Early on in Art is Magic, Jeremy Deller’s bumper compendium of his back catalogue, the 2004 Turner Prize winner talks about how he made the shift ‘from making things to making things happen.’ This line sums up Deller’s whole approach as an artist over the last thirty years, whether persuading the Williams Fairey Brass Band to play house music in Acid Brass (1997), reconstructing The Battle of Orgeave (2001), one of the key moments in the 1984 miners’ strike, or reinventing Stonehenge as a bouncy castle on Glasgow Green (2012).
Other works featured in Art is Magic include So Many Ways to Hurt You (2010) – a film about glam wrestler Adrian Street – and Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2019) , which filmed Deller giving a history of rave culture to a classroom of teenagers. Deller’s mix of pop culture, social history and civic spectacle has made for a form of very public art that engages with the world with a playfulness at its heart.
In keeping with this, Art is Magic more resembles a scrapbook or a Christmas annual than a coffee table tome, becoming an artwork in itself as much as a historical retrospective. The effect, it seems, was deliberate.
“I wanted something that was approachable, readable and friendly in terms of the tone,’ says Deller, who appears at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. “The way the cover’s done probably does make it reminiscent of annuals and so on, but I wanted that feel to it. I didn't want it to look like an art book, and I wanted it to be full of things. It's not got everything I've done over the last thirty years, but it's got quite a lot, maybe sixty or seventy per cent of what I've done, so I wanted it to be packed with stuff, so you could revisit the book and look at different sections at different times. You don’t have to take it on logically either, because it's not in chronological order, which is really important.’
Deller’s Edinburgh event is called It’s Time to Lose Control, named after the fourth chapter of Art is Magic.
“That’s the most meaty chapter in the book,’ he says, “and I suppose I wanted to have something a bit cryptic. There are two or three big projects in that chapter, all of which have their own degree of risk and chaos.’
Regarding his move from making things to making things happen, Deller puts it down to Acid Brass.
“That brass band liberated me from having to make objects and be an artist in that sense,’ he says. “They made me understand that I could work with people and do projects, and they were so easygoing and made everything so straightforward, even though I was asking them to do something that probably sounded a bit odd. So you rely on people who are just going to be up for doing something a bit different, and seeing where it goes.’
If there is a thread running through Deller’s work, it is arguably about making connections, both in terms of himself and others.
“I suppose it’s about connecting people, and connecting ideas that might not be thought of as being connected, like a brass band playing acid house music, and trying to find some common ground in some way. I'm not a very hopeful person about the state of the world. I never have been. I don't feel very confident about the future of humanity, but I try to make art to keep me hopeful about things, to keep me engaged with the world and what's going on in it.’
Jeremy Deller: It’s Time to Lose Control, Edinburgh International Book Festival,
August 22, 5.45-6.45pm. Art is Magic is published by Cheerio.
The list Edinburgh Festivals Guide, August 2023
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