[caption id="attachment_1499" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Paula Cooper, courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York in collaboration with Les pianos Pleyel, Paris."][/caption]
The French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot shows his most recent transformation of the visual world into sound, in an exhibition which feels like a breath of fresh air with its timeless charm.
The sound of a piano echoes in the stairwell as you climb up to the gallery. You enter into a space which, although filled with music – exudes a sense of quiet. It’s the result of the minimal elegance of French artist, Céleste Mougenot-Boursier’s, vision. He describes his art as being a sort of choreography. He wants to guide the viewer into a certain relationship, almost a dance, with the work.
A black piano stands in the center of the room, playing a stream of music. At intervals some distance from the piano are individual, black armchairs. Two opposing walls are carefully hung with small black-on-black silkscreens – a series of works by the artist entitled solidvideo. More of these silkscreens, this time white-on-white, hang in an adjoining room. These works are a new addition to Mougenot-Boursier’s oeuvre. And while they are easier for a collector to buy and place on the wall as a sort of souvenir, they feel more a part of the entire production, more like scenery. It is the installation as a whole that creates the atmosphere of pure and ageless grandeur.
I take the everyday exchange of language and change it into pure poetry.
The drifting music coming from the piano is the product of a program which takes the information typed into the gallery’s computers, normal information like emails, and based upon a code of Boursier-Mougenot’s creation, translates the letters into musical notes. In what he considers his role as composer, he has set up the program to moderate this input and follow specific patterns of crescendo, pianissimo, etc.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, as elegant as his installation, slender and fully clothed in black, explains to me that when he began as a composer, he always felt that writing music was too subjective. He was searching for a more objective way of making music, and he literally wanted to allow physical objects to speak. Known for using sound as an important element in his work and obviously inspired by John Cage as well as aesthetically by Minimalism, Boursier-Mougenot takes the slightest movements or fluctuations in physical objects and amplifies them. In this sound piece, index, he discusses his interest in the relationship between language and music, going back to Gregorian Chant and the development of written music from Latin. Boursier-Mougenot says that in this work “I take the everyday exchange of language and change it into pure poetry.”
Click here: to listen to the exhibition.
Recording by Calpin Hoffman-Williamson
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, March 19 – April 25, 2009
