The Mets Rooftop Jungle Gym

In the spring of 2008, Doug and Mike Starn began building a wide, arch-shaped structure of lashed-together bamboo poles in a giant disused factory building in Beacon, N.Y. (It remains a work in progress.) At the end of last month, 3,200 similar poles and 30 miles of nylon rope were delivered to the Metropolitan Museum, and the Starns, along with a crew of rock climbers, began constructing a new iteration of Big Bambú. It’s quite a departure from their well-known layered photo works of leaves, trees and other organic material. But last year they completed an ambitious installation in the South Ferry subway station in New York City, so the brothers are not entirely unfamiliar with designing large-scale public artworks.

By the time the rooftop space opens on Apr. 27, the team will have completed a 30-by-50-by-100-foot bamboo scaffold; over the course of the exhibition’s six-month run, the rock climbers will continually fill in this shell so that it forms a dense, undulating wave of interlocking bamboo poles rising 50 feet in the air. Museumgoers will be able to walk around, beneath and even on Big Bambú: adventurous visitors can buy advance tickets on the Met’s website (some will also be available same-day) to ascend the sculpture and experience it from an inside perch

The Conditions of Being Medium

In the years since his formal photography training at Chicago's Columbia College, Rashid Johnson's practice has increasingly subverted the dominant powers in diverse media by approaching them with the sub-cultural histories of black Americana. Currently on view in New York, there's his film The Sweet Sweet Runner (2010) (as part of his solo show, Our Kind of People) at Salon 94, inspired by the ur-blaxploitation work of Melvin Van Peebles. To Nicole Klagsbrun's group exhibition (LEAN), Johnson contributes Pink Lotion Box (2003)—a sculptural work made of Luster's pink hair lotion and Plexiglas, and a comment on the multi-million dollar black hair care industry.

RASHID JOHNSON, SWEET SWEET RUNNER INSTALLATION, 2010, FROM THE EXHIBITION OUR KIND OF PEOPLE. COURTESY SALON94.

"I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way," Johnson said, in an interview last week at his cluttered Bushwick, Brooklyn studio. The point at which Johnson "hijacks Krauss's language," as he said in a follow-up phone conversation, is where he looks at his work outside the classic definition of medium—that is, based on the limits of its materiality. For Johnson, another medium (a "consciousness") is created by his blending of sculpture, painting and photography. "The marriages [of those things] become the new mediums, not the separation of them."

Johnson frequently refers to the relationships between his different works: connections based on their proximity in a show, use of similar materials, or more basic principles.

"The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share," Johnson said. "The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography." His shelving-unit sculptures made of black tile or covered in black soap and black wax depend on subtle illumination. Imagine a sculpture made of dark materials or a black-and-white photograph in a darkened room. "Light brings to life the gesture in the more articulate moments of [a] piece," Johnson said.





RASHID JOHNSON, PINK LOTION BOX, 2004-2010. COURTESY NICOLE KLAGSBRUN GALLERY.



Though film is a relatively new medium for Johnson, the ideas behind The Sweet Sweet Runner, are couched in the dominant themes of his work.

"I've always been interested in this idea of a privileged life, probably because it's something I hadn't seen much of," he says. The Sweet Sweet Runner was inspired by Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 chase flick Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Johnson's film follows the protagonist as he exits his tony Manhattan apartment and goes for a jog; it's a riff on Van Peebles' Sweetback character running from the police at the end of that film. With Johnson's runner, "[It's] this idea that he's just kind of jogging for his health, running for his own health and then at the same time kind of running for his life."

Meditations on survival and maintenance cut through Johnson's work. Our Kind of People takes its title from Lawrence Otis Graham's 1998 book about an American black upper class. Another of Johnson's bodies of work over the last few years includes large-format photographs shot in black-and-white. His sitters mimic the poses of James Van Der Zee's Harlem Renaissance portraits. "I was playing with that idea and I was kind of thinking more and more about this idea of the black secret society," Johnson saud.

Johnson's untitled project concerns the Boulé, a secret society of black professionals, and its associated fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi. The Boulé was founded in the early 20^th Century by Henry McKee Minton, as a reaction, some say, to Marcus Garvey's black nationalist ideology and its "back to Africa" cry. Its known members included academics like W.E.B. Du Bois; rumored members range from Thurgood Marshall to Bill Cosby.

For his installation at Art Basel in June, Johnson's free-standing, shelf-like sculptures will be arranged in close proximity to each other, not unlike a shrine. The small tile-based sculpture is in the front, and behind it (and just off to the side) is a larger steel sculpture, and behind that a black-soap and black-wax work. The photograph, situated on a wall adjacent to the set of sculptures, depicts a model in the same pose as a well-known portrait of Boulé founder Minton.

While he said he consulted his great-uncle, who is a member, Johnson said the ability to navigate between "the real and then the produced" was what most appealed to him about creating the project. "It was an opportunity to play both with real ideas and to project my own fictional kind of characters into a story," he said. "It's an opportunity more than anything else to inject myself into history without anyone fully knowing how clear my actual intervention into that kind of historical language is."

"It's really an interesting dance," said Johnson, regarding figuring out Boulé membership. "I get to be the person who makes the final decision as to whether this person was a member or not of this secret society." Johnson here takes on the artist's responsibility to historical accuracy and cultural authority. And while the artist selects characters for the narrative of his project, ultimately the viewer is the one who determines the interpretation of the piece.

A Life in Smoke and Thread

The looms are packed up and five weavers have returned home to China after a 3½-month stint at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia as part of “Fallen Blossoms,” Cai Guo-Qiang’s two-venue exhibition at FWM and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Invited in 2005 by the late PMA director, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud, founder and director of FWM, to do a joint project at their institutions, Cai was waylaid by his fireworks project for the 2008 Beijing Olympics; d’Harnoncourt died unexpectedly that year. Regretful at never having worked with the highly regarded director, Cai was also struck by the sense of loss he perceived in Philadelphia, and more particularly by that of Stroud, who had been friends with d’Harnoncourt for more than 40 years. In response, he conceived a project on the transitory nature of life in general, and the course of the two women’s friendship in particular. On Dec. 11, 2009, at sunset, he ignited a huge flower-shaped fireworks display mounted on the PMA’s facade. The bloom spectacularly exploded, then smoked and smoldered in glowing embers shaped like petals before turning to ash and crumbling to the ground.

Two major new pieces were installed at FWM. Cai had asked Stroud to record memories of her friend, which became the basis of both works. Stroud’s spoken narrative was softly broadcast from speakers on two floors. Building a long steel trough, and nesting within it a 120-foot-long scroll of white silk with stencils and gunpowder, Cai ignited the piece in front of a select audience the same evening as the fireworks. The drawings in Time Scroll burned from right to left, the direction of the narrative, leaving behind singed scenes. During the exhibition, water flowed through the trough, with the expectation that the images would be washed away by the end, a metaphor for the erasures of time.

Cai’s second piece, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle, was more uncharacteristic. He arranged for five weavers to come to Philadelphia from the Xiangxi region of Hunan. They set up their looms in a row and worked at a steady pace to create some 20 tapestries. The artisans themselves designed the textiles, drawing on Stroud’s stories, photos of Philadelphia landmarks and their own imaginations, which made for some fanciful juxtapositions and inventions.

Oddly, Cai installed the project so that visitors entering at one end could see only the backs of the tapestries draped over a series of racks extending from the walls. “The backs of the tapestries have a stronger artistic sense,” he told A.i.A. in an e-mail, “and leave more room for imagination,” adding, “visitors see the hundreds and thousands of threads that make up a tapestry, which is more fascinating.”

In order to see the fronts, one had to walk past the weavers at work and double back through a narrow space between the looms and the racks, peering askance at the series of colorful scenes filled with descriptive detail: a trip made by d’Harnoncourt and Stroud to Egypt, complete with pyramids and the Great Sphinx; d’Harnoncourt looking over a city skyline with a glass of red wine at hand, or talking to reporters before a bank of microphones.

It is unclear what will happen to the finished tapestries. Stroud has expressed her hope that some of the panels will wind up at her institution, which owns examples and archives of many of the projects completed in residency. (Contractually, the Time Flies tapestries belong to Cai.) One can only hope that the tapestries will be shown again somewhere in their totality so that this moving tribute to a life and a friendship can be seen by a wider audience.