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Jeremy Deller talks about his contributions to The Writing On Your Wall, by Neil Cooper
“Vote Conservative” the white-lettered legend went on a sky-blue background in Deller’s new construction, with the words “For a New Britain” emblazoned below in smaller letters. Beyond such mixed messages, it was the face next to the slogan that caught the eye.
Rather than an image of Tory leader David Cameron, a far more telling photograph of a beatific looking Rupert Murdoch beamed out, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his somewhat wrinkly mouth. At the time, while no-one doubted the Murdoch media empire’s influence on British politics, Deller’s work appeared to be the subtlest of satires. In light of the ongoing phone-hacking scandal, it now looks like a prophecy.
This image is one of Deller’s contributions to The Writing On Your Wall, a new exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers which aims to reclaim the radical roots of print as a medium. As well as the Murdoch poster, the show will feature new commissions from Deller, Alasdair Gray, Art & Language, Ruth Ewan and Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. These will sit alongside historical works, from the 17th century broadsides of James Gillray and political pamphlets produced in the early 20th century, through to poster-poems by Christopher Logue and works by 1960s British Situationist provocateurs, King Mob.
Deller’s new piece is a screen-printed photograph taken from a local newspaper. The picture shows four people, either with walking sticks, crutches or in wheelchairs, standing in front of their soon to be closed day centre. Such an image is an all too familiar piece of community activist iconography, in which aggrieved citizens look glumly into the camera as the physical manifestations of their doomed lifelines loom large behind them. This is especially the case in the current economic climate, when public spending cuts are wiping out day centres and other services. The piece also continues Deller’s fascination with reclaiming social totems and disseminating their message in brand new contexts.
As well as The Battle of Orgreave, Deller’s projects have included Acid Brass, in which a northern English brass band played arrangements of first generation club tunes. More recently Deller constituted a civic parade through Manchester city centre which put some of the city’s more contemporary iconography to the fore, including Joy Division songs played by a steel band.
“It’s the sort of image you see in newspapers a lot,” says Deller of his new print. “In a way it’s about the clichés of local newspapers, but it’s very important as well in terms of how images like this are depicting a changing society. It is a kind of community that’s under threat, and that’s something that really interests me, and I’d really like to do a whole series of pieces like this one.”
If he does, it will form part of a major retrospective Deller is working on for the Hayward Gallery in London, where his ongoing inquiry into hidden histories will be brought out into the open more than ever before. The Battle of Orgreave will sit alongside a recent film about 1970s British wrestler Adrian Street, whose flamboyantly camp persona was a million miles away from the Welsh mines he was destined for. The film was inspired by a photograph of Street dressed in full finery alongside his coal-miner father sporting his very different working clothes down the pit.
“He’s led a fairytale life,” Deller says of Street, who now resides in Florida where he designs wrestling outfits, including those seen in the Mickey Rourke film, The Wrestler. “But it was a very tough one. The film’s a social history, but it’s also a very personal history, about how Adrian Street reinvented himself.”
Where once his approach might have been ghettoised as community art in its most patronising sense, Deller sees nothing unusual in what is essentially a curiosity about social groupings.
“I’d like to think most people are interested in these sorts of things,” he says. “For me it’s a natural thing to be interested in them, because we’re all part of the world.”
While all the artists in The Writing on Your Wall each come armed with their own individual approach, they have in common an oppositionist stance rooted in pop culture. Alasdair Gray’s literary and visual work has long been lionised by the establishment his work critiques. Former Turner nominees Art & Language have propagated an ongoing dialectical debate, often in collaboration with Texan-born alt.rock legend Mayo Thompson’s band vehicle, The Red Krayola, for whom they have contributed lyrics since the 1970s.
Edinburgh College of Art graduate Ruth Ewan’s interest in radical histories and social heritage is self-evident in Brank and Heckle, her debut solo show currently at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The titles of Tatham and O’Sullivan’s The Indirect Exchange of Uncertain Value and their 2010 CCA show, Direct Action Is Therefore Necessary, may sound as polemical as some of Art & Language’s provocations hint at, but in reality both are far more playful.
Of these live and kicking artists forbears, King Mob were a group of Notting Hill-based mischief-makers who took their name from graffiti daubed on the walls of Newgate Prison following the Gordon Gin riots of 1780. They had loose connections to Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, with Reid’s Suburban Press putting the tradition of political pamphleteering into a grassroots 20th-century context. In 1974 Reid became involved in the design and layout of Leaving The Twentieth Century, the first ever English language publication of Situationist writings. These translations were by King Mob member Chris Gray, whose idea of an anti-music group was made flesh when, depending on who you believe, McLaren and Reid either got together with The Sex Pistols or else created them as a concept.
“All the artists in this show definitely work in similar ways,” Deller concedes. “I suppose they’re all ... trouble-makers.”
One thing neither Deller’s or any of the other work on show in The Writing on Your Wall can be described as, however, is protest art.
“It takes a position, protest art,” Deller observes, “which probably looks good on demonstrations, but I much prefer to leave a bit of space in the work for people to think.”
This is something The Writing on Your Wall curator Rob Tufnell concurs with.
“Jeremy does quite subtle things,” he says, “but they can also be big gestures. So getting a colliery band to play acid house, which remains the only form of music for which a law was brought in to outlaw it in the shape of the Criminal Justice Bill, is subversive enough. Then to get Acid Brass to play the opening of Tate Modern in front of the Queen is a huge political act.”
As too, one suspects, will Deller’s Hayward show just as much as The Writing On Your Wall.
“It’s funny looking back,” says Deller, “because some things I was a bit embarrassed by at the time actually seem quite nice now. It’s a big deal going over all the things that make up your life, but it all stems from being interested in the world around me in its widest sense.”
The Writing On Your Wall, Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, September 17-October 25. Visit www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk .
