An eco-meditation from the scalding hot center of the universe 

   

When I used to live in houses with porches and carports and back doors (or when I’m back down South) I liked to listen to the wind. When it gets to howling, it’s best you go inside, but on a pleasant day the wind doesn’t make it’s own sound. So really, I like to listen to the wind’s influence: rustling through green leaves, flapping a flag out front, or ringing through a wind chime. Add a glass of sweet tea and a rocking chair and you’ve got the perfect afternoon. 

 

Now I live in a box ten stories off the ground: plenty sweet tea but no porch and no rocking chair. The sound of the wind’s influence is no match for cars and city buses, Bluetooth speakers, and neighbors in friendly parley. It isn’t until visiting friends point out the ever-present din of city life that I remember the sounds below the street noise. 

 

 

This summer, the Park Avenue Armory has opened its largest space to an installation that silences the avenue’s constant hum and replaces the blinding white of the summer sun with a dark expanse. There is one bright light from the ceiling reflected in the cool blue of three wide pools that contain an endless stream of bone-colored bowls. The bowls float in these expanses, carried by invisible currents to clink, separate, find new partners, and repeat. The blue pools and bleached light in the brooding Drill Hall are visually striking, but it’s the sound of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s clinamen that drew me back to the Armory for another visit. 

 

Though quietly, the bowls request that you stop and pay attention. On both visits, I sat down cross-legged on the edge of the pool and closed my eyes. It was the closest I’d felt to hearing the comfort of a wind chime in a very long time; it felt like noticing the color purple in a field of green. “When you hear wind chimes, it’s a reminder of spirit,” explained Ming Smith ahead of her 2024 photo exhibition set to ambient sounds by her son Mingus. “You can’t see air, but it’s manifest in two bodies of glass meeting each other. It is a minor sound, not overbearing like an orchestra.” 

 

 

French artist-musician-composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has managed to engineer just enough unpredictability to deliver an experience that feels divine, as surprising as wind, as sporadic as raindrops, as flighty as the swerve of atoms (this is where the work gets its name). The intelligent design of the universe is echoed in clinamen. God created for six days and rested on the seventh; Boursier-Mougenot’s pre-exhibition tuning process is what makes the bowls move as if they have minds of their own. By adjusting variables like water temperature, water currents, and bowl selection, the artist has created a tinkling, rhythm-defying symphony of clinks that are impossible to anticipate. The venue is a variable, too. The Armory provides the “grandest scale yet” for this work making “full use of the sonic and spatial possibilities of the Drill Hall”.

 

This summer in the City came bearing gifts like wise men who traversed afar: a basketball championship, an endless flow of futbol fans, and a 7-day wave of extreme heat. Each carries Nativity-style significance: we can do anything we set our minds to, we’ll always be a destination, and the need for climate resilience is beyond dispute. clinamen, too, is a gift to this city. It’s a cool, quiet place to be in the rapidly warming center of everything. With my eyes closed, I flipped through memories of sunny days, gentle winds, soft rains, and thick grass. It didn’t always used to flood during summer showers; a fan used to be enough to get you through the spring. The clinks of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s floating bowls are just loud enough to evoke natural phenomena, just loud enough to point out what we stand to lose.     

    

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

clinamen is “an acquatic and musical installation” by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at Park Avenue Armory. It is on view from June 10 to August 9, 2026. I was invited to attend an artist talk and installation preview on June 9 and offer my thanks to Resnicow + Associates. 

 

General admission tickets are $30, with $25 tickets available for seniors, students, and children over 6. The installation is open from 12pm-8pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; 12pm-10pm on Fridays; and 12pm-7pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The installation is closed on Mondays.