Doug + Mike Starn installing Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston announced this week that this year’s large-scale summer installation in its Caroline Wiess Law Building will be Mike and Doug Starn’s project Big Bambú. Set to open on June 10, 2018, the installation has been displayed at multiple museums and institutions across the world: it was first shown in 2010 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden, then in 2011 at the Venice Biennale, and subsequently it has traveled to Rome, Japan, Jerusalem, and Copenhagen. Because the piece is an installation, it has changed in each iteration, taking cues from its site.
This iteration of Big Bambú will be titled This Thing Called Life, marking the first time the piece is displayed as an indoor installation. Visitors will be able to walk into the installation, which is created using nearly 3,000 bamboo poles, via a bridge also made of bamboo. If you visit the MFAH now, you can see the large-scale installation in progress, as the artists’ team has been working on site since May 1st. See a livestream of the installation below.
Mike and Doug Starn spoke about their concept behind Big Bambú:
“In the ocean, you’re surrounded by a medium so heavy and forceful, it can overpower and sink you—or all that power, the power that is old as forever, can pick you up and take you for a ride! Big Bambú is a demonstration of the invisible architecture that exists in the world. Every culture has been built with random interdependence. We maneuver through everyone else’s world, we gain footholds on circumstances out there, and we surf the invisible structure of life.”
Previous iterations of the MFAH’s summer summer shows of immersive installations have included works by Pipilotti Rist, Yayoi Kusama, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Philip Worthington.
