LOOK AT THIS: “clinamen” by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

[00:00:00]I want you to look at this Celeste Boursier-Mougenot at the magnificent Park Avenue Armory.

[00:00:07]The title is Clinamen. It comes from an ancient Epicurean idea of the swerve, tiny unpredictable deviations that change everything. If you did this, would it change your whole life? This piece is a meditation on that. You enter the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Inside are three circular pools. Each is about 40 ft across, set into the hall like three moons of water. Each pool holds 10,000 gallons. These aren't indoor lakes, exactly, more like systems, constellations, small cosmoses. Floating in each pool are 250 glazed ceramic bowls. Invisible circulation jets gently push them across the surface. Each bowl drifts, swerves, separates together, and regularly the rims touch. And when they touch, they make a tiny sound, little ceramic knocks and clangs, tings, porcelain kisses. The work composes itself in real time. It's like some sort of sonic butterfly effect set into motion and placed before you. This artist has spent a lifetime perfecting a different way of saying the same thing.

[00:01:35]What fascinates me is that the work becomes larger the longer you stand beside it. I know contemporary artists supposed to teach us, challenge us, slap us, shake us awake. This artist does the exact opposite. What he's done here is astonishingly simple. The idea is that the cosmos itself might be making a music. Not music that we can literally hear, but a harmony underlying everything. This artist somehow awakens these bigger latent thoughts. Standing in this immense room, you become totally alone listening to these little bowls collide and separate. You begin to feel that mysterious overlap where science and enchantment occupy the same space.

[00:02:26]Music that arrives so naturally, it feels as though it were already in the air waiting to be heard. Some say this artist is working on a gimmick. Maybe, but it's a peaceful, seductive, beautiful one. Standing in one of New York's grandest interior spaces, listening to this accidental, ancient, archaic music emerge from water, vectors of air, chance, and motion is almost poetry. Go see it.