Magic touch

Connection and collaboration are central to the work of award-winning conceptual artist Jeremy Deller. He tells Neil Cooper that while his faith in the future of humanity is fragile, creating art inspires a sense of optimism

Early on in Art Is Magic, Jeremy Deller’s bumper compendium of his 30-year 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 across four decades, whether persuading the Williams Fairey Brass Band to play house music in ‘Acid Brass’ (1997), reconstructing ‘The Battle Of Orgreave’ (2001), a key moment in the 1984 miners’ strike, or reinventing Stonehenge as a bouncy castle on Glasgow Green in ‘Sacrilege’ (2012).

Other works featured in Art Is Magic include ‘Father And Son’ (2021), where two life-size wax figures (closely resembling Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch) slowly melt; ‘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 the world with playfulness at its heart. In keeping with this, Art Is Magic more resembles a scrapbook or a Christmas annual than a coffeetable 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. ‘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 30 years, but it’s got quite a lot; maybe 60 or 70%. 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.’