Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Born in 1961 in Nice (FR)
Lives and works in Sète (FR)

Sans titre, série IV-1,2 & 3

2000
Sound installation, pools, pumps, immersions heaters, porcelain tableware objects, stemmed glasses, water, chairs
Dimensions variables
Year of Purchase: 1999

Presented over the last ten years exclusively at contemporary art venues, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works are to be seen primarily as those of a musician. After being, from 1985 to 1994, the composer of the Side One Posthume Théâtre company of writer and director Pascal Rambert, he undertook to give autonomous form to his music by producing installations. Using a broad range of materials, situations and items, from which he contrives to extract the musical potential, he arranges devices that extend the notion of the score to the heterodox configurations of the materials and media he uses, to generate, usually live, sound forms that he describes as living. Each device, deployed in relation to the architectural and environmental givens of the exhibition space, serves as a suitable setting for a listening experience as it delivers up the process whereby the music is produced for the visitor to understand with his eyes.

‘Floating about in an inflatable swimming pool half filled with water are about forty pieces of ordinary crockery; various bowls, salad bowls of all sizes, miscellaneous porcelain or china dishes and stemmed glasses. An underwater pump produces a slight diametrical current in which these items swirl around and gently collide with each other, producing chiming sounds as they do so. To make the objects resonate better, the water is kept at a temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius by a set of heater resistances. Several series of pools working on this same principle have been produced since 1997. Each pool can be presented on its own or as an installation as one of several pools. The different pools in any one series are made up of the same type and number of technical components (inflatable swimming pool, pump, water-heater system) and also a collection of dishware that might look the same, but in fact each item has been chosen for its unique sound quality and the pitch of the note it produces when sounded. These sounds are appreciably different from one bowl to another of the same design.’

^{Céleste Boursier-Mougenot}