Art Is Magic: a children's book for adults by

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I suppose if you don’t go to art college, you don’t really know what the rules are,” he says. ​ “Maybe that’s the thing: the unwritten rules – doing whatever you can get away with. Iknew Ididn’t have technical talents as such, Ijust had to use my wits.” Later, when I ask Deller if he considers himself an outsider, he winces. “I don’t know about that. I mean, in one way, I’m proper establishment, really. I went to private school. I had all the advantages that gives you, and some of the disadvantages.” In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike. The dispute lasted for over a year and was the most bitterly fought since the general strike of 1926, marking a turning point in the struggle between the government and the trade union movement. Born in London and educated at Dulwich College, the Courtauld Institute and Sussex University, Deller attributes his interest in art and culture at least partly to childhood visits to museums. After an Art History degree he was, he says, ‘virtually unemployable’, and drifted into a few jobs before he started making art. He’s since won the Turner Prize and has represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Many of these participants were former miners (and a few former policemen) who were reliving events from 1984 that they themselves took part in. The rest were members of Battle re-enactment societies from all over the country. It’s now in the Imperial War Museum, where he feels it at least fits with the IWM’s modern focus on the victims of war rather than the perpetrators. The candles were made in Australia from moulds, and great care was taken not just with their likenesses but also with details such as their shoes and their gait. Cumulatively, I hoped these almost-imperceptible details would add up to something convincing, uncanny even.Pulling together all Deller’s cultural touchstones – from acid house and brass bands to crop circles and folk traditions – and featuring conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Beard, Art is Magic offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of a unique mind.

Also as an artist I was interested in how far an idea could be taken, especially one that is on the face of it a contradiction in terms, ‘a recreation of something that was essentially chaos’. Although I didn’t see the work in person, I watched a bit online and spent the day in the knowledge that an odd and foolhardy event was taking place simultaneously on the other side of the world. The detritus has since been melted down and recycled. I had been asked to make a work for the Melbourne festival and, with the bushfires uppermost on people’s minds, I suggested a sculpture of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch which destroys itself over a period of time, not dissimilar to a sacrifice or offering of some sort. I wanted it to have all the violence and beauty of a religious artwork, like Spanish polychrome sculpture. Persuading Britain’s weekend Vikings to participate was less of a problem, having enlisted expert re-enactment tactican Howard Giles onto our team. The day itself unfolded with military precision but came across (particularly in the police cavalry charge down Highfield Lane) as though it was happening for real. Which in many ways it was – a piece of social history re-lived, not re-enacted.Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. The reenactment was a public event, which was important for me as a form of public enquiry or, more viscerally, an autopsy of an exhumed corpse. Or even possibly as a reenactment of a crime in its original setting. Whatever it was, it was always, in my mind at least, performance art. It was never meant to heal community wounds – however much art is heralded as being capable of achieving this. If anything, it was intended to make people angry again. Deller finds fandom of any kind fascinating. He’s been one himself, and thinks fans make bands perform better – but it’s not only bands who have them; English Civil War re-enactors such as The Sealed Knot are fans of history, and Deller finds them just as interesting. At Beyoncé’s recent concert he enjoyed watching the audience as much as hearing the music Jeremy Deller’sThe Battle of Orgreave, staged seventeen years later, was a spectacular re-enactment of what happened on that day. It was orchestrated by Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment expert and the former director of English Heritage’s event programme. More than 800 people participated in the re-enactment, many of them former miners, and a few former policemen, reliving the events from 1984 that they themselves took part in. Other participants were drawn from battle re-enactment societies across England.

Another came up to Deller in tears at the opening, saying that he’d deprived real artists of having a show. There were suggestions that the exhibition was somehow cynical or exploitative, but for Deller, it represented a material culture he had grown up with through local church fetes. “Artists have always taken from folk and vernacular culture and made something else – they’re just interested in the visual world, aren’t they?” Twenty years later Deller was asked to make a film about the club scene in London in the 1980s; he thought that would be boring. Instead he wanted to make one about the relationship between politics and culture. In particular he wanted to show that Acid House was central to the huge social changes affecting the whole of the UK at that time There’s asection in Jeremy Deller’s new book in which his editor asks him, quite bluntly: ​ “Why do you do this?”Deller’s comparison between the standing and meaning that acid house and brass bands had in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s is well illustrated by Carl Freedman, writing in 1997 that,