A work Higgins says she particularly enjoyed was Sacrilege, a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London, consisting of an inflatable version of Stonehenge for people to bounce on. It appeared in Glasgow in 2012. It was first inflated in Glasgow in 2012, before being absorbed into the Olympic cultural celebrations. It toured the UK, and later went abroad, where it was hammered by typhoons in Hong Kong and a heatwave in Australia. I liked the idea of Stonehenge touring – turning up in your local park unannounced, then disappearing after a day, becoming a part of folk memory. The Olympic movement can be so pompous, taking itself so seriously with all these weird rituals and hierarchies, a bit like a religion. A country or institution that can’t laugh at itself is in trouble, and Sacrilege was my attempt to help with this situation. It allowed you to bounce about and fall over a founding myth.

Jeremy Deller isn’t afraid to tell it like it is; he’s been doing just that for over 30 years, making art works that challenge us all to think differently. Now he’s written a book Art is Magic*, and he’s here, (rather appropriately) in the West Court of Edinburgh College of Art, to talk about it with The Guardian’s chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins. Throughout 2019 and 2020, large parts of Australia were destroyed by a number of bushfires: Forty-six million acres of land were burned and it is estimated that up to 3 billion animals were displaced or killed. The Murdoch media in the country had initially attempted to ignore the story. When it became clear that they couldn’t, they were happy to repeat accusations that environmentalists had started the fires.Jan Younghusband at Channel 4 came on board with unwavering enthusiasm and Mike Figgis, equally gripped by the scale and ambition of Deller’s vision, agreed to direct the film which fast became much more than simply a means to an end. 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. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. that was shown at CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bourdeaux, and later was the subject of a book (first published in France in 1998 and translated into English in 2002). In this book Bourriaud describes relational aesthetics as ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon 2002, p.113).

Deller describes the photograph as an act of revenge by Street on his father and the workmates who bullied him when he worked as a miner in his youth. “He decided to be photographed in the place he hated most to show those people what he had made of himself.” As is his wont, Deller also sees it as a prophetic image, almost Blakean in its resonance. “He’s showing the future to the past, his own past and Britain’s past. He’s basically saying to these older guys, ‘It’s over for you, because everything is becoming showbiz, entertainment and service industries. And that’s what I am!’ It’s like a modern equivalent of Blake’s Jerusalem where someone arrives on a golden chariot during the Industrial Revolution to proclaim the future.” He wanted them to be in high-visibility locations, on roundabouts, near motorways, at railway stations. They didn’t approach people; if people came up to them they did not speak but instead handed them one of 19,000 cards with the name and details of a (regionally specific) soldier who had died on the first day of the battle. Deller spoke to every one of the participants, and gave talks about the project around the country He’s not coy about the commercial aspect either – if a book is easy to read people are more likely to buy it. They have, he says, printed a lot of copies; they need to sell them somehow. 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. Making good political art is almost impossible. Deller makes it fun. What sets him apart is his utopian optimism and belief in people.' - Jonathan Jones, The GuardianYou mean make art?” Deller responds with, notably, nervous laughter. ​ “It’s been aprocess of elimination, in that having studied art history, Isoon realised that it was aworld Iwasn’t equipped to be in.” No! Only that I hate writing. It was like I was dying and my innards were splashing onto the desk. Writing is very, very, difficult.’ Large groups of men like stag parties and football fans on trains frighten Deller; why then, asks Higgins, is so much of his work centered around masculinity? While Stonehenge is the most recognisable structure in the UK, it remains an enduring mystery. For our national identity to be a bit of mystery is no bad thing, as it gives the public space to make up their own versions of who they are. The idea of multiple interpretations of a place and history goes against the instincts of nationalism and authoritarianism, where countries have their sacred founding myths that cannot be interfered with. A country or institution that can’t laugh at itself is in trouble. Sacrilege was my attempt to help with this situation

With Deller’s idea, it was clear that the decoy of a film would be necessary. This would not only provide a source of finance (there was no getting away from the fact that this would be a lengthy and expensive undertaking) but it would also lend the project a certain degree of credibility. Throughout the last ten years at Artangel, we’ve always found that people (especially the owners of extraordinary locations) often become much more interested and much more co-operative if film or television is involved. Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave – a dangerously ambitious form of community play proposed via a short fax – was an immediate provocation. The project demanded to be realised even though it appeared impossible. It was probably this that drew us to it. Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young and The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, the fictitious account of Charles Lindbergh’s proto-fascist presidency told through the eyes of an eight-year-old Jewish boy called Philip.I would never have undertaken the project if people locally felt it was unnecessary or in poor taste, As it was, we encountered support from the outset because there seemed to be an instinctive understanding of what the re-enactment was about. I was not interested in a nostalgic interpretation of the strike. The History of the World is a particularly important work for Deller as it sets up the terms by which much of his work has continued to be made as an expression of a move towards what Freedman has described as a ‘more community-based culture’ that was an expression of a direct involvement with and understanding of all forms of popular culture as socially (and politically) determining. Deller’s work is always rooted in collaboration and engagement, and reflects in part what critic Nicolas Bourriaud has called ‘relational aesthetics’. This term was first used by Bourriaud in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic It was from these thoughts that Sacrilege, a life-sized inflatable model of Stonehenge, was created. I was trying to think what the stupidest idea that was possible to make would be, the sort of thing you might see on The Simpsons. It was made more or less by hand in Grantham by a company called Inflatable World Leisure. The inflatable stones were all individually painted. 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. Much has been written about Deller over the decades but this, ‘the best book by Jeremy Deller’, is the first time he has pulled together all of his cultural touchstones.

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. But Jeremy Deller seems unlikely ever to wallow in the past; instead he interrogates it rigorously to uncover what it can tell us about the present and the future. In the process he creates art to ignite debate, to challenge us all to look at the world clearly, and to do so without any hint of the dreaded rose-coloured glasses. And it’s the same in an art gallery; after half an hour you’re looking at the other people, not the art.’ The History of the World is a graphic and textual portrayal of the history, influence and context for acid house and brass band music. Adopting the form of a flow diagram, it suggests that there are social and political echoes and points of confluence between these two musical movements that date from different eras; acid house being a post-industrial movement of the late twentieth century, and the brass band movement dating from the industrial era of the nineteenth century.They handed out flyers explaining what had happened to the car, which Deller had been told had been blown up in the cultural heart of Baghdad. The explosion had killed over a hundred people. The reactions they received were perhaps surprising; the people who were crossest about it all were the anti-war factions, who felt it wasn’t sufficiently extreme. But most people were polite, though Deller says they couldn’t do the tour now Over a thousand people were involved in the project, either through taking part, filming or helping with the research. I would personally like to thank everyone who has shown faith in the project or was at least willing to give it a go. In 1994, I made a poster about a reenactment of the battle. It was a semi-serious idea at that point – an attempt to see if there was a way to look at the strike and that confrontation as part of the canon of battles on British soil. I thought the form of a battle reenactment might just be an effective way to do this, as we in the UK are so used to this type of historical display. There was an absurdity built into the idea, not least because it taps into the national obsession with history and conflict to the point where, based on the way we talk about it, you’d think the second world war had finished only last week. When the former miners realised that the reenactors playing the police were unnerved by them, they played up to it 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’. Does he worry about the current state of the world, the rising populism, the media propaganda, the acute sense of imperilled democracy? “Yeah, the world worries me constantly, but, for an artist, that is almost a good thing. It gives you something to constantly push against. If the world was perfect, what would I be doing – just making nice paintings all the time?”