Art Is Magic: a children's book for adults by

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Another came up to Deller in tears at the opening, saying that he’d deprived real artists of having a show. There were suggestions that the exhibition was somehow cynical or exploitative, but for Deller, it represented a material culture he had grown up with through local church fetes. “Artists have always taken from folk and vernacular culture and made something else – they’re just interested in the visual world, aren’t they?” Art is Magic is artist Jeremy Deller's attempt to tie up the key works of his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired his work. 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.

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 With its photos of bouncy castles (the 2012 work Sacrilege, for which Deller commissioned an inflatable model of Stonehenge), bats (an ongoing obsession) and chameleons (ditto) Art is Magic is, like much of Deller’s work, wrapped in a cloak of playfulness, behind which lie very serious concerns about our political system, the manipulation of public opinion, and the environmental crisis. You often sense that he’s throwing things into the mix and isn’t quite sure what will happen.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.” Jeremy Deller’sThe Battle of Orgreave, staged seventeen years later, was a spectacular re-enactment of what happened on that day. It was orchestrated by Howard Giles, a historical re-enactment expert and the former director of English Heritage’s event programme. More than 800 people participated in the re-enactment, many of them former miners, and a few former policemen, reliving the events from 1984 that they themselves took part in. Other participants were drawn from battle re-enactment societies across England.

We gave ourselves a year in which to build bridges of trust with the community of former miners in South Yorkshire and resolved to abandon the project at the first sign of hostility. They would become the cornerstone of the re-construction. It would be their memories and histories that would be re-staged. Deller finds fandom of any kind fascinating. He’s been one himself, and thinks fans make bands perform better – but it’s not only bands who have them; English Civil War re-enactors such as The Sealed Knot are fans of history, and Deller finds them just as interesting. At Beyoncé’s recent concert he enjoyed watching the audience as much as hearing the music And it’s the same in an art gallery; after half an hour you’re looking at the other people, not the art.’

Ghosts shows the Globe shouldn't always stick to Shakespeare

Born in London and educated at Dulwich College, the Courtauld Institute and Sussex University, Deller attributes his interest in art and culture at least partly to childhood visits to museums. After an Art History degree he was, he says, ‘virtually unemployable’, and drifted into a few jobs before he started making art. He’s since won the Turner Prize and has represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. To illustrate rave culture he showed footage of people trying to get to Stonehenge and being handcuffed by police. He also included the reactions of some passers-by, and says he was as surprised as the pupils to find that older people, far from being outraged at the ravers, were disgusted by the police 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.

The exhibition will tour the UK in 2014 to the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest; Bristol Museum and Art Gallery; and Turner Contemporary, Margate. They’d been in the war and they’d seen authoritarian regimes. An older man in a regimental tie defended the young people. A woman in her thirties abused them. Of course she’s now a Brexit voter.’ 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. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. 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.The event was commissioned by Artangel, formerly responsible for such projects as Rachel Whiteread’s House and Michael Landy’s Break Down. The research process took about two years and consisted of travelling up to the area and talking to people who had been involved in the strike. We recruited former miners from towns and villages within a 30-mile radius of Orgreave: Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield, Rotherham. These meetings started off being low-key, often one-to-one in a pub or in somebody’s home. The scale of these conversations gradually increased, until just before the event itself when I was meeting 50 or more former miners at a time. 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 This is an excerpt from the film which intercuts dramatic photographic stills from the clashes in 1984 with footage of the clashes re-enacted in 2001, together with moving and powerful testimonies, to tease out the complexities of this bitter struggle. Pulling together all Deller’s cultural touchstones – from acid house and brass bands to crop circles and folk traditions – and featuring conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Beard, Art is Magic offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of a unique mind. The venue for the event was a deconsecrated church with very understanding hosts. The Murdochs burned for 12 hours. By the end, Lachlan’s face had fallen off. Rupert’s stayed on, but now bowed slightly.

The reenactment was a public event, which was important for me as a form of public enquiry or, more viscerally, an autopsy of an exhumed corpse. Or even possibly as a reenactment of a crime in its original setting. Whatever it was, it was always, in my mind at least, performance art. It was never meant to heal community wounds – however much art is heralded as being capable of achieving this. If anything, it was intended to make people angry again. The Edinburgh International Book Festival continues at Edinburgh College of Art until Monday 28 th August. If the giant free festival and rave at ‘Castlemorton’ in 1992 led directly to the bringing of the Criminal Justice Bill to the statute book – in such a way that codified the particular dissent exemplified by the way of life that Acid House stood for – so did the 1984–5 miners’ strike exemplify the response to the Conservative Party’s aim to close the coal pits and smash union power; a response that could also be measured by the survival of brass bands at a time that the pits were closing. In a sense this work and, by extension, Acid Brass, also act as a direct overture to the event The Battle of Orgreave 2001 (a re-enactment of a particularly pivotal clash between the striking miners and the police during the 1984–5 miners’ strike), which Deller had earlier called, in a 1994 poster work, The English Civil War (part 2), and the subsequent The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All) 2004 ( T12185). Later, when I ask Deller if he considers himself an outsider, he winces. “I don’t know about that. I mean, in one way, I’m proper establishment, really. I went to private school. I had all the advantages that gives you, and some of the disadvantages.”

With so many works to consider, there’s one piece that Deller is particularly proud of. Baghdad centred on acar damaged by the Al-Mutanabbi Street bombing in 2007, looking more like alarge scrap piece of metal than afour-wheeler. Asobering reminder of the 26 people who were killed by the bomb, Deller took the car on a2009 nationwide tour of America, before bringing it to the UK, where it currently sits at the Imperial War Museum.