Studio Visit:
Doug & Mike Starn
Beacon, New York
– Climbing in the work of art? – Naturally.
The doors open on a dilapidated workshop in a desolate part of Beacon, a city in New York State. It takes a few seconds to get used to the darkness. Then I catch sight of it. At first I think that I am standing next to the skeleton of some monstrous space ant. The scale is huge. The room is 100 metres by 20 metres with a ceiling height of 15 metres, I discover later. The giant ant takes up all the available space.
My eyes get used to the dim light. What I am seeing are bamboo canes. Together they loom like a giant Mikado or a pile of pick-up sticks. The bamboo canes crisscross each other in a never-ending, random spider’s web. We are silent, walking about on tiptoes, not wishing to disturb things. Concrete, damp, the raw industrial floor. And then this bamboo creation, lithe as a jaguar and as majestic as a sphinx. It forces one’s gaze upwards as though it is practising some sort of religious power over us. There is a sound of gentle mumbling, perhaps a reflection of nervousness, or of reverence. Someone dares to approach the bamboo; and somebody pulls out a mobile phone. We are encouraged to start climbing.
‘Climbing in the work of art?’
‘Naturally.’
There is a bridge leading up from the floor in a gentle serpentine. I weigh each step on my way up. The bamboo is smooth and tractable. Something about the work causes me to stop all the time, to look around me and reconnoitre. The lengths of bamboo are inter- woven using firm knots. Underlying the construction is months of work by 10–15 rock-climbers that the Starn brothers contracted. The knots tie together the 2 500 canes of bamboo in a secure grasp. Yellow, red, blue.
The serpentine path ends in the middle of the construction. We climb up inside finding our own way. The jungle is dense, at the same time that it is wide open. Some of the bamboo canes stick out a long way while others remain completely inside the construction. Some of the canes are at an angle and some are straight; some point straight upwards like an insolent finger, while others humbly crouch. The perspective changes with every centimetre that I climb. There is a feeling of being inside a structure in the midst of something chaotic.
Some of the canes seem anarchistic while others do their job calmly and dependably. I imagine that this is rather like being in the Starn brothers’ heads. For decades the twins have been working with themes like chaos, interconnection and interdependence, in a succession of constructions and reconstructions. The bamboo canes that we climb up among represents the first of a series of artworks.
“They stick up like straws of grass that mess with the concrete skyscrapers beyond Central Park.”
Big Bambú was constructed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and consisted of more than 7 000 bamboo canes. They stick up like straws of grass that mess with the concrete skyscrapers beyond Central Park. After that the work made a guest appearance at the Venice Biennale and turned up again at the MACRO Museum in Rome. The trip continued to the island of Teshima in Japan. A path through a bamboo forest leads to a track that ultimately leads out of the forest. There, 18 metres above sea level, a bamboo boat hovers on a straggly journey over the forest. On the horizon one can get a glimpse of the Seto inland sea as well as a neighbouring island. The next stop is the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Text: Claes Kjellström
Photo: Patrik Sehlstedt
Idea & Production: Le Bureau
© Wetterling Gallery
About It’s mine
It is in the meeting of minds that art becomes important. These narratives are about initial meetings. About desire, passion, acquisitiveness. About the relationship between works of art and their owners.
It’s mine is a book that features encounters with 33 art collectors and artists who have opened their homes and their heart for us.
To get a copy of the book, contact info@wetterlinggallery.com.
