Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot 
from here to ear V. 19

November 25, 2015 - March 27, 2016

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has an ongoing policy of bringing together art and music. Keeping up with this policy, the museum is presenting the Canadian premiere of from here to ear v.19 by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. The artist represented France in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His 19th edition of this installation at MMFA's Contemporary Art Square, transformed into a giant aviary, is the largest one.

In this unusual pairing of birds and electric guitars, the installation presents more than seventy zebra finches. The little birds are native to the Australian grasslands. The birds produce sounds (music) by perching on electric guitars and basses that are plugged into amplifier. The live sounds on instruments that have either open blues tunings or rock power chords create an ephemeral piece of music. Itchanges as visitors walk around the gallery, the aviary, or rather, in the MMFA's Contemporary Art Square.

The first version of from here to ear was presented at MoMA PS1 in 1999. Since then, various works have been exhibited under the generic title from here to ear. While these installations share a common principle—an aviary where visitors can get close to the birds, whose activity creates a live piece of music—each installation is to be considered as a unique work determined by the circumstances of the exhibition setting. After New York, Paris, Milan, Linz (Austria), and Brisbane (Australia), this is the nineteenth presentation of the installation.

Although this is a unique concept to create music using live birds and musical instruments, I felt quite uneasy about this piece. The Australian birds need natural sun and open air, and also the sounds they are familiar with in the Australian grasslands. At the museum, they looked to me hopelessly encaged, at times spooked out by their limited spatial setting and people, and especially by the type of sounds and sudden strong audio vibrations they created. Although ornithologists approved of this exhibition, and the birds receive the appropriate care, I still could not help but feel that it was not entirely above the board to express one's artistic intellectual concepts using living beings - animals or birds - in an intellectually contrived, unnatural setting for those birds or animals.