- Curatorial Text
- The infinitely variable ideal of popular
- A Conversation: Jeremy Deller & Ferran Barenblit
Curatorial Text
Amanda De La Garza and Cuahtémoc Medina
The exhibition The Infinitely Variable Ideal of the Popular attempts to review the work of Jeremy Deller by incorporating early as well as recent work. Deller's trajectory is notable for a reflection on British culture and its historical and political contradictions, in the context of a post-industrial and multicultural capitalist society. The selected pieces make evident the manner in which Deller departs from object production in order to give way to collective actions, which arise from within the art sphere, only to later desert it. He presents a critical outlook on artistic means of production and on art's self-referential circuit.
The exhibition is articulated around several nuclei which assemble a variety of subject-matter interests in his work, such as: the art circuit, British popular culture and worker's culture in England, while, at the same time, they reconstruct the diverse roads traveled by Deller's work. His approach to the popular, and, on the other hand, to pop culture from the 90's, is traversed by humor. British popular culture is represented through its stereotypes, as a manner of inverting that very sign. Thus, their introduction in the art circuit appears as an attempt to erase the separation between High and Low culture, or, rather, of a mutual contamination of both aesthetics and modes of circulation.
Likewise, through the reenactment of situations related to historical events, the artist researches the relationship between art, memory and History, as is evident in iconic pieces such as The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, or, instead, through the recuperation of characters that embody cultural shifts, as in So Many Ways To Hurt You (The Life And Times of Adrian Street), 2010, a piece in which he portrays the life of a transvestite professional wrestler who comes from a coal miners’ family. An important aspect of Deller's work involves the construction of different instances of collective interaction, where a question arises regarding the possibilities and impossibilities of the collective, and about which is the role of art in the configuration of these scenarios and collectivities.
* Curatorial text published in the catalog Jeremy Deller. Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires 2015
The infinitely variable ideal of popular
Jeremy Deller (London, 1966) has influenced the twenty-first century art in a variety of ways. At a time when contemporary art assumes that appropriating elements of popular culture is a routine fact, Deller has shown the ability to intervene, comment and rethink the notion of "the popular" beyond the use of its repertoires, to conceive it as an active record of social memory. Since the beginning of his career, Deller´s projects have overflowed the disciplinary boundaries of the arts and the definition of "exhibition spaces", to intervene and investigate the culture in any form, in collaboration with all collective and special characters. Works as Acid Brass (1997) and The Battle of Orgrave (2001) are largely responsible for the turn that art has taken into participatory practices, provoking the experience of social situations, rather than its mere representation.
Deller's interest in the intimate relationship between history and culture, has led him to conceive the popular as a huge file of attitudes and strategies to face the constant change that is the defining mark of modern civilization. A recurring theme of his production is to explore British culture as a complex and sensitive accompaniment of the transitions from the industrial revolution to the emergence of post-industrial societies. As the artist himself has observed in reference to Judas Priest, "Music, as the industry is literally in the blood."
Despite the eminently public nature of Jeremy Deller's work, it has nothing to do with "political art" understood as propaganda. As the artist himself says: "I do not want to do a kind of political work in the sense that an activist would. I want to give a little more poetry, a little more space”. This exhibition allows us to appreciate the critical and evocative power of contemporary art as a passionate record of the rhythms of social history.
History is a Hen Harrier*
HAL FOSTER.
We sit starving amidst our gold...
William morris, The Socialist Ideal: Art (1891)
Extract
What does Jeremy Deller mean by ‘English Magic’? ‘Magic’, the dictionary tells us, is ‘the ability to influence the course of events through the use of mysterious or supernatural forces’; to add ‘English’ is to point to a native tradition of expert conjurers, from the druids of Stonehenge to sorcerers such as Merlin and Gandalf and beyond. At the same time Deller also intends ‘English Magic’ to evoke ‘the mythical qualities of popular culture and its abilities to weave spells, engecially in music’. For our part, too, we might extend the term to cover the transformative powers of artists like Deller, who summons an unexpected array of figures and events, both past and future, in order to comment on ‘the beginning and the end of socialism/communism as we know it’. In his semi-fantastic history staged at the British Pavilion, Deller includes other tricksters, such as Tony Blair, who helped to conjure up the weapons of mass destruction that prepared the way for the Iraq War (and the suicide of weapons inspector David Kelly, who is also represented here); Prince Harry, who escapes from every scandal as if by magic (including the controversy over the alleged killing of a protected bird, imaged here too); and Roman Abramovich, who, along with other Russian Midases, turned the collapse of the Soviet Union into a mountain of gold (which has allowed his purchase not only of a famous football club but also of a spectacular yacht, pictured here as well). In the age of neoliberalism, Deller suggests, the truly potent magic is precisely this ability to turn public resources into private gains, and he asks the question, what art might be imagined to contest such sorcery? Can the ghost of William Morris, for example, be summoned to avenge the conjurations of Blair, Harry and Abramovich?
Traditionally magic is seen as double, and so it is for Deller: there is black magic, such as the ‘deception, distraction and trickery’ of ministers, royals and oligarchs (not to mention leaders of financial services), and there is benign magic, such as the ‘wonder and delight’ offered up by different forms of popular culture. Sometimes, however, this latter magic unleashes its own havoc, and in the main room of the pavilion Deller presents a painted mural that ‘depicts a fantastical scene of destruction’. This futuristic vision of a popular insurrection shows St Helier, the capital of Jersey and notorious site of offshore banking, put to flames in a 2017 riot over taxes. Deller pairs this mural with another of a huge hen harrier, its striped wing and tail feathers stretched wide, with a tiny Range Rover clutched in its talons, an image inspired by the association of the Prince with the 2007 shooting of a bird of this endangered species.
The theme of both murals is revenge—of the common people in the tax revolt at St Helier, of the natural world in the giant bird preying on the luxury vehicle—and Deller carries the subject further in another mural that pictures Morris as a colossal Poseidon about to plunge the expedition yacht owned by Abramovich into the Venice lagoon (said to be the largest of its class in the world, the 115-metre Luna dominated the Giardini quai during the 2011 Biennale).
In this fantasy it is the socialist past that returns with a vengeance to smite newfangled capitalists like Abramovich. The room that contains this mural also juxtaposes original works by Morris with historical documents of the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Abramovich and other oligarchs exploited to loot the country. Here the theme of ‘the beginning and the end of socialism/communism as we know it’ comes into focus, as does the grim dialectic that drives the exhibition as a whole, a dialectic in which advanced capitalism appears as advanced catastrophe.
Deller stages a different time and place in each of the six rooms that make up the pavilion. Some are set in the near future, as with the popular revolt in St Helier in 2017, while others look to the recent past, such as the Kelly suicide at Harrowdown Hill on 11 July 2003, the alleged bird shooting at Sandringham on 24 October 2007, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the same years, which are evoked by portraits of Blair, Kelly and other perpetrators and victims made by ex-soldiers now in prison, along with additional drawings of these ravaged countries. Still other rooms reach further back in time, not only to the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s but also to the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; the final gallery of the pavilion juxtaposes images of IRA bombings and industrial breakdowns with documents of the Ziggy Stardust tour of 1972–73. This is an epoch, prior to the neoliberal undoing of the industrial left by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, that has long fascinated Deller, who has often used images of labour politics of the period in order to resist the amnesia about such events in the present.
‘English Magic’ calls up a far more distant time too, with examples of stone age axe-heads and flints as well as references to the standing stones at Avebury. Here again an extreme dialectic is sketched: not only is enlightenment seen to be tangled up with myth, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued during World War II, but progress is also revealed to be no simple opposite to regression, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan attest. In this dark light the giant hen harrier might evoke the great falcon of Yeats, who, in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919), described another post-war period that mixed ‘mere anarchy’ and ‘passionate intensity’ with a general lack of conviction. However, for Yeats, reactionary modernist that he was, the falcon represented a noble civilisation tragically lost, whereas for Deller the hen harrier figures a subjugated world ready to revolt.
The Song Is Bigger than the Band.
A Conversation
Jeremy Deller (JD)
Ferran Barenblit (FB)
Ferran Barenblit: The first temptation, when starting a conversation, is always to catalogue, to think in terms of the kind of work you develop. But you‘re not an artist who continually feels the need to question, to ask who you are, what kind of art you make or what you should be doing or why you work. Sometimes it seems to me that, as happens to a lot of us, you only look back very rarely, in order to think about why you work.
Jeremy Deller: I’m surprised sometimes that I’m an artista at all. My training is not as an artist, it’s in art history. A lot of people wouldn’t recognise my art and immediately see “a work by Jeremy Deller.” I try not to analyse my own work so much. That’s probably got something to do with not going to an art college, where you’re constantly asked just by yourself to talk about your work in front of people, theorise about it. I didn’t have any of that in my training. It’s a bad answer for you, me sort of negating your question.
FB: You move in the arena of the “precisely indeterminate.” Do you think that ambivalence helps to multiply the readings of your work?
JD: I’m careful not to reveal my opinions too strongly, or at all, really. Obviously by making a work you’re revealing something. I don’t want to make a sort of political work in the sense that an activist would make a political work. I want to give a little more poetry, a bit more space, for people to manoeuvre. The words “political” and “art” aren’t necessarily the two best words to put together sometimes, so I want to have a bit of space for thinking, and not to tell others what to think.
FB: In that case, perhaps its efficacy goes hand in hand with its emotionality. There‘s a tension in the film that comes from the spectator‘s involvement in it. Perhaps it‘s the fact that it seems to all of us to see one side as being more morally defensible than the other. Still, all of the “actors” are the protagonists who were on one side or the other of the barricade thirty years ago. It‘s impossible not to feel like you‘re a part of that.
JD: There’s something about the film that has made
people vibrate, it struck a chord. It’s not just about Britain obviously, it’s about a lot of things, a lot of different situations you can apply the film to. I like that, technically, it’s not the best-made film because it’s quite rough and ready, it was made in quite a short period of time. However, it’s very emotional, very raw and honest. The Battle has this very strange re-enactment. It’s like reality television but in a very raw version.
FB: And the spectator is surprised, too. What are these hundreds of people doing, revisiting their past? What is it in that mythology that‘s so powerful that it makes them want to remember it still?
JD: I think the work was quite risky because you have one thousand people involved, and no one really knew what would happen. There was a degree of risk in it. The potential for failure was very high. It was like an absurd idea, something that shouldn‘t be done. I compare it to Sacrilege, the inflatable Stonehenge. There’s a degree of stupidity and wilfulness, a kind of foolishness comparable to what happens in a Monty Python film. In any case, The Battle as an artwork is a lot bigger than I am. It has its own life. The core audience was the participants. I made it for all those people. Then there was the audience in the place watching it, since the event was public. And then you have these other ripples of circles going out, back and forth, but the centre of the whole project was really the miners, and their families, who were so happy with what happened. The Battle harks back to a moment in history, and since the work is still alive it allows audiences to go back to that particular moment in history, giving it a new life. The work itself is what is alive. I sometimes compare it to Led Zeppelin’s song “Stairway to Heaven.” The song is bigger than the band. As happened with them, I will probably be remembered by this work, which is perfectly fine with me.
FB: These comings and goings into the past are woven throughout the set of works shown in this exhibition: The Battle, the story of Bruce Lacey, the story of Adrian Street. You and I are from the same generation, but we must’ve gone through everything that’s explained here in different ways: the traumatic passage of an industrial society, proud of its achievements, to a society of the spectacle that continually has to re-exhibit itself. From Spain, the events of the miners seemed very far away, but history repeated itself very shortly thereafter. On top of that, I guess that you would be emotionally closer to characters like Adrian Street than I would be.
JD: I had to research what happened at Orgreave. I saw it on TV, like you did, I witnessed the strike on TV. The portrait of Adrian Street with his father was such a strange image, such a strange photograph, which I felt I have to investigate, just like the miners’ strike That image and the work about the miners’ strike are very similar, for they’re both works about a country trying to come to terms with being, of losing an industry, how does that change happen, but also what does it look like. Adrian embodies the change. He’s not just an entertainment figure, a wrestler, an outrageous person. He is a metaphor of what happened to the UK: it went from being an industrial country to being a country about services, entertainment, and creativity. That photograph is not only predicting this change, it’s literally embodying it. With his body he’s showing the change as it’s happening, of how to be post-industrial or at least one of the many possible strategies. It summed up 50 years of history in England. The Orgreave work was really about how a country de-industrialises, what you do to the people, how you treat them, the effect on a whole country. That is why both works are so weirdly connected: it is the re-enactment of a source. I wanted to know more about the picture and its circumstances. Adrian once was asked where he would like to be photographed for a newspaper article. They were paying him a lot of money to tell his life story and he said, “I want to go back to mine where I worked as a young man and I want to be photographed with my father.” Probably nobody realised that the photograph was basically revenge. He hated his father, hated the mine, hated that part of the world, hated everything about it. He went back to show them what he’d made of his life. He’s like someone who had not only come back: he had come from the future, some sci-fi character, to show what the future is going to be like. He seems to say, “It’s going to be bright and shiny not dirty and black.” I see it as a prophetic image, almost religious, or visionary, but by accident.
* Curatorial text published in the catalog Jeremy Deller. Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires 2015