Purr-fect Pitch

Oliver Beer remembers listening to the noise of street traffic as a child and being able to identify its musical key equivalent. “I had this intrinsic connection to harmony and music,” he explains. “I couldn't hear a bus go past without hearing what note that engine was singing.”

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In the decades since, the 38-year-old English artist has channeled this acute musical skill into a singular artistic practice. Much of his notable work involves manipulating non-musical objects with microphones and other sound technology to effectively re-create each as functioning musical instruments.  

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“Like a seashell, they don't make any sound,” he describes the found items he brings into his projects. “And yet, when you listen to them you can still hear the sound. That's because the ambient noise is being filtered through the geometry of the empty space that you’re opening your ear up against. An empty space always has its own acoustic fingerprint.”

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That concept is at the core of Beer’s latest show, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra,” which just opened at Almine Rech’s space in TriBeCa, New York. The main attraction is an installation of 37 cat figurines, which were sourced globally—from a 19th century Chinese “cat opium pillow” to a Mexican “tonalá cat” manufactured circa 1960 to 1980 to an undated Thai “guardian lion” and more. Beer culled his selection down from thousands of options of cat figurines sent to him by friends, associates, and family members from around the world to find the 37 that, thanks to their physical proportions, are able to replicate musical notes via feedback from an internal microphone. When the statuette’s microphone is activated by the different keys of a keyboard in the gallery, it produces a perfectly on-key tone, effectively making the cat “sing”—all together forming the exhibition’s titular “cat orchestra.”

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“There’s something innately godlike about cats,” says Beer with a laugh. “They’re so incredibly relatable, and also so incredibly aloof… They have this independence that makes us drawn to them, makes us attracted to them, because also there’s no guarantee that they’ll respond. That’s very much like gods as well: You appeal to them in the hope that they will favor you!”

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The artist created a similar installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 for “Vessel Orchestra,” which was composed of more general “vessels” and only allowed the likes of Philip Glass and other eminent musicians to use its affiliated keyboard. This time at Almine Rech, Beer notes, his keys are available for public use. Also on view are a series of 12 paintings that Beer made using pure blue pigment, which he vibrated into watery patterns across the canvases using sound from the cat orchestra. 

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On opening night, Beer took to the keyboard himself to play original compositions alongside the 2024 Whitney Biennial artist-vocalist Holland Andrews. The auditory effect was all-encompassing; it resonated within the hollow cavities in the figurines as well as in the viewer’s own physical body: You could feel the sound vibrating in your head, chest, stomach, bones. Such sensations were certainly convincing of Beer’s fundamental premise: Music is everywhere.

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‍“Oliver Beer: Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” is on view through April 27, 2024 at Almine Rech at 361 Broadway New York, NY 10013 US.