First monograph in French: from Rod Stewart to the Industrial Revolution, Art is Magic collates all of acclaimed artist Jeremy Deller's cultural touchstones into one lovingly curated volume, balancing these artistic inspirations with examples of Deller's visionary work.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Art is Magic at Frac Bretagne, Musée des beaux-arts and La Criée art center, Rennes, in 2023.
Jeremy Deller (born 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process. The great strength of Jeremy Deller's artworks is that they directly raise the question of the sacredness and untouchability of spaces, social codes and emblems of power and even more so of political, economic and religious powers. Whether it's stepping on Stonehenge's sacred ground, jumping on it or highlighting popular culture, evoking music fans or the British, it's all about mass creative power. Rather than fearing or suffering the powers in place, it results in a confrontation between history, culture and heritage. The work of Jeremy Deller is to be experienced by all and for all, he invites us to create a participatory work where everyone has a role to play. His artworks, trans-historical and partisan of free expression as a vector of values and meaning, initiate a dialogue between cultures, people, the past, the present and what could be the future. In a society that claims to open up access to culture and continues to provide a model to follow on what is culturally and intellectually acceptable from what is not, Deller gets away and plays with these societal stereotypes by focusing on subcultures, folklore, people.
Jeremy Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004, and represented Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Texts by Jeremy Deller; interview with Jeremy Deller by Daniel Scott, Alan Kane, Mary Beard, Jonny Banger, Cheerio.
Translated from the English by Sandra von Lucius.