Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/526269
E ven before attending Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Doug and Mike Starn knew all about the cit y's Cyclorama. Growing up in Absecon, New Jersey, the introverted, science-nerd brothers learned about this cool building, a Victorian-era domed structure that once housed a circular mural, 400 feet in circumference, of the Battle of Gettysburg. Hearing that students at the storied school got to show their work in the building clinched the deal. They enrolled. The Museum School has sent generations of American masters on their paths, including Will Barnet, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly, and Jim Dine. A few years ahead of the Starns was photographer Nan Goldin, the celebrated chronicler of melancholy bohemian squalor. But for the Starn brothers—identical twins born in 1961, who had studied photography together since they were 13 years old—the real lure of the school was the looseness of its cur- riculum. "We already knew what we wanted to do," says Doug. "We just needed a place to incubate the process." Thirty years after their final student show in the Cyclorama, the Starns, acclaimed for their photography and installations, find themselves in a not her spect acula r sett ing. In t he fa ll of 2008, they took over the former Tallix bronze foundry in Beacon, New York, a soaring cathe- dral of an industrial space, which now serves as their studio. Beacon has been a postindustrial dreamland for the visual arts ever since the Dia Arts Foundation turned a former Nabisco box factory into a showcase for minimalist art. The Starns initially used their space for their first experiments with what would become Big Bambú, their signature installation. They con- tracted more than a dozen local rock climbers to a ssemble a nd rea ssemble 2 ,0 0 0 ba mboo poles in a dense, navigable, habitable construc- tion. The piece is in perpetual motion: As soon as it's up, the climbers start reconnecting mate- rials, pole by tethered pole, to the end of the wave form, moving it along the 320-foot nave of the foundry like a giant Slinky. In this way, Big Bambú follows its own inner algorithm, a non- linear logic, and for the Starns, working on it in their studio is no different, really, from artists sketch i ng i n t he st ud io. T he brot hers have described it as "an organism that we are just a part of—we're helping it to move along." The Starns (who are very difficult for newcomers to tell apart) chaperone this visitor from project to project, their gentle, laid-back enthusiasm and self- effacing sense of fun masking their deep artistic integrity. They are handsome in a rock star sort of way—perfect for a John Varvatos campaign. With their intrepid dog, they lead me along waves of bam- boo decking from f loor to f loor of their sprawling, newly renovated premises, visiting workshops for each of their ongoing photo- graphic series. In one huge room, they elaborate on ideas for a major public commission, a mas- sive stained-glass window for the new US Embassy in Moscow. "All the art [in this project] has to someway reference t he t wo count r ies' histor y of space exploration," says Mike. "Back in the '90s, we were artists-in-residence at NASA and worked with images from Hubble. We wanted to com- bine t hat work w it h t he inner cosmos of t he mind, bringing in neuronal imagery." Since 20 0 8, Big Bambú has been inst a lled around the globe, as if the Slinky couldn't be contained by Beacon. In 2010, the Starns hit t he roof of t he Met ropolit a n Museum of A r t in New York Cit y, where the installation had fearless museumgoers feeling as if they were f loat ing over Cent ra l Pa rk. The show's tot a l at tenda nce wa s a mong t he h ighest i n t he Met 's h istor y. T he next yea r, Big Bambú migrated to Venice as part of the 54th Biennale, where it sat a st r ide t he Pegg y Guggen hei m Collection on the Grand Canal, looking more like a natural growth from the sea than a man- made structure. And recently it drew crowds to the Israel Museum, in the Jerusalem Hills, and to a bamboo forest in a reclaimed, formerly polluted island in Japan. At the Museo d'Arte Contempora nea in Rome, Big Bambú is over 140 feet tall. So often art aspires to be phenomenal, daz- zling, transformative—and the Starns take this mission literally. Take dazzle, for instance. The Gravity of Light project, from 2012, was a retro- spective of their photography-based works that Big Bambú is "an organism that we are just a part of—we're helping it to move along." —Doug and Mike Starn bostoncommon-magazine.com 87