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

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Over a thousand people were involved in the project, either through taking part, filming or helping with the research. I would personally like to thank everyone who has shown faith in the project or was at least willing to give it a go. He’s not coy about the commercial aspect either – if a book is easy to read people are more likely to buy it. They have, he says, printed a lot of copies; they need to sell them somehow. 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. Deller’s comparison between the standing and meaning that acid house and brass bands had in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s is well illustrated by Carl Freedman, writing in 1997 that, Father and Son: Jeremy Deller’s wax sculptures of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Photograph: C Capurro

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”. To illustrate rave culture he showed footage of people trying to get to Stonehenge and being handcuffed by police. He also included the reactions of some passers-by, and says he was as surprised as the pupils to find that older people, far from being outraged at the ravers, were disgusted by the police Also as an artist I was interested in how far an idea could be taken, especially one that is on the face of it a contradiction in terms, ‘a recreation of something that was essentially chaos’. With so many works to consider, there’s one piece that Deller is particularly proud of. Baghdad centred on acar damaged by the Al-Mutanabbi Street bombing in 2007, looking more like alarge scrap piece of metal than afour-wheeler. Asobering reminder of the 26 people who were killed by the bomb, Deller took the car on a2009 nationwide tour of America, before bringing it to the UK, where it currently sits at the Imperial War Museum.Perhaps his most beloved works, especially from ayouth perspective, are his explorations in dance music. Everybody In The Place – An Incomplete History of Britain 1984 – 1992, abrilliant documentary which aired on BBC2in 2019, was the artist’s examination of the significance of acid house and how it wasn’t all about drugs. It was about community, acollective spirit, rebelling against economic decline, class wars and over 10years of Tory misrule (sound familiar?). He filmed astaged lecture to aclassroom of diverse teenagers, as anew school of thought, and showed them period footage of ravers. 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, It’s not easy making political art fun or even engaging. But in Deller’s hands, political art is pop-coloured, hilarious, abit piss-takey. The book’s subtitle is, after all, AChildren’s Book for Adults. 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?”

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.” With Deller’s idea, it was clear that the decoy of a film would be necessary. This would not only provide a source of finance (there was no getting away from the fact that this would be a lengthy and expensive undertaking) but it would also lend the project a certain degree of credibility. Throughout the last ten years at Artangel, we’ve always found that people (especially the owners of extraordinary locations) often become much more interested and much more co-operative if film or television is involved. The event was commissioned by Artangel, formerly responsible for such projects as Rachel Whiteread’s House and Michael Landy’s Break Down. The research process took about two years and consisted of travelling up to the area and talking to people who had been involved in the strike. We recruited former miners from towns and villages within a 30-mile radius of Orgreave: Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield, Rotherham. These meetings started off being low-key, often one-to-one in a pub or in somebody’s home. The scale of these conversations gradually increased, until just before the event itself when I was meeting 50 or more former miners at a time. the comradeship of brass bands and their strong sense of pride have meant that they have long been used to symbolise the solidarity of trade unions and the working class. While house music’s original political stance was more one of passive resistance, in England the acid house scene took on a more oppositional, counter-cultural edge. Alongside the shared euphoria of Ecstasy, the music's independence from major record companies and the illegality of many of the raves fostered a sense of community amongst a generation of disaffected, Thatcher-alienated youth. 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.

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. 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.” Just saying ​ ‘rage’ and ​ ‘rave’, they’re two very similar words. Rave came out of ahorrible moment in history for young people, but it was avery necessary moment. As were the drugs, really – it was necessary drugs that made many people like each other.”

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. 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. 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

Mini versions were produced to pay for the inevitable overspend, giving the public the opportunity to burn their own rightwing chaos merchants at their leisure. The History of the World is a particularly important work for Deller as it sets up the terms by which much of his work has continued to be made as an expression of a move towards what Freedman has described as a ‘more community-based culture’ that was an expression of a direct involvement with and understanding of all forms of popular culture as socially (and politically) determining. Deller’s work is always rooted in collaboration and engagement, and reflects in part what critic Nicolas Bourriaud has called ‘relational aesthetics’. This term was first used by Bourriaud in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic Large groups of men like stag parties and football fans on trains frighten Deller; why then, asks Higgins, is so much of his work centered around masculinity? It was from these thoughts that Sacrilege, a life-sized inflatable model of Stonehenge, was created. I was trying to think what the stupidest idea that was possible to make would be, the sort of thing you might see on The Simpsons. It was made more or less by hand in Grantham by a company called Inflatable World Leisure. The inflatable stones were all individually painted.

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