'Stunning,' shaggy New Orleans sculpture rises above Burning Man mud bath

It’s going to take New Orleans artist Walker Babington two or three more days to leave Burning Man, the big sculpture festival and campout in the Nevada desert. The festival ended on Tuesday, two days later than expected. But Babington predicts it will still be a while before his three-story, three-ton surrealistic buffalo can be taken apart and packed up for the 2,200-mile return trip to New Orleans.

“We’ve got to strike this bad boy and get it back to the bayou,” Babington said.

A rare stretch of rain caused the delay, turning the ordinarily dry landscape of Burning Man into a quagmire as bad as Jazz Fest after a spring monsoon. Maybe worse. Which isn’t something anyone could have predicted.

New Orleans gallery owner Arthur Roger, who attended the event, shared a video of himself walking across the grounds in what looked like a sea of ankle-deep oatmeal. He said bicycling, a common form of transportation at the fest, was impossible. Delivery of water and maintenance of portable toilets was also tough, and tent life was “impossible.”

“It was like a New Orleans severe storm warning meets Woodstock, at Burning Man,” he said.

The situation was certainly messy, but spirits were still relatively high, Roger said, and Louisianians “may have had an upper hand,” since they are used to debilitating deluges.

A burning man goes to Burning Man 

A bright spot was Babington’s sculpture, which Roger said was “stunning, absolutely stunning.” He said that in his opinion, it was one of “the better pieces” at the monumental sculpture festival.

Babington is a creative dynamo with a cowboy mustache. He regularly finds work in movies and television shows, either as an actor or stunt man. He’s also been a Jackson Square artist and a Mardi Gras float maker.

In 2014, he conducted a dramatic art performance on a Marigny street, in which he donned a fireproof body suit, set himself ablaze, and burned a “fire angel” onto a wooden sheet – imagine a snow angel, only much warmer and more dangerous.

The fire angel still hangs in Babington's Irish Channel studio, where he spoke to a reporter before packing up the parts of the sculpture to take to Burning Man.

Most of the laboriously built sculptures that are displayed at Burning Man are torched at the climax of the festival. But Babington explained that he wouldn’t be permitted to actually burn his creation because it couldn’t be consumed by fire as completely as necessary. It is a Burning Man custom to have as little lasting impact on the site as possible.

The torso of the giant buffalo doubles as an intricately built New Orleans-style frame house on stilts. A photo of the sculpture shows visitors climbing a ladder to enter the surrealistic animal/architecture.

The shaggy sculpture is made of lumber salvaged from Hurricane Ida storm debris, plus odds and ends from old Carnival floats, driftwood, steel trusses for support, and a huge, old-fashioned copper lamp produced by the Bevolo company in the French Quarter, which hangs at the front of the sculpture to light the buffalo’s path.

The Burning Man management loved the design even before it was built. The festival awarded Babington $17,000 to build the behemoth. Babington supplemented that with Kickstarter and GoFundMe campaigns. Still, he laughingly said, the project was over budget.

Apprehensions about Louisiana's future

Babington conceived the artwork as a symbol of climate change and the rising water that threatens New Orleans.

The buffalo part of the sculpture is a touchstone to the ecology of the past. A buffalo may not seem like a symbol of Louisiana, Babington said, but the all-American animals did once wander the state. Now they’re gone. And if the buffalo is a reminder of the past, then the house, raised 14 feet above the ground, is the ghost of Louisiana future.

Despite the perennial threat of tropical torms and floods, Babington said the buffalo house is meant to imply “hope in the face of despair.” It’s as if the buffalo were a pack animal, carrying New Orleans culture to higher ground, he said. The formal title of the piece is “Burden of the Beast.”

As it turned out, the climate change theme of Babington’s sculpture harmonized with the 2023 Burning Man experience better than anybody could have expected … or wanted.

“It accidentally became meta,” Babington said. “It was supposed to be about persevering in the face of a hurricane. That was the hilarious part. We missed any hurricanes in New Orleans (so far) and ran into one in Nevada.”

The artist was referring to the almost unprecedented Tropical Storm Hilary that brought unexpected rain to the Burning Man site, softening up the ordinarily hard surface. A subsequent rain storm turned the fest into a mud bath.

New Orleans artist Brennan Steele has been to Burning Man a dozen times. He and other hometown “burners,” as the Burning Man sculptors are known, created a giant flammable voodoo doll, a King Kong-scale king cake baby, two incendiary alligators, and other burnable sculptures. New Orleanians may know Steele from the modernistic Algiers holiday bonfires he’s designed over the years.

Four years ago, Steele designed a Burning Man art car surmounted by a huge trumpet. The car, titled “The Sazerac,” which usually has Arthur Roger behind the wheel, had a hard time navigating this year’s mud.

“It was that silty, sticky kind of mud, like a riverbank,” Steele said. He and Roger took advantage of a break in the weather to vamoose on Sunday.

Once the buffalo stilt house returns to New Orleans, Babington said, he hopes to find a public spot to display it for the hometown crowd. Maybe someplace like Crescent Park, he said, or somewhere else near water. That seems like the best context.

This story has been updated with new information from Walker Babington.