BBVenice_5.26.11_3851 (2009-11) © Doug and Mike Starn

The 2011 Benefit Patrons’ Weekend on October 15 & 16 features many exciting and exclusive activities including a day trip to Beacon with a director-led tour of Dia:Beacon by Susan Batton and a tour of Doug and Mike Starn‘s laboratory studio at the former Tallix foundry spectacular space! The Starn’s moved to this studio to make the first Big Bambú experiment. This piece is formed by a network of more than 2,000 bamboo poles lashed together and is 40′ across 80 feet long and 50′ high. This installation creates a compelling dialogue with some of their current and early works articulated throughout the working space.

Shown above is a photograph of the Brother’s installation in progress, at the 54th Venice Biennale (May/June 2011). This original artwork is included in our Benefit Live Auction. In Venice, the Starns created a 50′ tall hollow tower of bamboo with a trail within its walls spiraling up to the top. The artists used as stem-cells, some fragments of their installation “Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop,” which grew over 6 months on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer. That exhibition had ranked 4th in the world in 2010 for total attendance of contemporary art exhibitions and was the 9th most attended exhibition in the Museum’s history. Throughout the Met exhibit, the Starns and their crew of rock climbers continuously lashed and sculpted over 7,000 bamboo poles, a performative architecture of randomly interconnected vectors forming a section of a seascape with a 70-foot cresting wave above Central Park. Big Bambú suggests the complexity and energy of an ever-growing and changing living organism.

Doug and Mike Starn are identical twin American artists. First receiving international attention at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, the Starns are primarily known for working conceptually with photography for the past two and a half decades. They are largely concerned with chaos, interconnection and interdependence, time, and physics, and they continue defying categorization, effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as photography, sculpture, architecture and site-specific projects. The Starns were represented by Leo Castelli from 1989 until his death in 1999. Their art has been the object of numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. They have received many honors including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants in 1987 and 1995; The International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography in 1992; and, artists in residency at NASA in the mid-1990′s.

Click here for more information and to buy tickets to our 2011 Benefit & Auction

Click here to view our auction catalog and to bid online

And Should…, 1974 © James Welling

Exhibition on view:
The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984
Tuesday, April 21–Sunday, August 2, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York
(212) 535-7710

Now on view until August is The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984. The exhibition is named after a group of artists working in New York from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, whose work and collective achievement is an important chapter in the history of contemporary art.

Coming from a generation with expanding media and consumer culture, and educated in the era of Minimalism and Conceptualism in art, the artists explore the social and psychological role of the image, and how it shapes our perceptions of ourselves and the world. The Pictures Generation 1974-1984 features the work of 30 artists and includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, video, installation, prints, and books.  Among the featured artists are Aperture-published Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and James Welling.