Jeremy Deller
Joy in People
February 1–April 28, 2013
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108
T 314 535 4660
CAM presents first mid-career survey of major British artist
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) is pleased to present Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, the first mid-career survey of one of Britain’s most significant contemporary artists. Over the past two decades, Jeremy Deller has redefined the rules of contemporary art and become a profound influence on artists emerging today. His practice puts everyday life and experience at the center of his internationally recognized collaborative and interactive work, celebrating how people’s activities transform mass culture or become part of the popular imagination itself. Deller’s statement that “art isn’t about what you make but what you make happen” is reflected in the way that he assembles things, stages events, and orchestrates and directs ephemeral yet galvanizing situations.
Joy in People will radically and dynamically transform CAM’s entire museum space and features a comprehensive selection of Deller’s major installations, photographs, videos, posters, banners, performances, and sound works. This presentation includes Open Bedroom (1993), a life-size reconstruction of his first exhibition staged in his parents’ house while they were away on vacation, and Valerie’s Snack Bar (2009), a functioning replica of a Manchester café, originally created as a parade float (complemented by large-scale parade banners and a video of the procession).
Many of Deller’s projects over the years have dealt with the social meanings of popular music. Joy in People presents a number of his pioneering works, such as The Uses of Literacy (1997), an installation incorporating art by fans of the Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers, and Our Hobby is Depeche Mode (2006), a video and archive based on the international devotees of the 1980s electro-pop band.
Deller’s work also incisively explores how the use of power by those in authority affects everyday people. His epic 2001 project, The Battle of Orgreave, is a two-part installation about a violent 1984 confrontation between striking coal miners and mounted police—an event he re-staged with historical re-enactors and former miners. More recently, Deller has explored the more arcane aspects of American culture and the legacy of the British glam wrestler Adrian Street.
An extensive array of public programs is planned to complement the exhibition, including a live performance of Deller’s pivotal 1997 work Acid Brass, in which acid house techno music is played by a traditional brass band, as well as a discussion between the artist and key participants in It Is What It Is, his 2009 project about the Iraq War. CAM’s museum store, CAM POP, will also be specially curated to reflect Deller’s exuberant embrace of both high and low culture.
Jeremy Deller (b. 1966, London; lives in London) will represent Britain at the 2013 Venice Biennale. He studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Sussex and, in 2004, won the Turner Prize. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2009), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2008), and the Kunstverein in Munch (2005), and in major group exhibitions such as September 11 at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2011), the Sao Paolo Biennale, Sao Paolo, Brazil (2010), and the 54th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2004), among many others.
Jeremy Deller: Joy in People is organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, where it was curated by Director Ralph Rugoff. The exhibition is coordinated at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Chief Curator Dominic Molon and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.
Press contact: Ida McCall, T 314 535 0770 x311 / imccall [at] camstl.org
