When you first enter Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s latest exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, one is not sure what exactly is happening. The minimal setting – a black baby grand piano set in the middle of an empty room with a handful of equally empty looking small-scale works on facing walls – sets a cold tone. The lighting, which comes from an open skylight in the ceiling located above the piano, fills the room with a color temperature much cooler than artificial track lighting, adding to this overall sense of detachment. The piano, though its keyboard lid is closed, emits sound as if the hands of Minimalist composer, John Cage, were playing it.

At first it seems that the piano is just one of those self-playing kinds, set to play hits from the Minimalist generation, but what is actually happening is much more interesting than that. Boursier-Mougenot developed a computer program that turns words typed on the keyboards of the office computers used by the gallery staff, into a set of notes, tones, and dynamics that then play on the piano. This is all happening in real time, so as an employee types, the piano plays. Ordinary language becomes extraordinary music.

Though this whole process is occurring between two automated systems – the computer and the piano – without someone present to hear its simple tones and bursts of atonal chords, the magic would be lost. For some reason, despite the impersonality of the installation, I felt as though this piano needed me to be there, to hear its song. It is this charge of dual emotion, the starkness of the room mixed with this feeling of dependency, that which gives Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation its sheer power. A sample of the composition streams here, but it is much better to visit in person. 

Images: detail (2009); Installation view. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.