Big Bambú

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Big Bambú at the Macro Museum

Big Bambú

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Starn Studio

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Cultural ›

While creating one of NYC Transit Authority’s largest permanent public art commissions for its new South Ferry Subway Terminal (inaugurated March 2009), American Artists and identical twins, Doug and Mike Starn (born 1961), devised to take on their most ambitious artwork to date titled Big Bambú. In September 2008, they took over a 4,000 square meters vacant art foundry in Beacon, 90 minutes north of New York City and ordered their new art supplies. 10 weeks later with 2,000 freshly harvested US farmed bamboo poles, each 12 to 15-meter long, and more than 50 kilometers of mountaineering rope, the artists had directed a team of 6 rock climbers at their side, to erect a 15-meter high indoor sculpture that spread over 18 by 25 meters. This chaotic network perfectly stable and amazingly strong, due to its thousands interconnections between poles lashed together, was for the Starns to echo the growth of life of individuals, societies, history, as well as metaphors of the structure of thoughts and the movement of body cells. Big Bambú was [and is] in permanent motion, bridging the realms of architecture, performance and sculpture. Within another 10 weeks, the artists and their team built 2 arches, which became arteries for the climbers to circulate inside the piece, and circulate the poles dismantled from the back of the sculpture to be reattached at its front. Big Bambú was literally crawling forward into the 100-meter studio. During these early explorations, a small community of art luminaries was let in to see these progresses. The New York Times Magazine after publishing a seminal story on the work, commissioned the Starns to create a 12-meter tall bamboo “T” shape for its fifth anniversary cover and a few other magazine published stories. These go the attention of the contemporary art curators of the Metropolitan of Art (New York) who came up in October 2009 to see what the Starns were doing and on the spot commissioned them to create a site-specific installation for the Museum Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Over the next 2 months Doug + Mike developed the ideas for Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t and You Won’t Stop, while meeting with structural engineers, architects, museum and Manhattan’s Building Commissioner and other professionals to guaranty the soundness of their plans for the roof: legal, construction and insurance departments: all gave their permission allowing the artists and the Museum to start assembly atop the museum. Built and dismantled over 10 months, open to the public from late April throughout October 2010, Big Bambú would be seen by more than 650,000 visitors, making the exhibit the 9th most attended in The Museum’s history. The brothers, a team of 12 to 20 climbers, over 8,000 bamboo poles and 110 km of rope restlessly built a monumental sculpture during the 6-month exhibition. Entering the roof one would first feel surrounded by a majestic bamboo forest with NYC’s architecture and Central Park for backdrop. From other points of view on the roof Big Bambú was shaping into a cresting wave that ultimately was 15 meters high, 30 meters long, and 15 meters wide. Here too, the artwork suggested the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism. And extraordinarily, the structure could also be seen from within. Small groups of visitors could navigate within the piece following an intertwined double-ellipse artery system that the Starns devised. Visitors and workers could walk all the way up on top of the 5-storrey-museum building.Doug Starn states: “We need to make it so big in order to make us - all of us - feel small—or at least to awaken us to the fact that individually we’re not so big as we think. Once we’re really aware of our true stature we can feel a part of something much more vast than we could ever have dreamed of before.” Mike Starn added as they planned the foundation and elements of design of their artwork before the construction started: “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. We will be constructing a slice of seascape, like our photographs, a cutaway view of a wave continuously in motion—just as our growth and change remains invariable, it is constant and unchanged.”This first outdoor installment at The Met became a place of work and a place of life. The artists created several rooms and platforms as much for the climbers and the public to explore the intricacy of the structure and experience the organism itself. All becoming in some ways, elements of the artwork and catalysts of its expanding community living the artwork.This year Big Bambú is a collateral event at the Biennale, a Glasstress special project, next door to the Peggy Guggenheim on the Grand Canal. Mike + Doug arrived with 11 of their climbers at the end of April and have been enjoying working in Venice. They and the sculpture path are already reaching up to 40 feet and by the opening, on May 29th, they will have trails leading up to an altana/rooftop lounge at 50 feet or more. They will continue to reach higher through the first 2 weeks of June.Big Bambú is about the continual evolution of living things, in addition to 2,000 fresh poles harvested from a farm in France, the Starn have cut several Fragments out of the Metropolitan Museum installation. From these they are grafting a new Big Bambú and using 1,000 poles from the Met as stem cells; the Venice piece will still be the Metropolitan piece but also a new one. Big Bambú is always growing and changing and becoming something new.

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Big Bambú

Other Projects by Starn Studio

Big Bambú at the Macro Museum

Big Bambú

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team