Primordial Fish

What is 57 feet long, 18 feet wide, 14.5 feet tall, weighs 6,000 pounds, can be found in the Nevada desert, and has a life span of one week? That would be Primordial Fish, a monumental steel sculpture created by Austin artist Bob Bacon for this year's Burning Man. Bacon, who runs the sculpture company Tatu Metal Art, is one of the teeming masses making the pilgrimage this week to the Black Rock Desert north of Reno – some 47,000 decamped there last August – for what the BurningMan.com FAQ calls an "annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance." And traveling with Bacon is the recently completed representation of an ichthyosaur that he conceived at the 2007 Burning Man and spent the past 12 months building. Like everything else at Burning Man, Primordial Fish will be trucked in, assembled, and displayed just a week before it's taken apart and hauled away. To learn about some of the other wonders to be installed on the playa at Burning Man 2008, visit www.burningman.com/installations/08_art_playa.html.