Jeremy Deller | Art is Magic

Jeremy Deller

Art is Magic

London, UK: Cheerio Publishing  2023

240 pp., 8.5 x 1.25 x 10.75”, hardcover

Edition size unknown

Art is Magic is “a book about an artist rather than an artist’s book”, Deller told the Guardian last April, also calling it “a sort of retrospective.”

Subtitled “A Children’s Book For Adults”, it was designed “to look a bit like one of those annuals you’d get for Christmas when you were a kid.” The large, colourful volume includes a cardboard cut-out of the Druid Ceremony at Stonehenge, and a sheet of stickers with designs that had previously featured on Deller t-shirts, plaques and posters (Welcome to the Shitshow!, I’d Rather Be Reading, the book’s title, etc.). A page of speech balloons with quotes from Andy Warhol and William Morris invites the viewer to identify who said what. The cover exclaims “The Best Book by Jeremy Deller” and the back pages are reserved for notes, pre-adorned with doodles. 

The idea of a retrospective as children’s book has been explored before (Wim Delvoye for Dummies was modelled after children's bath books, with soft, padded, waterproof pages) but this shares more in common with Laurie Anderon’s excellent Stories From The Never Bible, a career retrospective monograph told in the artist’s own voice. 

“The book is written in my own words,” Deller 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.”

The title draws together thematic concerns and cultural touchstones from through Deller’s practice, such as pop music, politics, art, film and history - from Factory records to factory workers to Warhol’s Factory. 

“Art is a way of staying engaged and in love with the world,” writes Deller in the introduction, perhaps the simplest and most effective way to describe the hold art has on those it has a hold on. “It is also a form of magic, it’s alchemical power transforming reality, if only for a moment, making the mundane profound.” This is a somewhat more grandiose reading, which he undercuts by following it with “It can be deeply absurd and even stupid at times.”

To further illustrate this, the introduction includes alternative titles you can use if you don’t like Art is Magic, all of which were once contenders: 

Animal Vegetable Pop Music

Thirty Years of Hurt

That’s Not Art

What’s the Point of That? 

What Were you Thinking? 

Mid-Career Crisis

Chapter One examines music projects Deller has made, ranging from the faux-exhibition posters for musicians like Morrissey, to Acid Brass to Everybody in the Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. A hand drawn diagram from 1996 - The History of the World - lays out many of the concerns Deller will return to throughout his work. It draws literal connections between Brass Bands and Acid House, worker’s rights and underground music. 

Chapter Two looks at the 2012 work Sacrilege, which remakes Stonehenge as a kind of fairground bouncy castle. The massive inflatable work debuted at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and then headed to London for the Olympic Games. It allows viewers to engage with culture, history and archaeology, while jumping up and down. During an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Deller said "I just wanted to make the most stupid artwork ever made."

Chapter Three looks at The Battle of Orgreave, which Deller calls his “Stairway to Heaven”,  and cites as the work he most gets asked about during artist talks. “The one work that may outlive me”. The 2001 project involved Deller working with a cast of almost a thousand to stage an historical re-enactment. Not of the ancient Battle of Marathon, the Civil War or the War of 1812 - Deller’s reenactment was of a miner’s strike, from only seventeen years earlier. Approximately a third of the performers were local residents and some had been involved as protester or police officer in the actual event, which has been called "one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history”. Deller had the former cops portray protesters and vice versa. The event became the subject of a Channel 4 documentary by Hollywood filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode, etc). See earlier post here, for more information. 

Public Artworks is the focus of Chapter Four, including Deller's rejected proposal for London’s Fourth Plinth - a car destroyed by a bombing in Iraq, which he hoped would rot in public during the eighteen months it would have been displayed in Trafalgar Square. The shortlisted proposal lost out to Antony Gormley, so Deller took the show on the road. The destroyed car spent more than a month at the New Museum in New York, before being towed to Los Angeles. En route, the car made stops in Texas, Alabama and Tennessee, Republican strongholds where the artist would meet with people “who didn’t necessarily share my opinions about the war”. 

Queen Victoria with her face smashed in is the title of Chapter Five, which consists of a conversation about statues with broadcaster Mary Beard. Chapter Six is about bats, which Deller lists (alongside Marmite) as one of his favourite things, throughout the book. Don’t Fuck With Bats takes its name from a sticker he produced in 2020, during Covid. 

Chapter Seven is about Depeche Mode and their fans, a project which harkens back to an early work about fans of the Manic Street Preachers. Deller’s collaborations with designer Fraser Muggeridge is the subject of Chapter Eight, ranging from business cards to billboards, album covers to massive projections (“Thank God for Immigrants”). Chapter Nine celebrates another years long collaboration, this time with Alan Kane, Deller’s partner on the Folk Archive Project (when I was at Art Metropole, I published the first iteration of this work, as the 2nd and final issue of Defile Magazine - see post here).  

A pub called The Curator is the title of Chapter Ten, about a Heathrow Airport bar. Deller makes the distinction that he is a “selector" not a curator, “choosing objects to go alongside each other to create some kind of vibration or tension”. 

An interview with Daniel Scott makes up Chapter Eleven and Glam music, champion wrestler Adrian Street and William Blake are the subject of Chapter Twelve, Valhalla in W12. Deller’s Valhalla, or Mount Olympus, was Shepherd’s Bush, the west London suburb that was home to Top of the Pops. Pop music, he says, taught him about “death and capitalism”. 

Benny Hill with the sound turned down is the title of Chapter 13, about Deller’s encounter with Andy Warhol. Deller was a fan because of Warhol’s connection to the Velvet Underground, and met him less than a year before he died. The Anthony d’Offay Gallery, alongside an exhibition of self-portraits, hosting a signing event in 1986. “The act of signing was deeply connected to his childhood,” Deller writes, “[Warhol] had written to Hollywood stars for their autographs and clearly understood our desire to have something signed; he saw it as a form of benediction.”  People brought books, copies of Interview magazine and - unsurprisingly - grocery store cans of Campbell’s soup. Deller brought a bootleg Wham! shopping bag for Warhol to sign. While this was happening, the twenty-year old art student finds himself invited by photographer Christopher Makos to meet Warhol’s entourage the next day, at their hotel. There he discovers a dozen men watching Benny Hill on TV with a Roxy Music Greatest Hits record playing on a boom box. 

Deller’s work made when he represented Great Britain at the Venice Bienalle in 2013 is covered in Chapter 14 and Iggy Pop Life Class in Chapter 17. The latter involved the 68-year old singer and Stooges frontman posing nude for a drawing class at the New York Academy of Arts. 

“The life class is a special place in which to scrutinize the human form,” Deller said of the project. “As the bedrock of art education and art history, it is still the best way to understand the body.” “For me it makes perfect sense for Iggy Pop to be the subject of a life class; his body is central to an understanding of rock music and its place within American culture,” Deller said in a press release at the time. “His body has witnessed much and should be documented.”

“I come from the approachable, rather than the obscure, school,” Deller told the Guardian, when promoting this book. “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.”

Deller understands the world around him through pop culture. This is reflected in both his subject matter and often the media that he works in (performances in public, t-shirts, stickers, billboards, shopping bags, etc.) The desire with this book to make his work accessible fits in with his larger approach, making the title both retrospective monograph and artist book.