The sight of a strange building rising from a Petaluma field could only mean the Burning Man arts festival is nearing, and artist Michael Garlington is once again swinging for the seats — one last time.
Garlington and a team of artists are constructing his Chapel of Babel, a 60-foot tower clad in his whimsical photography, filled with shadow boxes and fussily crafted tchotchkes. He describes the structure as a photographic sculpture.
“It was just slowly collecting these fantastical pictures to have enough where I could clad something to this degree," Garlington said.
For decades, Garlington plied his trade as a photographer, using an antique large format camera to capture dark and fantastical photos of scenes he created: a bullfighter battles a 20-foot bull; woman sits astride a massive horse made of balloons. After covering his Volkswagen bus in photos for a road trip to Washington D.C., Garlington realized the potential for photography as a visual wallpaper.
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“That was the beginning of doing kind of architectural photo sculpture,” he said.
His Chapel of Babel, cloaked in thousands of photos taken over the last 35 years, is a striking sight — a black and white feast featuring cutout images of birds and reptiles, portraits, images of actors Susan Sarandon and Willem Dafoe donning ornate photo paper costumes, constructed and photographed by Garlington.
The top of the tower is capped with a spire of stained glass — actually plastic — that will fill the sculpture with light. There’s a main chamber anchored by a massive color photograph of Garlington’s father, which he calls the Wizard of Pa.
“Cover a piece of plywood and it’s so impactful,” Garlington said, demonstrating how he covers the structure’s plywood frame with large paper photos he prints himself on site.
The Chapel of Babel is is a follow-up to Garlington’s Totem of Confessions, another elaborate photo tower built for the 2015 Burning Man arts festival, which bore the ashes of drug guru Timothy Leary. Sarandon led a procession of people carrying the ashes into the structure.
Garlington’s relationship with the annual arts festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert goes back more than a decade, when he began taking portraits of Burners, as attendees are called, in his macabre black-and-white style. Beyond the desert, he also contributed a giant photo-covered arch to the Burning Man organization’s exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.
But after years building projects for the playa, the name for the festival’s desert terrain, Garlington said his Chapel of Babel will be his last for the festival.
“This year I’m so honored to be making this piece,” Garlington said. “But it’s my final piece for the playa.”
Garlington said the effort in bringing a large-scale project to the inhospitable desert climate is massive. Even with funding from the festival and a force of 45 volunteers helping out, Garlington was continuing to fundraise to pay for the project during its construction. He figured the time was right to make way for the generation of builders and dreamers.
“I pass the torch to build these large structures on the playa,” he said, tilting back the voluminous brim of his sweeping western hat.
Among the volunteers who for years have helped to execute Garlington’s visions, there is some debate as to whether he will in fact keep to his declaration.
“We’ll see if he really means it,” smirked longtime volunteer Cheryl Humbert. “This better not be the last one.”
The loyalty of Garlington’s volunteer army is a testament to a mind that seems to constantly spin out ideas that roll larger with imagination.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed working and building with him because he’s incredibly inspiring," said volunteer Carry Bayan.
“He already has his vision and a way to execute it,” said Humbert. “You kind of have to roll with it and hang on.”
Garlington’s own appreciation for Burning Man runs deep. He credits the festival with allowing him the freedom to turn his imagination loose and aim larger than life.
As an homage to the festival, the Chapel of Babel includes a life-size cutout of Burning Man’s late founder Larry Harvey, which will appear each evening at the top of the tower like a cuckoo clock. Garlington said the final night, when his structure is burned, per tradition, the wooden figure will raise its arms like Burning Man’s symbol and disappear into the flames.
“It’s a city made for art,” said Garlington. “They don’t sell T-shirts. All they sell is the experience.”
Though many of the art pieces at Burning Man are burned down at the end of the festival, Garlington this year designed the artwork so it can be removed by participants pre-burn and taken home. Although he likes the idea of the art living on, he’s content with the notion of building something grand and beautiful, and then letting go of it.
“The materials are not meant to last,” he said, looking around at the different levels of the sculpture waiting to be trucked to the desert. “So to let them go is very freeing.”
