Just as the Winter issue of Tricycle goes up on newsstands, the new cover’s artwork is coming down. The meditator seen on the cover was photographed by Michael Dominic sitting atop Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t and You Won’t Stop, Mike and Doug Starns’s enormous bamboo installation on the roof of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was open to the public from late April until October 31st. During its 6-month showing Big Bambú—which attracted over 600,000 visitors and hosted 6 marriage proposals—went through constant change as the artists and a team of rockclimbers added bamboo poles to the structure each day. In the end the installation was comprised of 6,700 poles and over 70 miles of colorful cord. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a story on the exhibit, the Starn brothers, their relationship to the MET, and the daunting task of taking the structure down piece by piece:
It was all worth it, though, according to many who waited hours for tickets or returned repeatedly because they wanted to see how “Big Bambú” kept changing. “It’s exciting for people to become part of an installation like this,” said Ryan Wong, one of the tour guides. “People are just exhilarated to be up there. You can see it in their faces. They say, ‘This is like being Robinson Crusoe or being on a wooden roller coaster.’ ”
A melancholy hangs over the piece’s dismantling, which is expected to take two months. The Starns will cut out whole sections to keep as relics and are planning to gather the thousands of photographs they took of the piece into a pile, which will become an exhibition of its own. “It’s a lot of ambivalent feelings, conflicted feelings,” Doug said. “There is also an excitement taking it apart. I’m not quite sure why.”
If you didn’t get a chance to see the exhibit yourself, watch this New York Times video to get a sense of the incredible installation.
Learn more about Big Bambú here and check out the Winter issue of Tricycle for more photographs of Big Bambú.
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