| Acid-house music, tea-dances, brass bands, rock fans' tributes, stories of the miners' strike: these are expressions of 'folk' culture or popular culture; culture as lived rather than learned; culture with a small 'c'. Such is the raw material of Jeremy Deller's work, which can take the form of live and recorded musical performance, still photography and video, performance and book publishing. He presents himself as a very different, multifaceted kind of artist: curator, social entrepreneur, actor, and producer.
Much of the work involves collaborations with individuals and groups of people, but the artist often remains absent from the events he conceives and organises. There is a sense of democracy in the range of his subjects — from a cyclist knocked down near his home to the nightclub owner and celebrity Lothario, Peter Stringfellow — and in the way those subjects are involved and given a voice. Even the way the work is made and distributed is ‘democratised’: the CD of Acid Brass can be found on the shelves of art-gallery bookshops and record shops and also on such websites as Amazon for the price of a normal, commercial CD.
And his collection of folk-art archives can be easily accessed on the web
(see Find out more).
Deller investigates how communities and individuals interact according to their respective systems of belief. Any social group’s enthusiasms, rites and representations are based on a common past, belief and preferences. Deller works with these groups and their systems directly, sometimes bringing two groups together who would not otherwise connect.
Crucially, whatever his subject, Deller's work displays a genuine respect and empathy. 'Warhol said that pop art was about liking things,' he has said, 'whereas for me folk art is about loving things.'
|
