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from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/20/jeremy-deller-joy-in-people

 Jeremy Deller: heady brew

Swirling 3D bats, a tidy teenage bedroom, and a full-size Lancashire caff … Adrian Searle revels in Jeremy Deller's long, strange journey

Adrian Searle
guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 February 2012 21.30 GMT
Article history





‘An OAP youth club’ … Valerie’s Snack Bar, 2009. Photograph: Linda Nylind


Through the sound-baffled walls come muted cries and urgent high-pitched squeakings. The cries are my own. The squeaks belong to the bats. Get them away from me! There are thousands of them, hurtling and surging around the room on their leathery wings. I feel like I'm on aHunter S Thompson bender. Flailing my arms to keep the creatures away, I lose my 3D glasses in all the excitement – and remember that this is just a movie.

Returning to the caves where in 2003 he shot the nightly departure of bats for Memory Bucket – his film about Texas and, tangentially, George Bush – Jeremy Deller filmed them again, this time in 3D. Deller likes bats. He was even involved in designing a bat house for theLondon Wetland Centre. The original bat movie was in Deller's Turner prize show in 2004, the year I was a judge. It was the bats what won it; or rather, it was Deller's already significant body of work – and especially The Battle of Orgreave, his 2001 re-enactment film about the battle between police and striking miners in the Yorkshire village in 1984.


What a long, strange trip it's been. Coming right at the end of Joy in People, Deller's new show at London's Hayward gallery, the bats are a treat. The exhibition begins in a version of Deller's teen bedroom, less the guano-spattered cave favoured by most adolescents, and more an orderly display of youthful interests and preoccupations, with posters on the walls, things neatly entombed in his built-in wardrobe, and a film about joyriding playing on the portable TV beside his bed. There's none of Deller's own growing-pains mess here (he is not, after all, Tracey Emin), even as you stumble from the Hayward foyer through a rainbow-coloured door, emblazoned with the words Bless This Acid House, after fighting through the queue for the David Shrigley show upstairs.

Jeremy Deller: 'Music is folk art, in the best sense' Link to this video


Deller's teen bedroom is tidier than most, but then he did live at home into his 30s. He once held a show in his room while his parents were away: there's a photo on the wall of Deller and his clean-cut mates making a tower of beer bottles. Printed across the image of the tipsy lads are the words: "We Might Not Have Girlfriends But We Do Know How To Have A Good Time." Yay. In my teens, I'd have preferred a girlfriend, a boyfriend, any kind of friend really. Some things don't change.


Deller and Shrigley are an apt coupling for the Hayward: both channel something from their early hormonal upheavals and teen confusion into their work – if work it is. Neither make what looks like art with a capital A. The A in Deller's case stands not for a Shriglian aaaarghhh, or even for art, but for archive, that untidy trail of enthusiasms, old photos, video footage, ephemera and details of scams and projects that have littered his past, all tidied up and made into some sort of sense. The poetic aspirations and pretensions of the Manic Street Preachers, the intertwined histories of brass band music and acid house, the culture of German allotment societies and even the erotic toilet-wall musings of literate blokes who haunt the British Library – they're all here, in a show that is part installation, part multimedia commentary, part seminar room on the war in Iraq and part caff. The cafe is a reconstruction of Valerie's snack bar in Bury market, Lancashire; Deller calls it "an OAP youth club".


If you get fed up, or want to look at people who are similarly cheesed off, you can watch someone lying on a sofa reading a book, against a big black wall on which the words "I ❤ Melancholy" have been picked out in gloss paint. Deller, I note, was once in a new-wave goth band, but he always seems too busy to lounge about reading Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, or to indulge in goth-like maunderings.


You can learn a lot in Deller's work, whether about the miners' strike and the still unhealed wounds the conflict caused, or how hard it was for aDepeche Mode fan to walk through Basildon town centre in the early 1980s wearing eyeliner. It may be no easier in present-day St Petersburg, where Deller filmed Depeche Mode fans celebrating the lead singer's birthday, for a film about the continuing worldwide obsession with Basildon's finest.


I don't know about eyeliner, but when Deller first met Andy Warhol, the young Londoner was wearing what appears to be a schoolblazer, in a 1986 souvenir snap with the bewigged one. Deller was studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, at the time, and I don't think they did school uniforms, even back then. But it might explain why Warhol invited him to hang out at his Factory in New York.


Deller's popularity in part stems from his interest in popular culture, or rather aspects of life that usually slip below the radar of the art gallery. He is far from alone in his interests, but you never feel he's slumming it or sexing up his fascination. One of the things I like about Deller's work is that he communicates his enthusiasms so well, and makes you see things, go to places and meet people you wouldn't otherwise encounter, or had forgotten. I remember my mother screaming at the wrestling on the telly on Saturday afternoons, as she worked her way through a bag of cockles with a pin. "Rip his balls off!" she'd shout in encouragement toMick McManus, her favoured wrestler, or to Adrian Street as someone tried to yank his ear off.


Deller went all the way to Florida to film Street, now over 70 but still fighting. The Welsh wrestler's biggest problem was his authoritarian dad. Deller's film is jaw-dropping stuff. A 1950s bodybuilding magazine hunk, Street later took his professional persona from glam-rock. Really, Deller never needed to turn his documentary into an art installation, with its wall-sized mural featuring Welsh pit-head and Florida beaches. All this adds nothing. He should just get his film about Street to a bigger audience. Television would be Deller's natural medium, I think, were it not that artists and TV don't mix.


Nowadays, artists don't have to make things or paint or even party hard with Larry Gagosian. They just have to find a place for themselves, inbetween things. Deller has found a way of using his enthusiasms, of pursuing his curiosity in a creative way, that is great for him and good for us, whether what he does looks like art or not. Taking a wrecked, rusted car used in the bombing of a Baghdad book market around the US on a truck and using it to start conversations between locals, a former US soldier and an Iraqi was a brave – if slightly doomed – attempt to bridge cultural gulfs. The footage he shot is also moving and salutary. At the Hayward, where the car is installed (though it's now owned by the Imperial War Museum), you can join the conversation.


Deller, it seems, walked backwards into the artist's life, which is to say that he discovered that his interests coincided with a possible role as an artist, whatever that might be now. He has made the role his own.