This essay initially appeared in Reframed, the Art in America publication about artwork that surprises us and works that get us labored up. Sign up here to obtain it each Thursday.
Herding cats is notoriously tough, however how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up way back in a curious Seventeenth-century musical textual content—and once more extra lately by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery present in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, includes a most likely apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) referred to as the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a e book printed in 1650, Kircher described the instrument as a set of cats in cages that will shriek, in numerous voices, every time one among its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers taking part in a keyboard.
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Beer introduced Kircher’s imaginative and prescient to life—albeit in a a lot gentler model. The centerpiece of his present is an association of 37 cat-shaped vessels and collectible figurines, together with a feline absinthe pitcher from early Twentieth-century France, a Nineteenth-century ceramic cat “pillow” used as a headrest by opium people who smoke in China, and a recent reproduction of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the discovered objects are linked to microphones located to choose up completely different frequencies that resonate inside of every hole type. A customized keyboard sits in entrance of the orchestra, because it have been, and conducts it in an automatic style, with sliders transferring up and down to indicate which cats’ voices are “singing” at any given second. (Gallery-goers can sit on the keyboard and play it by hand too, however throughout all my visits everybody saved a curious distance.)
The temper of the music the orchestra performs is transporting, ambient in a way just like latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings set up mission began in 2006. And the number of the vessels and collectible figurines enlisted—starting from campy tchotchkes to elegant historic finery—helps direct consideration away from the technological make-up of the work to its extra playful, experiential results. This will not be extreme, austere sound artwork by any stretch.
Installation view of Oliver Beer’s “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech.
Thomas Barratt
The present additionally contains Reanimation (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), a 2024 movie made with faculty children’ drawings of a scene within the film The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall works (each 2024) that characteristic damaged bits of cat sculptures and different objects (feathers, guitar strings, elements of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a sequence of 9 “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid over amplifiers taking part in sounds from the cats within the orchestra. The outcomes are all summary modulations of blue on white, and figuring out that they have been made partly by sound provides them a form of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, in fact, but additionally audible of their means.
