Iggy pop Life Drawing Class (2006-2011). Artist impression by Sarah Tynan Jeremy Deller / Sarah Tynan
by Valentina Rossi
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.(1) I do not intend, with this quotation, to include Jeremy Deller’s work in a panorama exclusively bound to what Guy Debord calls the society of the spectacle, for Deller is certainly no Situationist (2); instead, it stems from a pop aesthetic that approaches a personal reinterpretation of collectivity, surely influenced by the society of the spectacle, but translated into the poetics typical of 1990s artists. In the simplicity of the forms used, such as posters and T-shirts—those which Zygmunt Bauman in “liquid modernity” defines as the products of “an era dominated by the throwaway” (3)—Deller reflects upon the consequences and the acceptance of pop culture, using its very own communication and marketing mechanisms. Examples of this are works like Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006) and The Use of Literacy (1997), but also unrealized works donated to MoRE [The Museum of Refused and Unrealised Art Projects] such as Iggy Pop Life Drawing Class (2006–2011). The project consisted of inviting a music icon like Iggy Pop to pose for a life-drawing class, without revealing his identity to students, with results that would then have been donated to and kept at the Smithsonian Institution. With this act, Deller strives for a sort of “preservation,” “historization,” and “celebration” of pop music in a culturalelite context, though paradoxically inverting and shifting places, stressing how these groups exert considerable influence both on different generations and on the collective imaginary. Music,(4) therefore, as a veritable builder of messages, like in the work Brian Epstein Died for You or The Search for Bez (both from 1994)—an entire music culture that intermingles with varying social contexts.
Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006). Production still showing Depeche Mode fans from all over the world. ©️Jeremy Deller
Deller’s world isn’t Andy Warhol’s glam world, but rather an imaginary one that shifts between a subculture world, like post-punk Manchester in the 1980s, and media figures such as Lady Diana or George Bush. His encounter with Andy Warhol seems to have made him understand not only the importance of glossy magazine celebrities, but also some of the mechanisms of series and repetition that are reflected in his early works, like for example his poster (1994–1996) and T-shirt production (1993–1995).
©️Jeremy Deller
As I have already said, Deller isn’t a Situationist. But the fact remains that he creates situations, proposing them through a filter that is ironic and desecrating at the same time, giving rise to disarming contexts that combine low and high culture, and the middle and upper classes. Besides, as Bourriaud states, we’ve gone from a consumer society that spawned pop art to a communications society that instead created—as he himself theorized—relational art. These “relations” are present in works like What Would Neil Young Do?(2006), which involved poster distribution with writing that once again refers to the world of music (for the Frieze Art Fair), and Folksong (2007), with the same operational modalities and at the same fair, though one year later.
Deller focuses these works on direct exchange with the public, as his poetics is certainly not “sentimental” like that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but rather a distribution that includes the audience-at-large to whom the artist wishes to give something, almost as if it were an actual event gadget or souvenir. The enormous pool of contemporary society not only concerns performance and music but also the theme of war that Deller deals with in various works, like in these projects refused for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square—once again donated to MoRE. Here, his anti-monumental and anti-patriotic outlook is developed through an initial proposal with a life-sized statue of David Kelly, the British scientist who died (a suicide, it would seem) following his statements to the media expressing doubts regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A second project, The Spoils of War, intended to display the wreck of an automobile destroyed by a bomb in Iraq. It is an anti-monument, a celebration by paradox, therefore ushering in a trace of the war to that which, for centuries, had been the heart of the British Empire—a place to celebrate glorious acts and which, with Deller, as with other British artists, undergoes an inversion of meaning. Deller refuses the traditional and celebratory monument, opting instead to work on opposites, on inverting meaning.
