Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, born in 1961 in Nice and now living in Sète, is a visual artist in whose work sound is central. A saxophonist, and a composer from 1985-1994 for the company of stage director Pascal Rambert, he strives to give autonomous form to his music by creating installations—typically live. These generate what he describes as living sound forms, driven by the energy of live music and the punk aesthetic, which he discovered in 1977. He noted London punk’s ‘irreverent attitudes, post-Dada mockery, androgyny, graphic design and fashion, which captured our attention more than the English bands’ music’, and the invitation to do it yourself that also resonated in the No Wave and in the music of Arto Lindsay, guitarist with DNA. ‘I approved of the singer Genesis P-Orridge, who said that although punks only knew three chords, Throbbing Gristle’s musicians could only play one’, he recalls with a smile. This irreverent and extremely inventive attitude has been reflected in his installation scanner (2006), a helium-inflated latex balloon ballasted by a cordless mic, which generates a Larsen effect; in from here to ear, a free concert by thirty mandarin ducks using Gibson Les Paul guitars as a musical perch; and in schizoframes, an environment in which visitors are invited to immerse themselves, stretching out and perceiving with their bodies the infra-bass frequencies from abstract video images. The Portraits series (2010)—for which he filmed guitarists playing, and then converted the images into a black-and-white musical score that recalls certain experimental photographic techniques such as rayograms —once again reactivates the features of punk, from low-tech to subversive appropriation: ‘I use amateur resources, an obsolete video camera and hackneyed effects. Hooking the video camera up to an audio amplifier cuts against the grain. I subvert the image to produce the sound.’
