Jeremy Deller at the Venice Biennale

Jeremy-Deller-will-represent-Britain-at-2013-Venice-Biennale.

In the book A Bigger Conversation Hockney had this to say; "I was very struck when one of the Turner Prize winners some years ago, Jeremy Deller, remarked that 'Artists don't paint these days, just as we don't go to work on a horse,' I blew that up and pinned it on my studio wall."


Whilst Hockney's reaction to Deller's claim was based on a supposed misunderstanding about the role of photography in art, I can't help but admire Hockney's reaction to take the quote and stick it on his wall, as a direct challenge to himself.


Alastair Sooke's review in the Telegraph offers a different point of view;


"Jeremy Deller is an artist – but you’d never think he was, at least not in the traditional sense. He won the Turner Prize in 2004, yet he didn’t go to art school, and readily admits that he cannot sculpt or paint. Since his earliest exhibition, in his parents’ house in Dulwich in south London in 1993, he has resisted making objects that can easily be bought and sold, preferring instead to build up a more nebulous oeuvre which primarily involves staging events and collaborating with others. He makes documentary films, organises processions, prints T-shirts, and once invited a brass band to play acid house music anthems....But here’s the thing. Deller has spent his career purposefully making art outside galleries – so a retrospective of his work inside a gallery is inherently problematic. The rush of being caught up in one of his live events is absent. Instead, visitors are offered too much tedious archival material and ephemera, little of which has much to offer from an aesthetic point of view to compensate for the fact that it mostly feels second-hand. It’s a shame: “Joy in People” is Deller’s mantra – and yet this exhibition of thin pickings cannot communicate the communal delight his work often engenders."


The comment "so a retrospective of his work inside a gallery is inherently problematic" is interesting as one wonders how an exhibition in the clinical environment of the Venice Biennale would hold up...