Bestiality Impresses Rubber Ducks, British Indecision Reaps Distress, Levis Belts, Being Is Ridiculously Drab… If nothing else, Deller’s retrospective imparts the knowledge that the standard of toilet wall graffiti in the 90s was pretty high. Foucault is referenced, as is Sartre and Pascal and doing something indescribable to Germaine Greer.
Transcribed from the original men’s facilities of the British Library, a place where Deller spent considerable time conducting a special kind of research that culminated in an artist’s book Pensées; a collection of the more memorable turns of phrase, some of which are displayed again here in a gallery reconstruction of his own loo.
The loo is the threshold from which the main body of the exhibition springs forth and toilet intellectualism sets the tone for the retrospective and indeed, Deller’s early career. Marrying high art with low culture his influences include The Simpsons, Peter Stringfellow (in whose club he organised the exhibition Butterfly Ball) and pop music.
Deller has commissioned brass bands to play acid jazz, parades commemorating Manchester’s closed entertainment venues, tributes to the Manic Street Preachers and staged situational slapstick comedy sequences in seaside towns. And, they’re just his minor works…
Deller is also the Turner Prize winning coordinator of scenarios, rarely referring to himself as an artist, he organises interventions and staged events often reliant on the participation of groups of powerless people with powerful emotions. He is best known for The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, a ‘battle reenactment’ of an infamous miners riot involving many of the original rioters and to which a room within the exhibition is dedicated.
A difficult artist to ‘retrospect’ Deller doesn’t actually make things (but hell, who does these days?), so the show is experiential, levis belts men, a retrospective with all the embarrassing bits left in. You enter head on into puberty, into a recreation of Deller’s childhood bedroom; his unsuccessful attempts at getting girlfriends, collections of beer mats and band shirts his single bed, silly notes and angsty scribblings emerging to a great big black wall pronouncing a potential teenage mantra and deliberate inversion of the show’s title ‘I heart Melancholy’. It soon gives way to a jumble of relics from previous projects and a video introducing the others that left little trace, trademark co-optive playfulness and free cups of tea in a 90s workers cafe.
But, then visitors are ambushed with a sudden coming of age, Orgreave closely followed by It is What It is 2009 a bombed out car from Baghdad that Deller towed around America.
A slow starter, Deller has grown up and grown serious fast, the final work in the exhibition being a reflective video of bats in flight, levis belts women, creatures Deller regards as more highly evolved than the human race.
Appearing anomalous at first, the video permits itself an unravelling. These communal creatures tells us more about the attributes that appeal to Deller within human nature; the chaotic coming together to sudden seemingly choreographed moments of unison. Sinister and celebratory in turn, the toilet humour has long been left behind.
The loo is the threshold from which the main body of the exhibition springs forth and toilet intellectualism sets the tone for the retrospective and indeed, Deller’s early career. Marrying high art with low culture his influences include The Simpsons, Peter Stringfellow (in whose club he organised the exhibition Butterfly Ball) and pop music.
Deller has commissioned brass bands to play acid jazz, parades commemorating Manchester’s closed entertainment venues, tributes to the Manic Street Preachers and staged situational slapstick comedy sequences in seaside towns. And, they’re just his minor works…
Deller is also the Turner Prize winning coordinator of scenarios, rarely referring to himself as an artist, he organises interventions and staged events often reliant on the participation of groups of powerless people with powerful emotions. He is best known for The Battle of Orgreave, 2001, a ‘battle reenactment’ of an infamous miners riot involving many of the original rioters and to which a room within the exhibition is dedicated.
A difficult artist to ‘retrospect’ Deller doesn’t actually make things (but hell, who does these days?), so the show is experiential, levis belts men, a retrospective with all the embarrassing bits left in. You enter head on into puberty, into a recreation of Deller’s childhood bedroom; his unsuccessful attempts at getting girlfriends, collections of beer mats and band shirts his single bed, silly notes and angsty scribblings emerging to a great big black wall pronouncing a potential teenage mantra and deliberate inversion of the show’s title ‘I heart Melancholy’. It soon gives way to a jumble of relics from previous projects and a video introducing the others that left little trace, trademark co-optive playfulness and free cups of tea in a 90s workers cafe.
But, then visitors are ambushed with a sudden coming of age, Orgreave closely followed by It is What It is 2009 a bombed out car from Baghdad that Deller towed around America.
A slow starter, Deller has grown up and grown serious fast, the final work in the exhibition being a reflective video of bats in flight, levis belts women, creatures Deller regards as more highly evolved than the human race.
Appearing anomalous at first, the video permits itself an unravelling. These communal creatures tells us more about the attributes that appeal to Deller within human nature; the chaotic coming together to sudden seemingly choreographed moments of unison. Sinister and celebratory in turn, the toilet humour has long been left behind.
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