Jeremy Deller met Ted in 2001, when Wattis curator Matthew Higgs invited Jeremy for a Capp Street residency via CCA. As his project culminated in a kind of guidebook to California, Jeremy spent a considerable amount of time in the Bay Area, coming to know Ted as a colleague at CCA. One can imagine the conversations between the three, touching upon music, popular culture, self-publishing, obscure histories, underground cultural figures and locales….

 

The quote printed on Deller’s shirt, evocative and prescient, is actually drawn from the Bible, and originally formed part of a 2004 project of similar biblical phrases emblazoned on colorful plastic shopping bags produced for the Frieze Art Fair and the museum store at the Carnegie International. Deller revisits this particular text in response to our invitation, finding it relevant not just to this moment of ecological instability and crisis, border and immigration disputes, and other land-related politics, but also specific to California and its legacy as a place of persistent (if often failed) utopian ideals of social and ecological relations.

 

Jeremy Deller is a British conceptual artist who works across many different forms, with a prevailing interest in politics as it intersects with the popular. His projects respond to specific cultural conditions and aesthetic forms, and are often realized in collaboration with people and within the realm of everyday situations, occasions, and spaces. Projects have ranged from the performative mashup of traditional brass bands with Acid House and Detroit techno, to the large-scale re-enactment of recent histories like the violent confrontations of the 1984 Miners Strike in Orgreave, to a traveling exhibition of British folk art and ephemera, to a film on 1980s rave culture and political turmoil. Many survey exhibitions and public commissions have taken place, as well as his inclusion in major biennials and festivals, and his awarding of the Turner Prize in 2004 and representation of Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

 

https://www.jeremydeller.org/home.html