7 September – 15 November 2014

Oliver Beer’s Diabolus in Musica explored people’s ability to imbue objects and phenomena with an emotional, poetic or simply narrative charge, through the power of the imagination. This human tendency was given partial form in an architectural acoustic installation based on a famous mythical chord, which in musical theory is called the tritone. It was an interval of three whole tones and corresponds to a diminished fifth. It was used in musical writing in the late mediaeval period but then banned by religious leaders. The sound produced by a diminished fifth or an augmented fourth is perceived by the ear as an unpleasant sound that provokes a sense of incompleteness and unease that earned it the sobriquet Diabolus in Musica. The popular collective unconscious gradually developed a tendency to think that the sound might conjure up the devil.

The interval had since been widely used in musical genres that have broken with classical tone relationships. In both jazz and Heavy Metal, for example, a number of melody lines are constructed around this association of unbalanced notes. The resulting musical experience for the listener is based on that sense of something incomplete and out of kilter, which challenges not the universal but something unusual in the sound experience. It is precisely this experience that Beer’s installation offered us, with a structure that totally envelops the spectator.

The exhibition also presented Reanimation I (Snow White), which was previewed as part of the Prospectif Cinema programme at the Centre Pompidou. It was a film which, along with several sculptures and installations, translated into disturbing artistic language Beer’s investigation of the tools traditionally used for identifying what people often seek to define as real. By playing around with the notions of presence and absence and interrogating the physical properties of everyday objects, Beer threw doubt on the objectivity of perception. The objects – a pipe, a firearm, railway lines –, which are ordinary and yet mysterious, seem to be possessed of a biographical dimension, partly explicable through the propensity of the human mind to invest inanimate objects and to enrich what Heidegger termed their ‘being-in-the-world’ through the imagination. The particular way in which they related to the wall or the floor, which they gradually merged into, brought added richness to the potential narrative, all of which contributed to an eventual infinite regress of the magic power of those two notes capable of summoning up the Prince of Darkness.