To Wiels this afternoon to see Jeremy Deller’s Joy in People. A relatively young (born 1966) British artist, Deller is deliberately ephemeral and avoids the commodification of his work, so this exhibition is as much a set of documentary and photographic reports on his works as it is about the works themselves. He is perhaps chiefly known for a 2001 re-enactment of the iconic 18 June 1984 Battle of Orgreave. I found the film about the re-enactment mesmerising. The 1,000-odd extras included some 800 ‘professional’ historical re-enactors, together with 200 local people, including former miners and former policeman and one man who had been both a miner and then a policeman. Their quiet reflectiveness, and the miner/policeman’s acknowledgement that he had been a pawn in a deliberately staged battle in a far broader struggle between the state and some of its people, contrasted with the cheerful boisterousness of the re-enactors. But even the latter fell into quiet appreciation of just how intimidating galloping police horses or the sound of hundreds of batons on riot shields can be and, yes, there was Tony Benn, cheerfully reminding everybody how the BBC had in its reporting reversed the order of events, so that the stone throwing was portrayed as the provocation rather than a self-defensive reaction to the initial charge of the horses. No Brit of a certain age will be unmoved by the cumulative effect of this work. And yet, given the current situation, perhaps the most memorable work on display is a set of three hand-operated embossers. With these Deller embossed bank notes with messages in relief such as ‘I’m sorry’. As he puts it ‘It has this random life that you have no control over. Once you start stamping things on money, it starts out on this weird journey and you don’t know where it ends up.’
0 Comments
1 Pingback