Opening later this month, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Big Bambú, a monumental bamboo structure by American identical twin artists Mike and Doug Starn (born 1961). The site-specific installation on the museum’s Roof Garden opens to the public on April 27, and will ultimately measure 100 feet long by 50 feet wide by 50 feet high in the form of a cresting wave, bridging the worlds of sculpture, architecture, and performance.
Big Bambú’s construction will incorporate the efforts of the artists and a team of rockclimbers, and visitors are encouraged to witness it as an evolving, organic project throughout the spring, summer and fall. A continually growing, changing sculpture, it will comprise thousands of fresh-cut bamboo poles—a complex network of 5,000 interlocking 30- and 40-foot-long bamboo poles, which will be lashed together with 50 miles of nylon rope.
The initial, roughly 30-foot high by 50-foot-wide by 100-foot-long structure will be completed by opening day on April 27; next, the eastern portion of the sculpture will be built up by the artists and rock climbers to an elevation of some 50 feet; and by summer, the western portion of the sculpture will be elevated by the artists and rock climbers to around 40 feet in height. An internal footpath artery system grows within the structure, facilitating the progress of the organism. The ephemeral state of the work will be documented by the artists in various scale photographs and video.
According to the Museum’s Gary Tinterow, “Although the Starn brothers are best known for their photographs, in fact their abiding interest is in organic systems and structures, as seen in their photographs of trees, leaves, and snow flakes, or here, in Big Bambú. We are intrigued by the possibilities of this ever-evolving structure on our Roof Garden, which, when animated by the team of rock climbers, will become an organic system of its own.”
And artist Mike Starn notes, “It is a temporary structure in a sense, but it is a sculpture—not a static sculpture, it’s an organism that we are just a part of—helping it to move along,” said Mike Starn. “We will be constructing a slice of seascape, like our photographs, a cutaway view of a wave constantly in motion—our growth and change remains invariable, it is constant and unchanged.”
And, he explains, “The reason we had to make it so big is to make all of us feel small—or at least to awaken us to the fact that individually we are not so big. Once we’re aware of our true stature we can feel a part of something much more vast than we could ever have dreamed of before.”
Big Bambú opens to the public April 27. It runs April 27– October 31, 2010 (weather permitting).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Avenue, New York
www.metmuseum.org
