Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop by Mike + Doug Starn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photograph by Patricia Silva.

They're "*working harder than ever; but you call it macking": five thousand thirty and forty foot-long bamboo poles, forty miles of rope. 17,000 pounds of sandbags for the sole purpose of testing tensile strength.  Two brothers and an extensive crew of installation artists, working constantly to cut, construct and extend the cresting wave of bamboo on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They make it look so easy. It all looks like far, far too much fun. "*Oh yes, indeed, it's funtime..."

Big Bambú is a perfect example for conceptual art that is photogenic from just about every angle. Then again, the Starn Twins first emerged on the art scene through the medium of photography: the decisive moment, the sure shot.  Most likely, you didn't need to watch Bravo's "Work of Art" episode six last week, to see just how fickle creative collaborations can be. It's a well-known fact. The more dimensions to consider in real life, the more emotions get involved. So for this reason alone, I'm pleased to witness collaboration in a way that dispells that tattered cliché. I don't know them, perhaps they argue like rabid dogs in their studio!  I'd be surprised, though. It's evident when they give interviews: the ease, that creative connection, the mutual support. It's refreshing. I want to see more we in the era of I Overshare.

"This piece is what it means to be alive.  To be alive is to be constantly growing and changing," they said. "And when we say alive, we don't just necessarily mean being human. A city is alive. A culture. A society." - Mike + Doug Starn, to NPR

Why did they subtitle this work in reference to the chorus of a Beastie Boys song? The reviews haven't mentioned this. A testament to tenacity, perhaps? I suppose it's not THAT important, but music is more than company to art. Music can be like food. When I visited the museum, the Twins were working on-site while a nearby portable radio blasted music. Led Zeppelin, a friend told me.  Like any other construction site in New York City—there was music blaring and the sensation of scaffolding. Only typically, construction sites don't feel like a welcoming forrest. Construction sites never feel like shelter until they are finished; unlike Big Bambú which shelters as it evolves, rising.

I'm drawn to the inherent life-death quality of their quote above, about what the piece means—to be alive. To be alive is to construct and not necessarily with rope or twine. With decisions we construct ideas and support systems. Being alive means creating; interfacing with the constructions of others and the creativity of nature itself. Where ever we look. Art is a magnanimous metaphor for states, conditions, variables. Big Bambú makes a good case for the transformations that collaborative beings can shape. And I believe we are collaborative beings, ego just gets in the way sometimes. 

In collaboration, one must give and bend. Like the unique tensile strength of bamboo, which has been pivotal in the building of bridges. Memory might fail me here, but wasn't bamboo key to the invention of suspension bridges? Bridging—oh, right! Art does that too. But people aren't building connective bridges as much we think we are. We're recoiling into a stoic stance of I am in a time where daily repetition becomes instant online content in itself.  Ours is the Age of Lifecasting, in which the most rebellious thing to do might just be in pursuing the fortitude of we.

Doug + Mike Starn's Big Bambú will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until October 31, 2010, weather permitting, on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.