Kitchenware bowls from retail outlets like Maison de la Porcelaine, Asa and Ikea are the active ingredients of an exemplary sound installation through Aug. 2 at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan.
Despite the economy of his tools, the sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has produced a powerful simulation of inevitability, of happenstance and helplessness, that defies the feel-good pretensions of most installation art today. The work, called “Clinamen,” was first seen in Paris last summer, and it was designed to challenge the role of traditional composers in our enjoyment of sound. It succeeds, and rewards you in proportion to the time you spend listening and looking.
Three circular pools 40 feet in diameter set inside the Drill Hall are rigged with circulation jets like the kind that keep the water fresh in swimming pools. These pools contain 10,000 gallons of water apiece.
Boursier-Mougenot (pronounced with a soft g) has floated 250 glazed ceramic bowls into each, mixing three sizes you could call cereal, fruit and jumbo buffet, all about the same hemispherical shape and putty-white color. And as the jets coax the bowls across the surface of the water, they gently knock rims.
Their dings, clinks and kalimba tinkles greet you at entry. They aren’t unbeautiful. But they are not strong or even particularly striking. And their modesty is enhanced by the fact that the pools only come into view gradually, as you approach them from the entrance, since they have been recessed into an elevated plywood deck. Once you mount that deck, you can then examine, up close, the herd behavior of these struggling, eddying vessels.
That is Step 1. Step 2 is a long sit, if you ask me. There is seating, but the sweet spot is the floor in the middle of the three pools. By increments your ears adjust to the undertone beneath all the percussion. It is a warm decay, like a collective gong, amassed by the regular warbles, marimba thonks and bongs of the larger, more resonant bowls.
In due course tritones, chords and conversations — doorbells, ringtones, Handel, “Funkytown” — emerge. Or they seem to. The ear always wants patterns. But these notes are random and dissonant. (There are 20 varieties of bowls here.) They make a music nearer the Indonesian gamelan, except that even listeners from microtonal musical cultures like Indonesia’s are here deprived of the governing logic of a human musician.
Here, only the system knows itself In life, discoveries like that can make you uneasy. Or resigned to a degree resembling freedom. Or both. And this seems to be the kind of surrender that Boursier-Mougenot aims for in his listeners.
In a video, Boursier-Mougenot explains — using the French for “arranger” or “orderer” — that his intention with the work was “to replace the traditional activity of the composer, to transform him, me, from the ordonnateur of the events to the listener.”
Now 65, he began as a composer for the Side One Posthume Théâtre company in Paris, from 1985 to 1994, under the French stage director and choreographer Pascal Rambert. He then moved into art, with acoustic installations that are installed, primarily in Europe, both for their value as sculptures and as musical systems. He calls his sculptures compositions too, though they are compositions only in the authorless sense of John Cage.
His best-known work may be “From Here to Ear,” which debuted at MoMA PS 1 in 1999, where electric guitars were installed fretboards-up so that a room full of zebra finches could alight and activate the strings. That work debuted at the MoMA PS1 in New York, in 1999. It has run in different cities since and been released as an album. In another work, shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery, vacuum cleaners play harmonicas.
“Clinamen” is his most convincing in its illusion of authorlessness. (Even finches have will.) It started less grandly, 30 years ago, with an inflatable kiddie pool and thrift-store china. Boursier-Mougenot, who was born in Nice and still lives in Southern France, kept the tub at home, where he ran it all hours and topped up the water. In 1999, too, Paula Cooper exhibited it in her Manhattan gallery as three kiddie pools.
What began as a curio about sonics and authorship, a toy basically, has grown up into an increasingly picturesque work of biennale proportions, bigger and more hardscaped as he has recreated it in Brazil, Australia, South Korea, Iceland.
In Paris last year “Clinamen” was only one pool. It occupied the sunny ground floor of the historic Bourse de Commerce and seemed like a social affair. Everyone had their phone out down below, and in the balcony, many sat quietly chatting.
Not here. The Drill Hall is dark as night, alien, silence-commanding, and it illuminates the wooden deck, and visitors, with a stretched muslin chandelier of the same 40-foot circle as the pools. That echo of proportions recalls a sun and its planets, or Richard Serra’s threatening steel sandwich, “Delineator.”
Deaf and hard-hearing patrons will have a cinematic but incomplete visit. During open hours the piece runs constantly and without specific show times.
As for the title, which Boursier-Mougenot borrowed from the Roman philosopher Lucretius, the Latin word “clinamen” means the swerve that an atom makes as it travels through time — the idea being that if all matter followed a predetermined path we would have no variation or free will. Indeed the bowls seem to hesitate and make choices in their little journeys.
But a different ancient came to my mind. Pythagoras believed that, since the planets and stars were just as material as Earth, their orbits must also produce their own sound, their own music, inaudible though it may be to our ears.
The tide pools in “Clinamen” follow orbits, too, because their jets flow down the middle of each circle, and this divides all the bowls into two cordate paths that mirror each other quite beautifully. This was more easily visible in Paris. (And the easternmost pool at the Armory seems a little slow.)
What later thinkers saw as a metaphor for our fallen state — Milton described “the heavenly tune, which none can hear / Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear” — Boursier-Mougenot has turned into a demonstration of the fact that the world operates without our consent or understanding.
There may be a technological comment here. That word he used for the role of the composer, the “ordonnateur,” shares a root with “ordinateur,” the more recent French coinage for “computer.” Generative systems of which humans become more observer than participant are what ultimately aligns Boursier-Mougenot with forebears like Brian Eno and Rebecca Horn, and also what make his tide pools a little unsettling.
Those artists created automated sonic and mechanical installations that explored the limits of our patience and challenged us to undo some of the assumptions, even the hubris, that tend to smuggle their way into our sensory expectations.
This seems like the goal of this searching and resourceful Frenchman who through more meditative means has brought back that challenge.
Clinamen
Through Aug. 2 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; 212-616-3930, armoryonpark.org. The installation opens at noon Tuesday through Sunday. Tuesday to Thursday: 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday: 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday to Sunday: 12 p.m.-7 p.m.
