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THIS CULTURAL LIFE - 62. JEREMY DELLER (320kbs-m4a/99mb/43mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 10th June 2023
Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 and Britain's official representative at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Jeremy Deller is an unconventional artist whose work is as likely to be seen in streets or fields as in museums and galleries. In his work The Battle of Orgreave he restaged a modern civil conflict; a clash between striking miners and police officers. He persuaded a traditional brass band to play Acid House tunes in his work Acid Brass. Perhaps most memorably, on the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme he conjured ghostly platoons of young soldiers all around the UK in his work We're Here because We're Here.
Jeremy talks to John Wilson about some of his most formative creative influences. Seeing The Who's rock musical film Tommy as a teenager was an unforgettable experience that revealed to him the power of imaginative vision. A chance encounter with one of his artist heroes Francis Bacon strengthened his interest in art history, and time spent with Andy Warhol in New York encouraged him to think of art as multi-dimensional and unlimited. He also recounts how P J Harvey's album Let England Shake and the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth crystallised ideas he was forming about notions of Englishness which he used in both his work at the British pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and his work to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
DESERT ISLAND DISCS: JEREMY DELLER (320kbs-m4a/99mb/43mins)
BBC Radio 4 broadcast: 6th January 2019
The Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller is perhaps best known for We’re Here Because We’re Here, a moving and powerful memorial to the Battle of the Somme, and The Battle of Orgreave – a re-enactment of the confrontation between police and pickets at the height of the miners’ strike.
Deller doesn’t paint, draw or sculpt and his work encompasses film, photography and installations. At school his creative endeavours were not always appreciated, and at 13 he was asked to leave the art class.
His lifelong love of history was ignited by childhood trips to museums with his father, and is evident in the subjects he addresses, from Stonehenge, which he re-created as a giant bouncy castle, to William Morris. He managed to meet Andy Warhol in London in 1986 and went to spend two formative weeks at Warhol’s New York City studio, the Factory. The experience crystallised in Deller the belief that art can come in many forms and that an artist can create their own world of ideas.
His memorial to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre will be unveiled in August 2019.
BOOK CHOICE: An A to Z London Street Atlas
LUXURY: A stretch of road over Hay Bluff between Hay-on-Wye and Abergavenny.
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Out of the Blue by Roxy Music.
Presenter: Lauren Laverne
Producer: Paula McGinley
The Sweet - Block Buster! [BMG]
The Beach Boys - In My Room [EMI]
Roxy Music - Out Of The Blue [Polydor]
The KLF - Last Train To Trancentral (Live From The Lost Continent) [KLF Communications]
The Congos - Fisherman [VP]
Melodians Steel Orchestra - Hallelujah
The Freedom Singers - We Shall Overcome [TP4 Music]
Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger [Sony]