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From: John Moseley
Category: Reviews of worldwidereview
Date: 12 December 2004
Was this revew written by an artist? It feels like it. As a sort of an artist myself, I find Deller's practice oddly threatening. There's something in his T prize profile film about how he doesn't see the point of making objects when he could make an event and communicate with people. Something like that. And he does look like he's having a lot of fun with that approach and maybe even some profound experiences with the people he, um, dellergates to make his work in various ways. I can't help being jealous in a way and a few of his ideas are actually good, Acid Brass for instance. The implied sanctimony towards object making artists is irritating, like some simplistic Victorian health authoritarian exhorting artists to leave the noxious solipsism of the studio for to breathe the vivifying air of the common folk. Artforum said about him memorably that he was 'an artist who gets down with the people wherever he goes', which is like, obviously, fuck right off. And the idea that he might be using his travel grants and such to go and have profound experiences with the residents of places like Waco raises interesting questions about notions like generosity and selfishness in art. Selfishness, solipsisism and egotism are, frankly, a worry for us all (especially me), whereas Deller constantly gives the impression of being a sort of non dysfunctional Sophie Calle who's somehow bipassed the whole issue by his willingness to sacrifice making for meeting people. I say, that's the impression, but he may be tricking both us and himself, by having the experiences rather than communicating them, sharing them admittedly with various immediate collaborators/minions, but failing to communicate much to the rest of us except 'I really really like meeting people' or 'Humanism is good' and presenting most of his work as tantalising mementoes of brilliant parties most of us weren't invited to. The surprise result: he's more, not less selfish and self-obsessed than most object making artists. Well, maybe. Or maybe about the same, but with a garnish of obfuscatory piousness that makes it harder to stomach. Along with that, there are loads of problems about his relationships with the decent, honest working proles, criminals, teenage pop fans and Republican voters who effectively act as his media. Deller is a post No Logo artist, one for whom problematic issues of authenticity, originality and authorship have been swept away by increased 'global and social awareness', whatever that means. At the same time, whether he likes it or not, all those old French/American academic arguments still apply. To some extent, they're part of what's made his work possible via a host of Conceptual strategies that are now decades old. What's new is the naive enthusiasm with which Deller goes after his 'authentic' experiences. There might be a bit of basic political critical awareness in the work, but any critical willingness to investigate the representational problems in the work itself is woefully absent, as if no anthropologist or physicist had ever raised the question of how the observer affects the experiment. Naomi Klein in No Logo describes how her generation went through college obsessed with representational issues, only to leave and realise that a lot of it wasn't fucking rocket science: people were being exploited and it neeeded to be shown. The intricacies of the petit objet A and the chora and aporiae and the palimpsest and the parergorn and a plethora of other impossibly complex theoretical shibboleths were just wasting everybody's time. Klein was totally right and took the honest decision to become an incredibly hard-nosed political activist and journalist. Deller, at about the same time, was becoming an artist, which, unfortunately, is a somewhat different kettle of stimuli, for reasons that are way to numerous and tricky to properly discuss here, though I might point out that, as journalism, some of his fascinations look pretty trashy and inconsequential. All that said, sorry to disappoint anyone who's lapping up this hatchet job, but I do think he's OK. I like his fluidity and energy and incredible zest for the subjects he pursues, his jokes aren't bad and at his best he does something that many of the best artists do, which is to create/reveal surprising relationships and hybrids. And although it's a representational problem in itself, one he himself may well have an issue with, I really kind of like his coolest kid in the world persona. Again, like a lot of great art, I feel like it's an archetype that existed prior to him, but which had never been properly embodied until he came along. And I thought his acceptance speech was fine, very modest, restrained and likeable.
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