Oliver Beer’s Sound Projects: Exploring the Acousmatic Possibilities of Visual Spaces

[En anglais] 

Imagine, briefly, walking into a museum or gallery, ascending a staircase into an exhibition space. What do you see? Do you see objects cluttered in a small room? Or do you see a space that resembles a white cube, with paintings hung on the walls at eye level? Now, think about what you can hear. Can you hear the voices of other visitors? Can you hear anything else? Do the objects make a sound? Of course not, because when we enter a museum we expect to strain our eyes in a silent space, looking at and taking in the visual qualities of a painting, sculpture, or artefact. But for British sound artist Oliver Beer, “the museum is like a vast multi-layered chambered instrument just waiting to be played.”1 1  - Lauren Rosati, “In Conversation: Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra and the Democracy of Sound,” interview, August 2, 2019, www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2019/oliver-beer-vessel-orchestra-interview

This might be a strange way to describe museum collections, but many of Beer’s projects are centred around activating different spaces by unleashing hidden sounds. For example, his project Household Gods (2019) presented at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in the Marais district of Paris displayed an array of objects as instruments, such as a tiny pot in the shape of an Egyptian god and part of a chimney salvaged from the Palace of Westminster in London, England, after a fire in 1834.² 2 - Oliver Beer, “Household Gods, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais,” last modified February, 2019, accessible online. In the summer of 2019, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City held a similar exhibition by Beer called Vessel Orchestra (2019), featuring thirty-two vessels, statues, and sculptures from The Met’s collection as musical instruments. Like Household Gods, Vessel Orchestra challenges the assumption that artworks should only be looked at. Instead, the exhibition asks, What would these objects tell us if they could sing?