Building bridges
‘Big Bambú’ installation invites physical interaction and connectivity at MFAH
The bridge made of tightly bundled bamboo poles gave slightly as we stepped onto it to cross a 30-foot “ravine” of terrazzo, feeling a little off-balance but as giddy as kids heading into a Robinson Crusoe-ish adventure.
As we approached the center of “Big Bambú: This Thing Called Life,” the structure began to reveal itself as more than a tangle of about 3,000 bamboo poles gone haywire at the tips. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s summer experience is like an elaborate treehouse that might exist somehow within a giant, roiling ocean wave.
By the time the public begins to explore it on Sunday, the poles will all be securely tied. Visitors will sign waivers and follow a few rules; in the vein of amusement-park rides for big kids, they must be least 42 inches tall to enter.
“This Thing Called Life” is the latest work in a series of “Big Bambú” projects by internationally known artists Mike and Doug Starn that are constructed with the help of 12 rock climbers, half of whom are local. Each version responds to its particular environment. The
Houston version, the first one designed indoors since the initial prototype 10 years ago, imagines a wave cresting through the modernist interior of Mies van der Rohe’s Cullinan Hall.
Museum visitors have been watching “Big Bambú” form since early May, from the ground up, as the climbers lashed poles vertically then horizontally, repeating the pattern intuitively. They begin from a floor plan that suggests the direction it should take, but the Starns give them great latitude; it’s purposefully collaborative and spontaneous. Detail work will continue on the piece for another week or so, even though it is open.
On Wednesday, because the path wasn’t yet finished, we had to watch where we stepped and what we grabbed as we walked through. Above us, some of the crew dangled in harnesses like so many Spider-Men, their movements as improvised as the heady jazz playing through the gallery’s sound system.
More tactile than recent immersive spectacles such as Pipilotti Rist’s “Pixel Forest” and Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms, “Big Bambú” also invites more physical interaction than the first installation of the museum’s 5-yearold summer series, Jesús Rafael Soto’s “Permeable.”
It’s not exactly a jungle gym: Visitors enter from the Brown Pavilion balcony to traverse that bridge, following a path that winds around the installation’s vortexlike center. After they descend bamboo-covered steps, they can linger underneath, along the forest floor, so to speak.
The point is not just to feel wild for a few minutes, although one might think that upon first encountering the artists, who are in their late 50s. The Starns have the aura of veteran rock dudes, the kind of guys who party late and don’t brush their long gray hair the next morning. And music is an important part of the “Big Bambú” building culture.
The subtitles for the projects usually reference lyrics, and music plays constantly during the construction to help create the right vibe. “This Thing Called Life” refers to a line of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” but the words “have so many more meanings,” suggested curator Alison de Lima Greene.
All the “Big Bambú” installations spring from the Starn brothers’ philosophy that nothing in the world is monolithic.
“Nothing exists without its interdependence and connections with everything else,” Doug Starn explained. “This is how a person grows, becomes who they are. How a family grows. How culture has grown for tens of thousands of years. Sometimes it’s an obstacle, sometimes it’s a step. These are things we all maneuver through, all the time, every day.”
Mike Starn may have said some of that. The artists, who are identical twins, add to but don’t exactly finish each others’ sentences because their thoughts, like their art, are a continuum.
They came to appreciate the intersecting forces of nature as surfers, growing up near the Jersey shore in Absecon, N.J. Encouraged by their parents to explore art, they took up photography together at 13. They weren’t conventional thinkers: During visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, they liked the conceptual works of Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
They went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on a shared portfolio, and they became an art-world sensation almost overnight after they graduated, when a critic raved over their first New York show. That body of work pushed photography into a physical realm with taped-together grids of prints that were torn, torqued and distressed.
The Starn twins’ imagery captured magical organic networks — the multitude of veins in decaying leaves, the branchy landscapes of dense tree canopies, the designs of snowflakes. But their art was always sculptural, too, about combining pieces to make something larger, never simply a big print produced by a lab but handmade, piece by piece, in their studio and cobbled together with Scotch tape.
“In the early days, that was about perception,” they said. “The world is not what you see; it’s a construction within our heads based on our emotions, our history, our knowledge, our sense of smell or touch — all these things coming together.”
Eventually they embraced video, painting, furniture design and architecture as well as sculpture. They conceived the “Big Bambú” project as a break from their first big public art commission for a New York subway station — a project that took two years and involved hundreds of people, including glass makers in Munich. They needed to do something that felt more freespirited.
At that point, the interdependence idea was just a personal philosophy, their approach to life. When the brothers realized they could demonstrate it physically, they also sensed they’d need to build something enormous to support people who might travel through it. (“This Thing Called Life” is sturdy enough to hold a car aloft, they said.)
They had previously made a giant sphere, a kind of exoskeleton of black pipe, and also considered vinyl materials. “We knew we were looking for these vector shapes that could be randomly placed and attached to five or 10 other randomly placed poles, to create a stable structure,” Mike Starn said.
They chose to use bamboo because it was organic and flexible, and because they once got lost in a bamboo forest in Kyoto, Japan, and the experience stuck with them. They source the bamboo in three sizes from a farm in Dudley, Ga. They are limited to 52-foot lengths because that’s the size of the delivery trucks.
Gary Tinterow, who was a curator at the time, saw the “Big Bambú” prototype in the artists’ Beacon, N.Y., studio and commissioned the brothers to create the first public version for the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. More than 600,000 people visited, and the piece evolved the entire time, gradually un-built as the show dates wound down. The artists insisted they had to be able to “live” in the piece, which had large viewing platforms that offered views of the city.
“For us, the biggest challenges were procedural, legal and internal — how to safely admit people into the piece and cover a fairly aggressive legal environment in NYC,” said Tinterow, who became director of the MFAH six years ago. “It also set a great precedent for other great and challenging installations on the roof. Our team got accustomed to something that was out of the ordinary.”
Since then, the Starn brothers have taken “Big Bambú” teams to the Venice Biennale; Rome (where their tower peaked at 140 feet); Naoshima, Japan; Jerusalem; and, concurrent with the Houston project, Copenhagen. They no longer feel the need to be there for the duration.
Tinterow said he envisioned a four-story “Big Bambú” for the opening of the Glassell School of Art a few weeks ago, but given the security and weather issues, instead led the artists into the air-conditioned museum. They were skeptical but understood once they saw Cullinan Hall.
Three huge photo grids hang on the walls around the installation like curtains hanging askew, further emphasizing the concepts about chance and chaos.
Along with the integration of the rock climbers and the response to architecture, Greene said, “it also comes out of the fact that they are twins. They’ve debated everything and worked together since they were born. They’re hard-wired for this kind of collaborative matrix.”
“Big Bambú” projects are in great demand, but the Starn brothers have yet to become bored with their signature process. They’re negotiating even more audacious versions, they said.
“It’s endless. There’s so many things we would love to take on. It’s an incredible challenge wherever we do it … hardly something we feel content with. It’s always a crazy thing. Working here inside was a wonderful switch for us. And creating this wave.”
The labor of building isn’t as easy for them as it was a decade ago, but they don harnesses and hang alongside the rock climbers. Their thoughts about the meaning of it all — the process as well as the finished installations — haven’t changed.
“This is the invisible architecture of life, this random interdependence,” they said. “It’s not chaos in the perjorative sense. It’s chaos in the sense that things have their own trajectories and intersect to create structure.”