Jeremy Deller’s nomination to represent Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale didn’t come as a surprise. The 2004 Turner Prize winner has been a dominant figure on the British art scene for almost a decade, and his first retrospective, “Jeremy Deller: Joy in People,” has just finished touring Europe and the U.S. to great acclaim. Yet Deller is anything but the usual museum-type artist. Described by the British Council’s pavilion commissioner, Andrea Rose, as “a pied piper of popular culture,” he is at his best when working in the larger world, with people of all stripes. Procession, 2009, organized for Manchester International Festival, was a riotous celebration of the city’s diversity in the form of a parade, gathering participants as varied as the Unrepentant Smokers, the Carnival Queens, and the Adoration of the Chip group. Realized the same year, It Is What It Is cut closer to the bone. The New Museum in New York displayed the wreck of a car bombed in Baghdad, and an Iraqi citizen and a U.S. war veteran later toured with it elsewhere in America to continue the debate it begat.
Deller never shies away from poking where it hurts. His notorious Battle of Orgreave, 2001—the reenactment of a 1984 confrontation between police and miners that emblematized Margaret Thatcher’s fierce handling of the strike—probed very fresh wounds in the British psyche. The artist, who held his first exhibition at his parents’ house in 1993, when they were on holiday (he only moved out at age 31), can also be tender in his quasi-anthropological approach. He records vernacular forms of artmaking in his longtime project Folk Archive, chronicles the life of the Klein gardens in Münster (Speak to the Earth and It Will Tell You, 2007–17), and has collected and displayed artworks made by fans of the band Manic Street Preachers. The artist met Modern Painters U.K. editor Coline Milliard to discuss his British Council commission.
Coline Milliard: Stuart Hall concludes his essay in the catalogue of your retrospective by saying that you give an “artistic form” to “politics for a so-called non-political age.” Do you recognize yourself in this description?
Jeremy Deller: Yes, I suppose I do. I’m not going to contradict Stuart Hall—why would you want to do that? I work with politics, political events, or politicians even, yes. I look at them in a different way, reimagine them.
CM: But you seem to have quite an ambivalent relationship to the political.
JD: You work with what you have around you. I’m not an activist, and I don’t join many campaigns—which is probably why I do what I do. I’m not very good at being a spokesman for something. Someone like Bob and Roberta Smith—he’s amazing the way he puts himself on the line and his heart on his sleeve. I can’t really do that.
CM: Why not?
JD: It’s not in my emotional or mental makeup. I’m not a join-in-er, I never have been. I find it really difficult being part of a group of people doing or saying the same thing.
CM: Yet the group or collaborations with groups are at the heart of your practice.
JD: Yes, I love groups of people. And maybe it’s because I have a fear of the group—fear is probably too strong a word—but an uncertainty about groups that I want to work with them, almost to help me get over that slight anxiety over group behavior.
CM: Do you see collaboration as an artistic medium?
JD: Yes. Or people as an artistic medium. And collaboration is a form of that.
CM: I was thinking about Sacrilege, 2012, your inflatable Stonehenge bouncy castle. This is quite different from your other projects. Although it is interactive, it is also very much a sculpture.
JD: It’s a big object; it weighs tons. It was just an opportunity to do a really stupid big thing, and I thought I should do it because it wasn’t going to happen any other time. I had the idea, and it took years to happen. It was mainly because of the Olympics that you could do things like this. It toured Britain. It’s a really big one-liner. But I don’t mind that, and it’s necessary sometimes when you are doing public projects.
CM: You also had the idea for a Stonehenge gateway at the Olympic park.
JD: Yes, they asked a lot of artists to come up with ideas for the park’s ceremonial entrance points. My idea was to make a version of Stonehenge or of other such structures around the U.K. I liked the idea of having those instead of something really new and shiny in the Olympic park, of having something that looked like it’s been there for 5,000 years. It didn’t get commissioned. Maybe they thought I was taking the Mickey out of the Olympics, which of course I was. People didn’t know if the Olympics were going to be a disaster or not. So they were overly worried about everything. That work was seen as potentially a critique, but in a way it was all about British identity, the changing nature of it, and the indefinable quality of Britishness.
CM: Like Stonehenge.
JD: Exactly, everyone knows what it is, they know where it is, but no one knows what it was for or who really used it, what the people were like, how they spoke, what happened there. A lot of people agonize about what Britishness is. There are conferences about it all the time, and yet it doesn’t matter because it can be many things at the same time. It’s constantly evolving, and that’s why it’s an interesting thing to play with.
CM: I’d like to pick up on this idea of the one-liner. It seems to have been running through your work from the start, from the posters and T-shirts you did in the 1990s to the Folkestone Triennial’s slapstick routines [Risk Assessment, 2008].
JD: It sounds like a criticism.
CM: I think of it more as a device.
JD: Well, it’s a very simple piece of communication, isn’t it? Some things I do aren’t one-liners, but a lot of them are. I like slogans. I like big bold texts on walls, on banners, on posters. It’s something that appeals to me: someone just saying what they think, what they believe, saying something.
CM: Even the bombed car [Baghdad, 5 March 2007, 2009] is a one-liner.
JD: Exactly, as an idea. Most of the ideas I have can be described in a sentence. But some are hugely complicated, potentially quite dangerous ideas to do, yet they can be easily understood. The complexity comes later.
CM: How do you feel about representing Britain in Venice? Do you think you’re the best person for it?
JD: Absolutely [laughs], there’s no one else who can do this job at this time. You become an artist to be challenged, to be stretched, and to have these opportunities. I can understand why people would turn it down, but for me it’s almost why I’m doing this thing, to put myself into situations where I wouldn’t usually put myself and to try to work them out. Especially the older you get, I suspect, you could rest on your laurels and take things a little bit easier, but of course it’s the last thing you want to do.
CM: How does one start on a project? Particularly within the framework of the Venice Biennale?
JD: You go to the building and have a look at it. I had been to the British pavilion twice, but both times it had been totally transformed by the artists, Mike Nelson and Chris Ofili. When the selection panel met, I suppose they could see that I was capable of doing a traditional exhibition, and I think they liked that. I never thought I could do an exhibition like I did at the Hayward, but I did do it and it gave me confidence. So you just go there, and you think about what you are interested in, things maybe you’ve wanted to do for years and were not able to do. I’m going to be using the space.
CM: So the pavilion is not something that you are having a problem with.
JD: No, absolutely not. I’m using it in its totality. The only thing I was told was, “Please don’t do something people have to queue up to get into.” So there won’t be any queuing. It won’t be very British in that respect. It’ll be more of an open show.
CM: Showing in a traditional setting is an ongoing conundrum for you, isn’t it? At the Hayward Gallery, you had a slide show, Beyond the White Walls, 2012, depicting your various projects with you explaining them in a voiceover—which worked very well.
JD: It was my way to try to get around that. To hear your voice all the time, when you are editing or when you are in the Hayward is just mortifying. But it worked and people liked that. The pavilion is almost the size of the Serpentine Gallery, so I think of it in those terms really. And it’s not going to be tailored to an international audience. I’m just carrying on doing what I’ve been doing before.
CM: What kind of relationship do you have with Venice?
JD: I find it very annoying actually. It’s a totally frustrating town. I find it quite difficult being there, but that’s probably my fault for going to the openings. It really puts you in your place as an artist.
CM: Your artistic trajectory has become a bit of a legend. Your early meeting with Warhol . . .
JD: Yes, this has become a story now, with the bedroom show at my parents’ house. The narrative has been set. I didn’t talk about the Warhol thing until about four or five years ago because I knew that would be a problem. But once you’ve let that slip, that’s it—the cat’s out of the bag. I didn’t hang out with him for weeks and weeks, but I was there and I did meet him a few times. It was very important for a young person who liked art to go and hang out at the Factory. It was a mind-blowing experience.
CM: During this formative period you approached artmaking from quite a tangential angle.
JD: Did I?
CM: You didn’t go to art school, for example. Do you feel that it somehow opened up what you feel art could be or do?
JD: Well, I never had those blocks that you were given at art college to question every action you make through theory. I don’t question myself enough, maybe. But I’m more of an instinctive person. I always say Alan Kane, whom I work with a lot, and I were never given the rule book. That was good actually. I think I’ve been quite lucky in terms of where I was at the time and the things that were happening.
CM: Your art is about everything but art.
JD: You’re right. The subject matter is not art or art history necessarily; it’s about other things. That’s how I work. I like documentary films. I like reading the papers. I like the news. So that’s a reflection of me as a person.
This interview appears in the May 2013 issue of Modern Painters.