Giant Bamboo Artwork Rises Atop Met Museum

NEW YORK (April 27) -- For the past two months, an elaborate bamboo structure has been rising toward the sky from the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The huge piece of art, called "Big Bambu: You Can't, You Won't, and You Don't Stop," is the creation of Doug and Mike Starn, 48-year-old fraternal twins who have been collaborating since they were teenagers.

The installation, which officially opens today, is a work in progress, and by the time it is over in October, the artists will have used 5,000 bamboo poles and 50 miles of climbing rope to create Big Bambu.

At first glance, the piece has the look of a giant game of pickup sticks, a messy chaos of bamboo overlooking the pristine grounds of Central Park. But on closer inspection, it's clear that the work was carefully planned as an architectural piece like the buildings in the Manhattan skyline beyond.

In fact, Big Bambu combines architecture, sculpture and performance art. It won't ever reach a "completed" state but instead will be continually built and modified by the artists and a team of rock climbers, who were recruited to fasten the poles together by perching, climbing and hanging in the structure for 10 hours a day.

"The piece is a microcosm of life itself," Mike Starn told reporters. It will constantly grow and change throughout the next six months around a series of pathways that the artists see as arteries. Visitors will be able to walk around the work on these paths, which the artists and climbers use to carry bamboo from one side to the other.

"It's just really unbelievable to us that the museum had the balls to do something so crazy," Doug Starn said.

The Starns' work has traditionally been about intersections and interconnectedness. In a way, the brothers are a walking embodiment of these ideas: their near-identical appearances -- shaggy, graying hair and loose bluejeans -- and quiet, laid-back demeanors overlap. They naturally finish each other's thoughts, often passing a sentence back and forth two or three times before completing it.

"That's been our work since the beginning, since the '80s. It's always been about...," Mike began.

"How nothing stays the same, everything's always changing, growing...," Doug cut in.

"And everything's interconnected and interdependent. The only thing that's consistent is change itself," Mike concluded.

Big Bambu continues this tradition and adds the elements of time and life to mirror how an organism develops and changes. As it is built and rebuilt over the next six months, the work will rise up to resemble a wave in shape and motion.

"The energy of a wave is constant and it's continuous, yet it's always new and becoming something," Mike said. "And so that's what we see the world as. We see every individual in society, and culture -- it's all continuous and has an energy flow." Hence the secondary name of the work, "You Can't, You Won't, and You Don't Stop," an homage to one of the artists' favorite bands, the Beastie Boys.

At its crest, the Big Bambu wave will be 50 feet high, 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, intentionally massive to take viewers on a journey of "thinking you're big, to realizing you're small, to realizing you're part of something bigger," Doug explained.

From the ground looking up, the work seems like a dense thicket. Only the bright red, orange and blue nylon climbing ropes at the intersections of the poles reveal that it's actually man-made.

The project grew out of a similar piece the brothers did in the early 1990s using black pipes and clamps. The earlier material would have been too heavy and dangerous for a sculpture that would be constantly changing and moving.

The light and flexible bamboo is easy to work with and lends life to the piece. Even the way bamboo grows -- as a grass, not a tree, it matures quickly and continues to grow once it's been cut -- reflects the artists' philosophy.

"We really had to find a material that really would be about life and then have the structural abilities that were required as well, and bamboo just came to mind," Mike said.

Apart from the intentions of the artists and the staid museum setting where it is located, Big Bambu is like an adult's dream tree fort in the sky.

"It was a very dry, conceptual piece about everything we've been talking about," Doug said in an interview with the museum. "But climbing in it, we feel like kids again."