Art Is Magic: a children's book for adults by

Product Information

I’m glad you’re not an historian’ says Higgins, ‘because you make history so much more interesting.’ Jeremy Deller at EIBF: (c) Robin Mair There’s asection in Jeremy Deller’s new book in which his editor asks him, quite bluntly: ​ “Why do you do this?” Higgins was one of only two journalists – and the only woman – invited to the rehearsals for Deller’s We’re Here Because We’re Here project. His plan was to have men dressed as World War One soldiers to appear unannounced, In Art is Magic, Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller brings together for the first time key works from his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired him. English Magic is also a new film work by Deller which forms a major part of his exhibition for the British Pavilion. The film brings together many of the ideas behind the works in the Pavilion, featuring visual and thematic elements that reflect the artist's interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history.

Deller during the filming of his 2001 re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreave. Photograph: Steve Forrest/Troika He wanted them to be in high-visibility locations, on roundabouts, near motorways, at railway stations. They didn’t approach people; if people came up to them they did not speak but instead handed them one of 19,000 cards with the name and details of a (regionally specific) soldier who had died on the first day of the battle. Deller spoke to every one of the participants, and gave talks about the project around the country 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?” It was first inflated in Glasgow in 2012, before being absorbed into the Olympic cultural celebrations. It toured the UK, and later went abroad, where it was hammered by typhoons in Hong Kong and a heatwave in Australia. I liked the idea of Stonehenge touring – turning up in your local park unannounced, then disappearing after a day, becoming a part of folk memory. The Olympic movement can be so pompous, taking itself so seriously with all these weird rituals and hierarchies, a bit like a religion. A country or institution that can’t laugh at itself is in trouble, and Sacrilege was my attempt to help with this situation. It allowed you to bounce about and fall over a founding myth.With conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Bear, the book offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of Deller’s life and works. Born in London and educated at Dulwich College, the Courtauld Institute and Sussex University, Deller attributes his interest in art and culture at least partly to childhood visits to museums. After an Art History degree he was, he says, ‘virtually unemployable’, and drifted into a few jobs before he started making art. He’s since won the Turner Prize and has represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. They handed out flyers explaining what had happened to the car, which Deller had been told had been blown up in the cultural heart of Baghdad. The explosion had killed over a hundred people. The reactions they received were perhaps surprising; the people who were crossest about it all were the anti-war factions, who felt it wasn’t sufficiently extreme. But most people were polite, though Deller says they couldn’t do the tour now A work Higgins says she particularly enjoyed was Sacrilege, a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London, consisting of an inflatable version of Stonehenge for people to bounce on. It appeared in Glasgow in 2012.

Making art outside gallery structures has allowed Deller to be nimble and responsive, often working with eye-catching graphics designed by Fraser Muggeridge – among them billboards reading “Cronyism is English for Corruption”, the infamous “Strong and stable my arse” 2017 election posters, and a series of bootleg Brexit protest T-shirts that included the immortal “Abercrombie & F*** Brexit”. Spread from Art is Magic by Jeremy Deller (Photo: Cheerio) Although I didn’t see the work in person, I watched a bit online and spent the day in the knowledge that an odd and foolhardy event was taking place simultaneously on the other side of the world. The detritus has since been melted down and recycled.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 suppose if you don’t go to art college, you don’t really know what the rules are,” he says. ​ “Maybe that’s the thing: the unwritten rules – doing whatever you can get away with. Iknew Ididn’t have technical talents as such, Ijust had to use my wits.”

This is an excerpt from the film which intercuts dramatic photographic stills from the clashes in 1984 with footage of the clashes re-enacted in 2001, together with moving and powerful testimonies, to tease out the complexities of this bitter struggle. that was shown at CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bourdeaux, and later was the subject of a book (first published in France in 1998 and translated into English in 2002). In this book Bourriaud describes relational aesthetics as ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon 2002, p.113). He spent a day with pupils in a North London school. By chance none of these young people had parents who had been born in the UK, so they had no idea about life here in the 80s. He showed them archive film of both the miners’ strike and various raves. The film became Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018.) The pupils were amazed. Deller took shots of their reactions. The Battle of Orgreave was incomprehensible to them – one asked if the men were striking because of climate change. You mean make art?” Deller responds with, notably, nervous laughter. ​ “It’s been aprocess of elimination, in that having studied art history, Isoon realised that it was aworld Iwasn’t equipped to be in.” I put myself and other people who were doing that at great personal risk. I mean, how would you know what the reaction would be to that in the Deep South? On the first day we started, we were in a campervan, towing the car, and the American soldier and the Iraqi civilian – both of whom had been in life threatening situations – looked really nervous. And I thought, ‘If you’re worried, then I should be really worried because you’ve been in war situations.’ But actually, on the whole, it was amazing to meet Americans face to face, without any of the fluff or hype around it, and just chat to them.”Pulling together all Deller’s cultural touchstones – from acid house and brass bands to crop circles and folk traditions – and featuring conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Beard, Art is Magic offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of a unique mind. Deller’s greatest work has taken place beyond gallery walls. Think of The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a 1000-person re-enactment of a clash between police and striking miners in 1984, for which Deller recruited a cast of ex-miners and battle re-enactors. Or We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016), his First World War memorial work, in which 1,400 young men in authentic military uniforms appeared, unheralded and unexplained, in public spaces around the UK on 1 July, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. And it’s the same in an art gallery; after half an hour you’re looking at the other people, not the art.’