Artwork: View of Jeremy Deller’s wall mural, A Good day for Cyclists, 2013, at the Venice Biennale, British Pavilion
In Jeremy Deller’s 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition in the British Pavilion, English Magic, a large wall mural featured a giant protected hen harrier bird aloft and clutching a tiny red Range Rover in its claws. The mural is titled, A Good Day for Cyclists, and is a curious piece, the story behind it illuminates much of Deller’s thinking and approach to his art. Six years prior an incident was reported that two hen harriers were shot out of the sky above the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. Prince Harry and his friend were apparently the only ones in residence at the time. As Deller noted, while the identity of the shooter was never revealed, if an ordinary citizen had shot one of these birds, they would have gone to prison for six months, and this bothered Deller. There is an element of justice prevailing, nature triumphing over humans, and a “flipping the bird” at the aristocracy and elites who most often drive the archetypal Rover SUV. Trained in art history, there is an investigative and curatored aspect to his work, where his ideas are often brought to life through collaborating with others. The mural is an example, having been painted by another artist. Deller employs whatever means best communicates the idea, and I’ve featured blog posts on his various paste-ups and wall posters used to focus attention on subjects such as international human rights, poetry to British elections.
Artwork: Jeremy Deller, Sacrilege, 2012
Humour, irreverence, and a keen interest in history and its relationship to the present are key elements to his art, a classic being his inflatable life-size bouncy castle of Stonehenge, Sacrilege, which toured England in 2012, and also featured as a video in English Magic. It’s a work of joy, fun and daftness, yet there is an undercutting satire of reducing Britain’s famous ancient monument associated as a Druidic temple, to a playful entertainment spectacle. Deller was commissioned to create an artwork by the Glasgow festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London for the Olympics and says this about it: “I just wanted to make the most stupid artwork ever made […] Some people will be very annoyed by it, so I just thought, well, you might as well just get the criticisms in first.” The title kind of one-ups the critics as kids and the public have huge fun trampling a national icon. He continues: “In a way [Sacrilege] was meant to counteract what I felt was the pomposity of sport and the Olympics. As it happened, it wasn’t so pompous in the UK, but the whole Olympics movement seems to be really full of itself, so I just thought, let’s do something about Britain that shows we have a sense of humour about our history and we’re willing to satirise ourselves almost and have fun with our history and identity.”