The Starns - Big Bambú Venice
- 13 years ago
54th Biennale di Venezia
May 29 - June 15, 2011
Giardino delle Vergini in the Arsenale
NY based artists Doug and Mike Starn have been invited to participate with an official collateral event to the Biennale to build a monumental bamboo structure, next to the Peggy Guggenheim collection on the Grand Canal, entitled Big Bambú Venice. The central aspect of the sculpture-in-growth is a 15m tall hollow tower of bamboo, with a trail spiraling up to the top reaching a 6m wide roof top lounge, or Altana (with limited access). The Starns and their crew of rock climbers will continue to lash together bamboo, sustaining the spiral upward until the closing day of the sculpture on June 15th.
As Big Bambú is about the continual evolution of living things, Doug and Mike Starn have cut several of the fragments out of the installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, where the piece has been exhibited to great acclaim in 2010, in addition to 2,000 fresh poles harvested from a farm in France. The Starns: “We are grafting a new Big Bambú and using the 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-- as we all are.”
Set against Canale Grande and its Renaissance backdrop, Big Bambú suggests the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism. The chaotic network, perfectly stable and amazingly strong due to its thousands of interconnected poles lashed together, is for the Starns an echo of the growth of life of individuals, societies, history, as well as metaphors of the structure of thought. Big Bambú is in permanent motion, bridging the realms of architecture, performance and sculpture. Visitors can witness the continuing creation and evolving incarnations of Big Bambú created by the artists and their team of rock climbers over the next weeks.
After Venice, Big Bambú will travel to Vienna and find a new form in Spring 2012 at T-B A21.
May 29 - June 15, 2011
Giardino delle Vergini in the Arsenale
NY based artists Doug and Mike Starn have been invited to participate with an official collateral event to the Biennale to build a monumental bamboo structure, next to the Peggy Guggenheim collection on the Grand Canal, entitled Big Bambú Venice. The central aspect of the sculpture-in-growth is a 15m tall hollow tower of bamboo, with a trail spiraling up to the top reaching a 6m wide roof top lounge, or Altana (with limited access). The Starns and their crew of rock climbers will continue to lash together bamboo, sustaining the spiral upward until the closing day of the sculpture on June 15th.
As Big Bambú is about the continual evolution of living things, Doug and Mike Starn have cut several of the fragments out of the installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, where the piece has been exhibited to great acclaim in 2010, in addition to 2,000 fresh poles harvested from a farm in France. The Starns: “We are grafting a new Big Bambú and using the 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-- as we all are.”
Set against Canale Grande and its Renaissance backdrop, Big Bambú suggests the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism. The chaotic network, perfectly stable and amazingly strong due to its thousands of interconnected poles lashed together, is for the Starns an echo of the growth of life of individuals, societies, history, as well as metaphors of the structure of thought. Big Bambú is in permanent motion, bridging the realms of architecture, performance and sculpture. Visitors can witness the continuing creation and evolving incarnations of Big Bambú created by the artists and their team of rock climbers over the next weeks.
After Venice, Big Bambú will travel to Vienna and find a new form in Spring 2012 at T-B A21.