It would be nice if objects could tell you the stories of their own past, but it would be even better if they could sing them. That’s what Oliver Beer’s managed to do: he’s shoved microphones down a ceramic frog’s throat, a wedgewood vase, a glazed gravy jug and an earthenware pot and he’s made them all sing.
Motion sensors trigger speakers attached to each pot, allowing their resonant frequencies to echo out into the space. It’s a signature move by the young British artist, and now he’s doing it in the Mithraeum, an ancient Roman temple in the middle of the City.
It works because vessels aren’t just containers of fluids or flowers, they're containers of ideas and histories. The 28 pots here range in date from the second century AD through to today. There are rough, textured, ancient jugs, neatly glazed modern ceramics, glistening metal buckets. Some are lavishly decorated and extravagant, others are minimal and functional. These vessels once served a purpose, they were water jugs, flower vases, or just displays of aesthetic taste or wealth. They had a reason to exist.
As you walk past, each vessel hums at you in soft tones, producing gentle ambient melodies, like someone locked Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno in a pottery shop. The interactive element doesn’t always work, and is fiddly enough to distract you from the ideas. But it still sounds gorgeous. Some pots resonate together in big, sad minor chords, others create warm major intervals, some are harshly dissonant and wobbly, some are beautifully diatonic, It’s a sonic reflection of Britain’s own history, of the dissonances and consonances of life on this island, of constant change, of war and empire, of poverty and luxury, immigration and movement. It’s a whole a nation’s history singing to you.
Even if the country has gone to pot, at least it sounds nice.