This past weekend, my friend and I were fortunate enough to acquire tickets to experience the Big Bambú, Doug and Mike Starn’s immense installation constructed from Georgian and South Carolinian bamboo poles and nylon twine sited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden.
At the start of the tour, I couldn’t help feeling a bit tentative: the pathways of bamboo give ever so slightly underfoot. It didn’t take long, though, to redirect my focus on the vista and the amazing experience of being within this vast network of large ‘pixie sticks’ (one cannot help feeling like a child in an unusual tree house). The structure includes a sitting area (referred to as “the lounge”, about 30 feet above the rooftop garden floor) complete with bamboo cup holders, a bamboo makeshift guitar, and shade canopies. More recently, a bamboo love seat was added that seemed to balance precariously on the less developed part of the installation – this was not open to the tour and only accessible to the artists and their New Paltz based team of rock-climbing assistants. While we were in the lounge, the unexpected happened when the famous red-tailed-upper-East-Side hawk, Pale Male, came to perch on one of the outer poles. He proudly surveyed Central Park as if he, indeed, owned it (if I were Pale, I would say this was one fabulous nest).
The Big Bambú project started in early spring and is still in progress, although it is nearing its growth stage at the end of October. The long dismantling of the project in November and December is meant to be included in its representation of the process of life: a living, growing presence with no predetermined direction and then its slow unwinding.
To learn more about Big Bambú, the Starn twins, how to get tickets, and how to prepare yourself for the tour (sneakers only and no acrophobia issues, for instance), visit the Museum site.
