Oliver Beer

At the far end of the Grand Locos, a former train-repair depot-cum-main-exhibition-site for the 17th Lyon Biennale, there is a vast dark space. It takes your eyes a moment to adjust, but through the darkness you rapidly perceive a series of eight video screens, hung in a spiral formation, illuminating the space with an orange glow like fires in a cave. On each screen a person, holding aloft a flashlight, which illuminates the stalactites and the cave paintings that surround them. The figures begin to hum and trill different notes into the echoing chasm. Suddenly, a chord is struck, and the vibrations of their voices begin to fill the space like warm air. One by one, the filmed subjects sing. Different songs, different voices, different languages coalescing and harmonizing in a chorus that overwhelms you with waves of sound. You move through the space, spellbound by this sonorous butterfly garden. The notes flutter their little wings, enveloping you with something strange but familiar.

A long sloping ramp leads even farther into the cavernous space. On this lower level you find abstract paintings—spectral, undulating, atmospheric clouds of color—hung along one wall and illuminated with spotlights. Smaller video screens hang on the opposite wall. On these screens, you encounter the singers from before, however this time they are not serenading you, but rather being interviewed.

This is The Cave, the most recent and ambitious iteration of Oliver Beer's 'Resonance Project'. Begun in 2007, the 'Resonance Project' is a series of performances which explore the acoustics of space. Born in Pembury, UK in 1985, Oliver Beer trained as both a visual artist and a musician at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University and the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford. He also studied Film Theory at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Resonance Project: The Cave combines these various scholarly competencies into a single, total work of art. Since 2007, Beer has collaborated with various singers and vocal artists to identify the natural frequency of architectural spaces: The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK (2011); MoMA PS1 in New York (2012); the glass tunnels of the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2014), and the 16th Century Kiliç Ali Pasa Hamam Bath House in Istanbul, Turkey (2015), to name just a few. He then used this audible signature as the structural harmonic framework of a musical composition, sung in chorus.

The Cave extends the principle of identifying and instrumentalizing the natural frequency of an architectural space to the Paleolithic painted caves of Dordogne, specifically Grotte de Font-de-Gaume. Unlike other spaces previously explored in the 'Resonance Project,' these caves are not man-made, even if their cave drawings bear the markings of the earliest human creative activity. Beer worked with each of the singers, teaching them to stimulate the space modes, to transform and to displace their voices without any electronic amplification. In this way, he plays the notes of the cave as though it were an instrument. The cave becomes an extension of the voice, the singer’s body becomes the resonating organ of the cave.

The discovery of a space’s natural frequency determined by its unchanging physical dimensions operates like a form of sonic time travel. Because the dimensions of the Cave are fixed, the resonant note picked out today is the same as that which the Earth’s first artists might have discovered while singing there over 17,000 years ago. To further mine this theme of the primordial artistic gesture, Beer asked the eight vocalists to sing the first song that they could remember. This question acted a bit like a Proustian madeleine, plunging not only the singers into the primal scene of their musical talents, but also the audience into the shared origins of humanity’s natural creativity.

Canadian-American Rufus Wainwright intones À la claire fontaine, Danish singer eee gee carols the folk song Tit Er Jeg Glad, Japanese vocalist Michiko Takahashi sings Anta Gata Doko Sa and so on and so forth. Despite the different voice types and languages, the architecture of the cave channels their voices into a polyphonic and harmonious chorus.

In the interviews screened on the lower levels, the vocalists tell the stories behind their songs. Wainwright explains how his mother would sing À la claire fontaine to him as an infant. Much later, on her deathbed, a family chorus of this song resuscitated his mother from a coma, bringing her back to life, if only for several seconds:

"All of a sudden she woke up from her coma and her eyes, you know, lit up and her mouth moved and she tried to sing it with us for about 5 seconds and then returned to her dying state," Wainwright recalls.

Such is the power of music, this invisible essence connecting us both to what is familiar or filial and to our common ancestral roots. Mélissa Laveaux’s interview is telling in this sense. "This isn’t the land of my ancestors" she begins in reference to the La Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, before hesitating and correcting herself: "Everyone comes from the same place in a way, as the Human race obviously." This hesitation and amendment is revelatory of how the musical chord, like the cave and its paintings, are truly universal, capable of undoing and untangling our clichés about identity, leveling the cultural playing field of our shared ancestral heritage. The Cave is thus a work that takes seriously the "personal relations" theme of the 17th Lyon Biennale.

The sense of return and a deep connection to the origins of life reappear in the interview with Takahashi, who compares the acoustic experience to being "[...] in my mother's womb." This theme is also present in the paintings that hang opposite the video screens on the lower level. Beer creates his 'Resonance Paintings’ by applying finely powdered pigments onto a horizontally positioned canvas. Working with the vibrations from singers' voices, as recorded in the cave, he carefully combines their harmonies and dissonances to meticulously move the pigments and create precise visual compositions. Beer’s innovative painting technique reveals the otherwise invisible geometry of sound waves, a phenomenon known as Cymatics. Drawing on his musical training, for Beer this phenomenon becomes an innovative and precise tool for him to 'paint with sound'.

The color palette of these paintings is just as interesting as the technique of their creation. Across the 8 canvases Beer moves progressively from a palette of dark earth tones (black, brown, ochre) toward brighter more vibrant colours. The effect produces abstractions evocative of both fire and the earth pigments that define the faunal and figurative representations of the cave paintings. In this way, once again, Beer manages to coalesce different artistic forms—film, music and painting—into a single, total work of art. The product manages to be at once innovative while returning the viewer to that point zero of human creation—to that primordial gesture from which we draw our common uniqueness and spirit.