Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea: Part of Strangelove at Turner Contemporary

This audio work understands the Katie Paterson exhibition, with which it shares its space, as exploring a contemporary re-enchantment of the cosmos, rendering nature into art. Rather than a retrograde step into mythology or the supernatural, Patterson’s work is resolutely factual. Provoking an affective and sensual engagement with sublime forces, Paterson need not concoct superstitions, rather, she follows J.M.W. Turner in working with the abundant wonders of our physical universe.

“Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea” undertakes a similar conversion. However, here the approach is less about exploring physical experience and more concerned with our cognitive response to the pressing environmental reality in which these works exist.

Auto-Tune is a fashionable vocal processing tool. It's inhuman tones ubiquitous in contemporary pop music. By bringing this digital process to bear on a recent interview between Donald Trump and a CNN news reporter, what was once situated in the context of the (purportedly) factual, now becomes performative and synthetic. A cold clash of opinions is transformed into an operatic duet. Foregrounding the exploitative agenda behind the emotive charge of political enunciation, the work suggests a change in the appropriate mode of reception from that of rational consideration toward a theatrical, and perhaps more cynical, critique.