Artist of the week 78: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (original) (raw)

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot can find musical potential in just about anything. In the past two decades, the Paris-based artist's sonic adventures have included getting vacuum cleaners to play harmonicas, by attaching them to the nozzles. Floating crockery has doubled as percussion instruments. Little birds have rocked out with guitars. Street life, trees blowing in the wind and even the feedback from his recording equipment have all been translated into sound art.

Boursier-Mougenot originally trained not as an artist but as a musician, at the Conservatory for Music in Nice. His time as composer for the avant-garde Pascal Rambert theatre company, from 1985 to 1994, pushed his work into more experimental realms. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to stage sound installations in art galleries, venues where his ideas for compositions could unfold over long stretches of time.

Boursier-Mougenot's approach has something in it of John Cage's belief that "everything we do is music". Yet he does not embrace the chaos of sound that floods daily life, on its own terms, as Cage did. Rather, he creates highly orchestrated situations where something as random as where a bird chooses to alight or how the wind brushes through a tree's leaves can create new kinds of music, reveal hidden patterns.

In an untitled work first staged in 1999, plates, cups and glasses float around in blue paddling pools, creating, with the aid of microphones, an amplified jingle of clangs and tinkles. It is far from left to chance: the water temperature is carefully controlled, the current of the paddling pools determined by pumps. With a similar exactitude, Boursier-Mougenot's Recycle (2006) exchanges sound and movement between the natural and technological worlds. Cameras filming tree branches relate their movements to a grid of metal wall fans, which pump out air that echoes the pattern of the wind. Yet another work, Videodrones, created for New York's Paula Cooper gallery in 2002, used the humming sound generated when a video recorder is attached to a sound amplifier. While real-time surveillance images were projected in the gallery, the art space resounded with the buzz of life on the streets.

Why we like him: With the help of guitars and tuned strings doubling as perches, birds perform a truly captivating live set in an evolving series of gallery-based aviaries. The latest incarnation, featuring tiny red-billed zebra finches and Gibson Les Paul electric guitars, is currently installed in the Barbican's Curve.

Kid Rock: Boursier-Mougenot has a musical family. Even his one-year-old son plays guitar – though, like his dad's zebra finches, he may not entirely know what he's doing just yet.

Where can I see him? Boursier-Mougenot currently has two solo exhibitions, at the Barbican's Curve Gallery in London and No Vinyl Any More, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.