Best intentions

US artist David Best is famous as the master craftsman of six giant temples that have been constructed and then torched during the Nevada desert’s notorious Burning Man Festival. The Temple of the Mind, built in 2000, was followed by the Temple of Tears, the Temple of Joy, the Temple of Honour, the Temple of Stars, and last year’s Temple of Forgiveness. Considered the most spectacular and awe-inspiring art event to come out of Burning Man, Best has chosen the Electric Picnic in Ireland to host this year’s giant temple.

Before he began making his temples ­– which are constructed by an all-volunteer ‘family’ of about thirty people – Best was “pretty much a typical artist. You know, galleries, museum shows, that type of thing. Working in the established art community as an artist making objects. But I’ve discovered that making something that’s for sale and something that’s not is the difference between night and day. It’s much more fun to make things that don’t sell. It’s a much nicer process. And it’s more fun reaching out to the non-art people, people who couldn’t afford to buy art in a gallery.”
A friend’s motorbike accident was the catalyst that propelled Best from traditional art into building and burning elaborately-designed giant plywood temples.
“We were going to the Burning Man to party,” remembers Best. “And if young Michael Hefferon hadn’t been killed on a motorcycle on his way to the desert that year, who knows? I’d be making carousel horses for merry-go-rounds. But the fact that he got killed, everybody had to do something as a tribute to him, and it went from there.”
Best’s temples have become depositories of prayer and remembrance, where tens of thousands of people leave photographs and notes to loved ones lost. Anyone can come and help build the temple, and in the process people tend to unburden themselves of pain and suffering. When the temple is burned on the last day of the festival, the incandescent display, silhouetted against the night sky, emits a massive wave of celebration and healing, bringing many of those watching to a place of tear-filled awe and release.
In moving away from the creation of individual art objects, Best has shone light on the benefits of community ritual, where artistic value is not so much in the object created, but in the lasting emotional and spiritual experience of the people who help build it and watch it burn.
While Best’s temples have helped multitudes through all sorts of sorrow and bereavement, they have a particularly profound resonance for people who’ve lost loved ones through suicide.
“There are some remarkable things I’ve heard and seen,” says Best. “A man whose son committed suicide came up to me and said, ‘You’ve set my son free.’ Wow! What a nice thing to have someone tell you when you’re working with crappy plywood.”
It’s easy to see why Best is so good at facilitating collective healing through art. Within moments of talking to him over the phone in his Californian home, I was unburdening myself of the particular challenges I face in my own life. His aura makes you want to tell him your deepest pain. Is this something Best consciously cultivates?
“Well, no,” he says. “I’m just an ordinary guy who has his work and his family and cats and dogs. But I was talking to someone the other night at a function, and we were saying that anyone who’s had a son that committed suicide, or a mother or brother or a sister or father – they want to talk about it. And all you have to do is listen. You don’t have to have to have an answer or know what to say. You just let them talk. But people don’t let other people dump on them. And there’s nothing to it. I’ve talked to thousands of people about this kind of stuff, and I like it. Recently I’ve had a pretty shitty month… A friend of mine’s daughter was killed tragically in an accident, another friend of mine was dying in hospital… One evening I came home not exactly on top of the world. And I get a phone call from someone who says you might not remember me, but I met you in the desert – and I mean I talk to thousands of people in the desert – and I talked to you about my son and then I did remember. And he says, Well he jumped off the Golden Gate bridge last month. And I said, It’s such an honour that you called me. And you know you can call me any time night or day and I’ll help you with whatever I can do.
“It’s such a privilege to have somebody share something with you. Especially something so difficult.
“For years my friends in Ireland,” continues Best, “in all different walks of life, have said Ireland needs a temple. You need to do this here. We’ve got incredible alcoholism, we’ve got incest, all these things that no one brings out. They’re all hidden. There’s huge amounts of shame. One of the things for me that’s probably the most challenging, or the thing that gets me most pissed off and the most angry is the shame. And the reason we build the temple is so that that person whose son has committed suicide can be proud of that son, and put the son’s name right in the centre of the temple. Why do we build churches if we don’t build them for people to put their sons’ faces in who’ve committed suicide? What the hell is a church for if you can’t put your most radical grief on the altar?
“We have it in the United States with our veterans coming back from Iraq. There’s a lot. But Ireland has epidemic proportions of suicide. People say Ireland’s so wealthy… It’s wealthy for three per cent of the population. Everyone else is experiencing chronic inflation. For young kids there’s no hope. And there should be and there is: there is plenty of hope.
“I have a house outside of Tipperary. Ireland’s a great country, but I’ve been coming here for 30 years, so I don’t see it through a green lens. I don’t see the Paddy walking around with a green shamrock, I see the other Ireland too. So the other big issue with the Electric Picnic temple – and it’s something that means a lot to the young Irish people – is the destruction of the Irish culture. And that’s why the temple is called the Temple of Truth, and why it has Celtic images on it.
“I have a team of people who work with me,” concludes Best. “The ritual of working together is something we don’t generally do in our culture anymore. People work for money, but they don’t work for the joy of working with one another. But you can’t do it alone. You need to have a community and we’ve lost that. And I think we’re trying to get back to that. I know damn well we need it.”