NEW YORK - On a recent summerlike morning, men in T-shirts and women in bikini tops were busily working to the loud strains of Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. Some looked like tightrope walkers, delicately balancing on horizontal poles in bare feet; others could be seen shinnying up vertical poles like monkeys, securing intersections with colored nylon ropes; and still others were building teepeelike configurations on the ground.
But this wasn’t a circus tent-raising; it was the scene on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Supervised by artists and built by about a dozen rock climbers, an installation in the form of a labyrinthine jungle of bamboo was rising some eight meters in the air.
The installation, “Big Bambu: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop,” is a startling departure. Where once there were vistas of the city’s skyline and Central Park, there are now thickets and elevated walkways winding through them.
It’s the creation of Doug and Mike Starn, 48-year-old identical-twin artists . And while “Big Bambu” may seem liked a finished installation, it is a perpetual work in progress. Throughout the summer the public will be able to witness its metamorphosis as the rock climbers continually add to the work until it forms a cresting wave covering an area 30.5 by 15 meters and soaring 15 meters above the roof.
Museum officials estimate that some 400,000 people (depending on weather) will see “Big Bambu” before it is dismantled at the end of October. All visitors will be able to stroll the roof’s main level. The paths above, however, will be limited to guided groups of 10 to 15 people, twice an hour.
The idea grew out of the Starns’s project “Sphere of Influence,” which was first shown in Berlin in 1991 and consisted of a rotating globe about 4 meters in diameter made of metal pipe clamps juxtaposed against sheets of transparent photographs. But for “Big Bambu,” pipe was too heavy.
“It didn’t have the right qualities,” Doug Starn said. “This piece is organic. It’s about all the things in your life, including those that aren’t planned.”
They chose bamboo, they said, because it is light yet incredibly strong and can withstand all kinds of weather. And like the work itself, it constantly changes, its colors deepening and fading depending on the light and the weather.
The layout has been carefully planned, but the sight of the bamboo poles lashed together feels chaotic, a sensibility both artists say they embrace. Mike Starn compared the construction itself to “the arteries in your body or in the city subway system,” and added, “We’re also talking about Western civilization, the interconnected dependency we all have on each other but which is changing all the time.”
The project will evolve in three phases: first the basic structure, already completed; then the eastern part will be built to about 15 meters up by the beginning of June; finally the west side will rise to about 12 meters by mid-July.
More than 5,000 poles from a bamboo farm in Georgia and a centuryold plantation in South Carolina have gone into the project along with 80 kilometers of nylon cord in three widths and about 20 colors.
By CAROL VOGEL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LIBRADO ROMERO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
A worker helps install ‘‘Big Bambú’’ on the roof of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. The work will rise to about 15 meters.
