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Herding cats is notoriously tricky, but how about generating them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and yet again far more not long ago by the British audio artist Oliver Beer. His most current gallery display in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, will involve a almost certainly apocryphal contraption (a single hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a e-book revealed in 1650, Kircher explained the instrument as a collection of cats in cages that would shriek, in diverse voices, each individual time a person of its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers taking part in a keyboard.
Beer brought Kircher’s eyesight to life—albeit in a considerably gentler version. The centerpiece of his demonstrate is an arrangement of 37 cat-formed vessels and collectible figurines, like a feline absinthe pitcher from early 20th-century France, a 19th-century ceramic cat “pillow” made use of as a headrest by opium people who smoke in China, and a the latest reproduction of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the identified objects are linked to microphones situated to decide up unique frequencies that resonate within of just about every hollow type. A personalized keyboard sits in front of the orchestra, as it were, and conducts it in an automated vogue, with sliders relocating up and down to exhibit which cats’ voices are “singing” at any offered second. (Gallery-goers can sit at the keyboard and enjoy it by hand too, but throughout all my visits absolutely everyone held a curious distance.)
The temper of the music the orchestra performs is transporting, ambient in a way very similar to latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings set up venture started in 2006. And the range of the vessels and figurines enlisted—ranging from campy tchotchkes to elegant historic finery—helps direct focus away from the technological make-up of the function to its additional playful, experiential consequences. This is not significant, austere sound art by any stretch.
The show also includes Reanimation (Most people Needs to Be a Cat), a 2024 film produced with school kids’ drawings of a scene in the film The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall functions (each 2024) that feature damaged bits of cat sculptures and other objects (feathers, guitar strings, sections of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a collection of nine “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid around amplifiers playing sounds from the cats in the orchestra. The final results are all summary modulations of blue on white, and realizing that they were being produced in aspect by sound provides them a type of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, of study course, but also audible in their way.