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Jeremy Deller: English Magic
TURNER CONTEMPORARY
MARGATE, UK
OCTOBER 11,2014-JANUARY11, 2015
Pounding from the heart of Jeremy Deller's installation are the unmistakeable metallic vibrations of steel drums. Soundtrack to Deller's film English Magic (2013), the beats offset footage of the crushing of a Range Rover (known as a "Chelsea Tractor" in reference to its non-agricultural use in expensive parts of London) and of the public happily cartwheeling on an inflatable Stonehenge. Set to a musical score recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios, references to key symbols of English culture are not only visual, but auditory too: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony no. 5 in D major (1938-43), iconic 1980s acid house track Voodoo Ray (1988) by A Guy Called Gerald, and The Man Who Sold the World (1970) by that most quintessential of English eccentrics, David Bowie, hold the audience transfixed until the end.
I had thought that the enjoyment of a large inflatable toy house here-or "bouncy castle" in British vernacular- to the melodies of a steel band was a particularity of my own English childhood; but in Deller's story of the state of the nation, it provoked...