Jeremy Deller: ‘The world worries me – but for an artist, that’s a good thing’

Jeremy Deller’s new book, which he describes as “a sort of retrospective”, is called Art Is Magic. It reflects his belief in the alchemical power of art to transform the everyday – “if only for a moment, making the mundane profound”. He did, however, consider several other alternative titles for the book, including “That’s Not Art”, “Call That Art?” and “You Can’t Do That”, all of which are things people have said to him about his work.

While most conceptual artists probably accept that a certain degree of public bemusement comes with the turf, Deller is that rare thing: a conceptualist who feels the need to explain his art. “I do, yes,” he says, nodding, when we sit down to chat amid the organised clutter of the office of his flat overlooking north London’s Holloway Road, where he does most of his thinking and planning. “I’m aware that a lot of artists don’t, but I come from the approachable, rather than the obscure, school. To me, my work is quite obvious in a way, more obvious than a lot of contemporary art, but it is definitely conceptual insofar as I start with an idea and see what happens. That still unsettles people who expect art to be on gallery walls.”

Revealingly, he describes Art Is Magic as “a book about an artist rather than an artist’s book”. To this end, it is designed, he says, “to look a bit like one of those annuals you’d get for Christmas when you were a kid”. It is subtitled “a children’s book for adults”, which somewhat underplays the provocative political undertow of some of the projects described within, whether it is his epic reenactment of the “Battle of Orgreave” during the miners’ strike or his 2019 film Putin’s Happy, which captures the febrile atmosphere of the Brexit protests in Parliament Square. “The book is written in my own words,” he explains, “and the tone I was aiming for is someone sitting in a pub chatting to you about what they’ve been up to. I hope the book demystifies things, explains my motivations, and sheds some light on what I do.”

What Deller does ranges from the seemingly playful – an inflatable, lifesize, bouncy castle-style model of Stonehenge – to the deadly serious – the mangled shell of a car destroyed by a bomb in a crowded Baghdad market. The former, entitled Sacrilege, played host to children and ravers at various outdoor sites until it collapsed from wear and tear during a tour of Australia. The latter, called It Is What It Is, failed to make it on to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, but caused a stir when it was exhibited in several American cities and towns, from New York state to Texas and beyond in 2009. (It is now on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum.) He describes it as “probably the most irresponsible and foolhardy work I have made to date”.

Having just rewatched Putin’s Happy, in which he engages with individuals amid the often unruly and threatening throngs of protesters, I’m not sure I agree. The interviews he conducts in what he calls “potentially hostile territory” are set against a background tumult of noise, movement and confrontation. There were, I say, a lot of angry, white men shouting loudly. “Yes, and Brexit was their war,” he replies, shaking his head.

His strategy was to approach people with opposing views to his “in a friendly way, so as to hopefully get into their mind a little bit”. Does he, in retrospect, think he succeeded? “To a degree, yes. I wanted to see why they were like that, what had happened to make them so aggressively bound to this cause. With some people, I achieved that. But, most of the time, rational discussion wasn’t happening in that square. Once you started a debate, people would join in and start screaming and shouting. It was very heightened. Within five minutes, you’d be accused of being a paedophile and that was it.”

Now 57, Deller has been turning his often improbable ideas into art for 30 years. Most of what he does is collaborative, site specific and transient, his reputation resting to a degree on the ambitious nature of ephemeral projects that tend to pivot on the political or the countercultural. He is nevertheless reluctant to call himself a political artist, and insists he is not an activist. “I make work around and about politics,” he elaborates, “so politics is definitely embedded in the art as either a piece of political theatre or political memorial.”

His best-known work, The Battle of Orgreave, is both. It entailed two years of deep research and a cast of 1,000 former miners and historical war ‘reenactors’, whom he assembled in a windy field near Sheffield in 2001 to reenact the infamous confrontation between police and striking miners that took place near the Orgreave coking plant in 1984. In the book, he calls it “my Stairway to Heaven” and suggests that it may be “the one work that may outlive me”.

Like most of us, Deller experienced the actual event through the often chaotic news footage broadcast on television. “I was a teenager and I remember the imagery being so viscerally strong. Men fighting in a field in the countryside and being pursued up a hill by dogs and police on horseback. To me, it seemed medieval, the brutality of it as well as the spectacle.”

When he talks about his work, Deller often draws parallels between recent events and moments from history or mythology. He describes the rural acid-house raves of the late 80s, which he explored in his film Everybody in the Place, as “Dionysian and Bacchic”. When I ask him to elaborate, he says: “Though no one was thinking of it in these terms at the time, there was definitely a mythical, epic quality to the rave scene: the quest to find the rave, to move towards the light in the countryside, and to find a transcendent release through the experience. There was a folk element, too, insofar as raves were communal, grassroots events that involved rituals and strange modes of dress.”

Deller grew up in London and famously attended the elite private school Dulwich College at the same time as Nigel Farage, who makes a fleeting appearance in Putin’s Happy, revving up a union jack-waving anti-Brexit audience in Parliament Square. “Farage was a few years ahead of me. He swallowed the whole project and still believes what he was taught there, whereas I had to unlearn everything.” What was the project? “Oh, that there is a hierarchy and you are at the top, and that’s how it goes, basically. Whereas if you’re poor, it’s your own fault.”

Later, when I ask Deller if he considers himself an outsider, he winces. “I don’t know about that. I mean, in one way, I’m proper establishment, really. I went to private school. I had all the advantages that gives you, and some of the disadvantages.”

I meant more in terms of the art world, where he has always seemed out of step with the prevailing trends and apart from the ongoing carnival of commodification that began in earnest with the ascendancy of the YBA generation, of whom he is a contemporary. “Well, my work is less defined by what’s going on in the art world,” he says. “And I do feel like I have created a world to be within in a sense. But, no, I’m not really an outsider. It would be too romantic to say that.”

At school, an off-message teacher hosted a weekly film club where the young Deller was mesmerised by “mind-bending films” such as Donald Cammell’s Performance, Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Ken Russell’s Tommy. “I was 12 or 13, when I sat and watched Performance on a big screen with huge speakers in the Great Hall – all this sado-masochistic sex and violence. I remember thinking: ‘What the hell is this?’ It definitely had an effect.”

His singular way of seeing, he says, is rooted even further back in a childhood absorbing pop culture via the TV. He remembers seeing the Beatles’ zany second film Help! on television in the early 70s, when he was five or six – “It blew my mind”. When his mother explained to him that it wasn’t real and that the band had split up, he felt “bereft”. Soon after, he bought his first vinyl single by the glam rock band Sweet.

In Art Is Magic, he writes: “Glam rock demanded my attention as a child … I became totally invested in it and was buying more records then than at any time since.” What was its attraction for a well-bred south London schoolboy? “It was about the way they dressed as much as how they sounded,” he says. “You look at them now, and it’s pretty wild: the makeup, the glitter, the stage costumes, all that cross-dressing by people who were not really like that at all.”

The faux-campness of Sweet almost certainly informed the style of the 70s glam wrestler Adrian Street, the subject of Deller’s film So Many Ways to Hurt You, which he made between 2010 and 2012. One of the most intriguing images in the book is a photograph of Street in full glam mode – platinum blond tresses, mascara, lipstick, tight shiny trousers and top, platform boots – posing next to his father and fellow workmates at the pithead of Brynmawr colliery in 1973. Look closely and you realise Street is also wearing his middleweight wrestling championship title belt.

Deller describes the photograph as an act of revenge by Street on his father and the workmates who bullied him when he worked as a miner in his youth. “He decided to be photographed in the place he hated most to show those people what he had made of himself.” As is his wont, Deller also sees it as a prophetic image, almost Blakean in its resonance. “He’s showing the future to the past, his own past and Britain’s past. He’s basically saying to these older guys, ‘It’s over for you, because everything is becoming showbiz, entertainment and service industries. And that’s what I am!’ It’s like a modern equivalent of Blake’s Jerusalem where someone arrives on a golden chariot during the Industrial Revolution to proclaim the future.”

Art Is Magic reveals the full, dizzying range of Deller’s work to date, from Acid Brass, in which a Stockport brass band played acid house and techno, to We’re Here Because We’re Here, a deeply affecting public art project that involved 1,600 volunteers, dressed in first world war uniforms, appearing silently in public spaces across the UK. As with his famous drawing The History of the World, a flow diagram of how popular culture can sometimes shape the course of history, even predict it, his entire practice sometimes feels like an epic attempt to prove that everything is connected.

Does it become more difficult to come up with good ideas as he gets older? “Well, I’m 57, so I’m getting on now, but you have to be open and be a sponge to some degree to be an artist, whatever age you are. It’s also important to not get stuck in the things you do. It can be quite difficult in a way, but I think I managed to gracefully retire from pop culture a while back. I mean, a 50-year-old man at a club. It’s just weird.”

Of late, his work seems less playful. Putin’s Happy is a case in point, but also Father and Son, which was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and comprised lifesize wax candles of Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, which slowly melted over 12 hours in a deconsecrated Melbourne church. The work was a response to the Murdoch press amplifying conspiracy theories that arsonists played a major role in the devastating Australian wildfires of 2019 and 2020. “I usually don’t make such blunt statements,” he says, “but, with them, it was about the damage they have done to the world through their media empire. I wanted to create a contemporary secular image that echoed classical religious art, and make it as grizzly and beautiful as I could.”

Does he worry about the current state of the world, the rising populism, the media propaganda, the acute sense of imperilled democracy? “Yeah, the world worries me constantly, but, for an artist, that is almost a good thing. It gives you something to constantly push against. If the world was perfect, what would I be doing – just making nice paintings all the time?”

 

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