"How Oliver Beer turned a Paleolithic cave into a musical instrument" At the Lyon Biennial, the artist unveiled an operatic work shot at one of France’s prehistoric sites
By Coline Milliard
Oliver Beer makes spaces sing – almost literally. Classically trained as a musician and composer, the artist taps into the little-known but omnipresent phenomenon of acoustic resonance, in which any empty space or form can be made to elicit a powerful musical note – as with rubbing a wine glass – when stimulated at the right frequency. For over a decade, Beer has teased out the resonant frequencies of locations as varied as the sewers of Brighton, southern England, and the Centre Pompidou’s glass corridors, mapping a creative terrain at the crossroads of architecture, form, and harmony.
His latest project, though, might be his most ambitious to date. For the multi-screen video and sound installation The Cave, which will premiere at the Lyon Biennial this week, the artist enlisted a star cast of musicians, including Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, and Mélissa Laveaux. He invited them to sing their earliest musical memory and play with the resonant frequency of the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, a Paleolithic cave in the Dordogne, southwest France, celebrated for its polychrome paintings and ancient engravings. The result is an operatic, immersive work – and an invitation to encounter sounds that might have been first experienced by cave artists up to 19,000 years ago.
For the fourth instalment of our ‘Artist As’ series – which profiles practitioners operating beyond the traditional confines of the visual arts – I asked Beer about the role music played in his artistic training, the links he draws between the sonic and the visual, and his quest to transcend Western music’s loaded legacy. (...)
You don’t experiment with resonance just using your own voice. Very soon, you started to invite other musicians and singers to participate. For The Cave project, you gathered an incredible cast of musicians, including Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, and Mélissa Laveaux. What was the process that pushed you to continue developing this idea?
Each architectural space is a unique instrument with its own harmonies, and the singers bring their own musical influences to each piece, so it’s never the same twice.
For about 10 years, I dreamt of making a work in the famous Paleolithic caves of the Dordogne, which contain some of humanity’s earliest artworks. I was convinced I would find a relationship between the locations of the paintings and the resonant sweet spots of the cave of Font-de-Gaume. I was granted access in 2021, and over three years I filmed a video opera there. I discovered a connection between the cave paintings and the cave’s resonance. (...)
Realizing it was impossible to bring the public into the cave, I created an installation to bring the cave to the viewer. The Cave will premiere at the Lyon Biennale in a vast industrial space, with eight synchronized cinema screens and 16 speakers, recreating the experience as if we were alongside the singers inside the cave. (...)
In an underground tunnel beneath the exhibition space, you’ll show a new series of your Resonance Paintings, made using sound waves to move pigments on the canvas without ever touching it. Do these new paintings relate aesthetically to the Paleolithic paintings?
(...) I make the paintings by placing a speaker beneath a horizontally positioned canvas and scattering finely powdered pigment on the surface. By playing specific musical notes that cause the canvas to vibrate, the pigment moves, forming patterns that visually represent the sound waves. I’ve learned to precisely control these waves, using sound like a paintbrush to create the forms I’m looking for. Then I fix these shapes in place, capturing the invisible shapes of sound – the physical manifestation of waveforms. For The Cave, I made a new series of Resonance Paintings using each singer’s voice to stimulate vibrations. I incorporated the exact same black and ochre pigments found in the cave paintings. The series transitions from deep earth tones to celestial colors, echoing the musical journey experienced in the cave. (...)
