbolton glyph that appeared to answer the 1974 Arecibo message.
Originally published in Artforum in 2002. A review of Julius Evola’s books newly translated by Inner Traditions, including The Hermetic Tradition and Revolt Against the Modern World, tracing the Italian baron’s path from Dada alongside Tristan Tzara to the UR occult group. Pinchbeck links Evola’s account of alchemical dream states to Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
An on-the-ground look at Berlin’s post-wall art scene, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2001. It reports from Art Forum Berlin, the galleries Klosterfelde and Neugerriemschneider, and the Kunst-Werke space in Mitte, profiling artists Kirsten Pieroth, Monica Bonvicini, and Elmgreen and Dragset, whose cheap rents and club life Pinchbeck likens to 1960s New York.
Rolling Stone sent Pinchbeck to Burning Man in 2000. The dispatch describes the dust storms that nearly broke the festival, the Microsoft-staffed Church of Mez camp, John Perry Barlow at Spiral Oasis, and Larry Harvey’s grant-giving organization, showing how Silicon Valley money reshaped an event that began as a beach effigy burning.
A Village Voice article from 1999 on Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork. It covers Grof’s seminar at the New York Open Center, his earlier LSD research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and the claim, seconded by facilitator Oliver Miller, that accelerated breathing reaches the same nonordinary states as psychedelics.
A short first-person sidebar for The Village Voice, 1998, recounting a guided ayahuasca session. Pinchbeck describes green visions of plants and vines, bit-mapped patterns, a sense of the brew scanning his body, and mild vomiting, and concludes that the New Age setting left the experience tantalizing rather than life-changing.