clinamen (v.11)
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
© The Artist/ADAGP 2026 | Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
june 10 – august 2, 2026
wade thompson drill hall
MORE TO EXPLORE
Shop | Library
Explore a selection of books and an array of exclusive merchandise.
Concessions
| Veterans Room
Enjoy a selection of snacks, beverages, and other light refreshments in the warmth of our historic period rooms.
OTHER HAPPENINGS
Armory After Hours | Veterans Room
Join us on Friday evenings when we keep the installation open late and offer libations for attendees in one of our historic period rooms.
Artist Talk: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | Veterans Room
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at 6:00pm
In conversation with art historian, contemporary art curator, and Director of the Pinault Collection Emma Lavigne
SEASON SPONSOR
PUBLIC SUPPORT
Bloomberg Philanthropies is Park Avenue Armory’s 2026 Season Sponsor. Leadership support for the Armory’s artistic programming has been generously provided by the Anita K. Hersh Philanthropic Fund, Charina Endowment Fund, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, Pinkerton Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the Thompson Family Foundation, and Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
Major support was also provided by the the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Shubert Foundation, the SHS Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, and Wescustogo Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Julie Menin. clinamen (v.10) 2025, Collection Pinault, Paris © Céleste Boursier-Mougenot/ADAGP
Photo: Laurent Lecat
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates dispositifs—orchestrated environments that expand the notion of the musical score into heterodox configurations of materials and media—using a wide variety of situations and objects to reveal their sonic potential and generate spontaneous, live acoustic forms. Deployed in response to the architectural or contextual framework of exhibition spaces, each dispositif offers an invitation to a listening experience in which sound-generating processes are made visible and comprehensible to the visitor. Through multiple forms of access and spatial engagement, and by making the visitor’s momentary presence an integral element, these installations constitute variations on the principle of the “penetrable” artwork.
clinamen is a piece Boursier-Mougenot first developed almost 30 years ago. It features circular basins filled with water in which ordinary porcelain bowls, selected for their distinct timbre, drift freely and gently collide to produce chiming sounds. In one respect it is a sound work, a musical piece transforming the roles of composer and performer into the role of listener through planned happenstance. At the same time, it is a physical sculpture that renders its own processes visible, serving as a living score for what is heard. It ultimately creates music and art out of everyday life using the model of nature.
The artwork evolved out of Boursier-Mougenot’s longstanding and wide-ranging exploration of sound and perceptual experience. He drew inspiration from the concept of clinamen in Epicurean philosophy, first described by Lucretius as the unpredictable deviation in the movement of atoms—a spontaneous swerve that made contingency and, by extension, free will possible within an otherwise ordered system. Boursier-Mougenot was also inspired by the works of La Monte Young, including his longstanding installation Dream House, which generates sound in progress for audiences to experience over time. The resulting installation invites audiences to become more fully aware of themselves in time and space, in a shared experience of grace and beauty. clinamen has previously been exhibited at the Bourse de Commerce (Paris, France); Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, South Korea); National Gallery Victoria (Melbourne, Australia); STUK (Leuven, Belgium); Pola Museum of Art (Hakone, Japan); Fondation François Schneider (Wattwiller, France); SFMOMA (San Francisco, California); Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, China); and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo, Japan); among others.
This installation in Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall features three pools, each 40 feet in diameter and 14 inches deep, holding more than 10,000 gallons of water. Nearly 800 bowls of varying sizes can be found in the pools, animated by water motors and fine-tuned by the artist himself. The Armory’s sweeping interior and natural lighting offer a unique setting for visitors to experience this ongoing composition for the first time or anew.
ARTS EDUCATION: CREATING SPACE FOR CHANCE
Throughout the summer, New York City public school students are engaging with clinamen through a variety of Park Avenue Armory’s Arts Education Programs. For students at three of the Armory’s Partner Schools, visiting the installation in June is the culmination of a semesterlong creative process of their own. Visual art students from Bronx Envision Academy, Bronx Compass High School, and Vanguard High School took a deep dive into Céleste BoursierMougenot’s creative process this spring, which inspired three distinct artistic projects exploring topics ranging from chance and interactivity in installation work, to the inclusion of natural elements in art, to the very underpinnings of modern art itself.
An additional 500+ young people experience the installation as either a way to cap off the school year in June or kick off camp season in July. Participants in the Armory’s Production-Based Programs enjoy student-only hours inside the installation, and participate in onsite workshops that explore clinamen through different art forms: embodying emotional “swerves” in theaterbased workshops, choreographing unique pieces by likening the movement of the bowls to the technique of flocking in dance workshops, applying meditation techniques into visual art responses, or constructing their own chance-based instruments in music workshops.
Finally, this summer’s High School Youth Corps interns explore Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s creative process by investigating clinamen and other works by the artist. Youth Corps members follow in the artist’s footsteps by becoming immersed in the mind, curious nature, and playfulness of a child through research, artmaking inspired by play, multisensory exploration, and inner child reflection and exploring these elements through various artistic mediums. As a culmination of this exploration in August, the Youth Corps present an immersive and sensory installation including curated, interactive art and a guided activity rooted in childlike play, allowing for family, friends, and Armory staff to play and connect with their inner child.
ABOUT CÉLESTE BOURSIER-MOUGENOT
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (b. 1961, Nice, France) lives and works in Sète.
His works, which have been presented in contemporary art venues in France and abroad over the past 30 years, may be considered, above all, those of a musician. After serving as composer for author and theater director Pascal Rambert’s company, Side One Posthume Théâtre, in Paris from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give autonomous form to his music by creating art installations.
Other than clinamen, representative dispositifs from Boursier-Mougenot’s oeuvre include: from here to ear – aviaries conceived as “bird territories,” where visitors interact simply through their presence and movement with Australian finches that fly, perch, or hop on amplified electric guitars, thereby generating an abstract rock composition in real time; and offroad – an uninterrupted ballet of three grand pianos rendered mobile by the artist, whose pursuit of, flight from, and occasional collisions with one another create a spontaneous piano score.
In recent years, Boursier-Mougenot has also been producing soundless works, transposing his compositional methods into forms of motion or simple arrangements of materials such as wood, water, or stone. This led to a series of mineral installations entitled choreography or miner(e)ality, intended to be physically occupied, traversed, or climbed by visitors—whose bodily presence and movement become the living component of the works.
Boursier-Mougenot is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Xippas Gallery (Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, Athens), and Mario Mazzoli Gallery (Berlin). His work has been exhibited at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2009), the Barbican Centre, London (2010), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Centre Pompidou Metz (both 2015), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (both 2017), the HAB Gallery for Le Voyage, Nantes (2018), the Arter Museum of the Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul (2019), and the Central Academy of Langfang Fine Arts, China (2021). He represented France at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
PRODUCTION STAFF
Aaron Copp Lighting Supervisor
Dave “Tater” Polato Production Electrician
Ruby Carmel, Yedoye Travis Run Crew
Ruby Carmel Production Assistant
James Tullos Production Rigger
Theodore Sarge Staging Supervisor
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BNW Rigging
Odeum Labor Services
M Stevens Production Consultants
Lighting and Rigging Equipment by 4Wall Entertainment SteelDeck NY
Tom Carroll Scenery
Mill Bergen Pools
Paula Cooper Gallery
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.
The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to the Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices.
The Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institution’s artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals.
The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman Emeritus
Elihu Rose, PhD
Co-Chairs
Adam R. Flatto
Amanda J.T. Riegel
President
Rebecca Robertson
Vice Presidents
David Fox
Pablo Legorreta
Emanuel Stern
Treasurer
Emanuel Stern
Marina Abramović
Abigail Baratta
Joyce F. Brown
Cora Cahan
Hélène Comfort
Paul Cronson
Tina R. Davis
Jessie Ding
Sanford B. Ehrenkranz
Roberta Garza
Kim Greenberg
Samhita Jayanti
Branden JacobsJenkins
Edward G. Klein, Brigadier General NYNG (Ret.)
Ralph Lemon
Jason Moran
Emmanuel Morlet
Janet C. Ross
Stephanie Sharp
Joan Steinberg
Dabie Tsai
Ku-Ling Yurman
Ying Zhou
Avant-Garde Chair
Adrienne Katz
Directors Emeriti
Harrison M. Bains
Angela E. Thompson*
Wade F.B. Thompson*
Founding Chairman, 2000-2009
Deborah Warner
Anita K. Hersh
Artistic Director
*In memoriam
