I turned off online comments as they seemed to be getting out of hand, though I wish I had taken screenshots of this billionaire pile-on. I actually felt a bit sorry for them, trying to gain some sympathy for themselves from the situation. Little did the Murdochs know that, later that year, I had a work in the pipes where a likeness of Bad Grandpa and Uncle Lachlan would literally be burned. The whole process was kept a secret because of the reach of the Murdoch press in Australia Art is Magic is an attempt to connect the key pieces in Deller’s œuvre with the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired him. Much ink has been spilled about Deller over the decades, but this is the first time he has brought “Art is Magic, le meilleur livre de Jeremy Deller” This historical context — political, social and artistic — is also in evidence at La Criée Centre of Contemporary Art with Warning Graphic Content, a collection of Deller’s poster and print work from 1993 to 2021 that features over 100 pieces. In direct response, the voice-over in Deller’s slideshow Beyond the White Wall recounts his projects undertaken in the public space that blur the boundaries between the space of art and the social space.

Perhaps his most beloved works, especially from ayouth perspective, are his explorations in dance music. Everybody In The Place – An Incomplete History of Britain 1984 – 1992, abrilliant documentary which aired on BBC2in 2019, was the artist’s examination of the significance of acid house and how it wasn’t all about drugs. It was about community, acollective spirit, rebelling against economic decline, class wars and over 10years of Tory misrule (sound familiar?). He filmed astaged lecture to aclassroom of diverse teenagers, as anew school of thought, and showed them period footage of ravers. Another came up to Deller in tears at the opening, saying that he’d deprived real artists of having a show. There were suggestions that the exhibition was somehow cynical or exploitative, but for Deller, it represented a material culture he had grown up with through local church fetes. “Artists have always taken from folk and vernacular culture and made something else – they’re just interested in the visual world, aren’t they?”For access to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating rows A to C and wheelchair spaces in the Front Stalls, please enter via the Artists' Entrance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road (Level 1). Why is Art Is Magic the ‘best book by Jeremy Deller’, as per the tagline on the cover? Because I haven’t done a book like this before, it’s almost comprehensive. It’s also more or less in my own words, so it’s as I want it to be.

I put myself and other people who were doing that at great personal risk. I mean, how would you know what the reaction would be to that in the Deep South? On the first day we started, we were in a campervan, towing the car, and the American soldier and the Iraqi civilian – both of whom had been in life threatening situations – looked really nervous. And I thought, ‘If you’re worried, then I should be really worried because you’ve been in war situations.’ But actually, on the whole, it was amazing to meet Americans face to face, without any of the fluff or hype around it, and just chat to them.” Jeremy Deller: It doesn’t cover everything I’ve done and is quite a subjective take on things. In a sense it’s meant to be both an introduction and an overview, but a very personal one because I’ve written everything in it—apart from the interviews, obviously. It’s an explanation of sorts and also it’s about motivation: why I wanted to do things, and how I did things. So it’s maybe lifting the lid a little bit on the process, as well. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. What’s the best thing about collaborating with the public? You don’t really know what to expect and what's going to happen, and also they make things better. Talk to a member of staff at the auditorium entrance if you have a disability that means you can’t queue, or you need extra time to take your seat. They can arrange priority entry for you as soon as the doors open.His best-known work, The Battle of Orgreave, is both. It entailed two years of deep research and a cast of 1,000 former miners and historical war ‘reenactors’, whom he assembled in a windy field near Sheffield in 2001 to reenact the infamous confrontation between police and striking miners that took place near the Orgreave coking plant in 1984. In the book, he calls it “my Stairway to Heaven” and suggests that it may be “the one work that may outlive me”. Art is Magic is the first French retrospective of the celebrated English artist Jeremy Deller (born in London in 1966), winner of the prestigious 2004 Turner Prize and Britain’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2013. You could be talking to awoman whose son was killed the previous month,” he continues of his research process, ​ “and you wouldn’t know that until they told you. But it was an amazing achievement for me personally. Sometimes you have to take the risk.” Much has been written about Deller over the decades but this, ‘the best book by Jeremy Deller’, is the first time he has pulled together all of his cultural touchstones. I enjoy those little moments, like calling a chapter ‘Queen Victoria with Her Face Smashed In’. Very late in the day, in the last two or three weeks, I basically just turned the book around. It was quite traditional and I had to interfere with it, putting in crazy chapter headings, changing the typefaces and adding in more irreverent captions to replace the ones that were very dry. In the main body text I’m trying to be quite straightforward, and then the captions are written in a more irreverent, slightly insider-y tone, almost to undermine what you are looking at. If I’d had another month, I would have interfered with it even more, but it’s probably good I stopped when I did.

Deller is interested in popular culture and counter-cultures. His artistic inquiries focus not just on social issues and history but also on music. Deller’s oeuvre is tinged with acerbic humour and conscious socio-political discourse, making a connection between vernacular or mass culture and the world of work. The artist’s quest has led him to explore the social history of his country and further afield via the social conflict of the Thatcher era, the pop group Depeche Mode, the world of wrestling, the spawning ground of Brexit… and even acid house and the rave movement. In each case, Deller has constantly strived to involve other people in the creative process.

What was the last physical album you bought? I bought a lot in a charity shop recently, and one was a Sigur Rós album that I’d never heard of before. It’s good for driving. It was from these thoughts that Sacrilege, a life-sized inflatable model of Stonehenge, was created. I was trying to think what the stupidest idea that was possible to make would be, the sort of thing you might see on The Simpsons. It was made more or less by hand in Grantham by a company called Inflatable World Leisure. The inflatable stones were all individually painted.

Art is Magic, le meilleur livre de Jeremy Deller is the first monograph in French on the famous English artist. The book explores Deller’s cultural references from Rod Stewart to the Industrial Revolution, and links them to his iconic œuvres. This detailed book, designed by Deller himself, is organised around 12 chapters written by the artist, and features five interviews. Published to mark Deller’s first retrospective Interview with Jeremy Deller and Sophie Kaplan, La Criée Centre of Contemporary Art, Saturday June 10, Father and Son: Jeremy Deller’s wax sculptures of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Photograph: C CapurroWith its photos of bouncy castles (the 2012 work Sacrilege, for which Deller commissioned an inflatable model of Stonehenge), bats (an ongoing obsession) and chameleons (ditto) Art is Magic is, like much of Deller’s work, wrapped in a cloak of playfulness, behind which lie very serious concerns about our political system, the manipulation of public opinion, and the environmental crisis. You often sense that he’s throwing things into the mix and isn’t quite sure what will happen. Revealingly, he describes Art Is Magic as “a book about an artist rather than an artist’s book”. To this end, it is designed, he says, “to look a bit like one of those annuals you’d get for Christmas when you were a kid”. It is subtitled “a children’s book for adults”, which somewhat underplays the provocative political undertow of some of the projects described within, whether it is his epic reenactment of the “Battle of Orgreave” during the miners’ strike or his 2019 film Putin’s Happy, which captures the febrile atmosphere of the Brexit protests in Parliament Square. “The book is written in my own words,” he explains, “and the tone I was aiming for is someone sitting in a pub chatting to you about what they’ve been up to. I hope the book demystifies things, explains my motivations, and sheds some light on what I do.” While most conceptual artists probably accept that a certain degree of public bemusement comes with the turf, Deller is that rare thing: a conceptualist who feels the need to explain his art. “I do, yes,” he says, nodding, when we sit down to chat amid the organised clutter of the office of his flat overlooking north London’s Holloway Road, where he does most of his thinking and planning. “I’m aware that a lot of artists don’t, but I come from the approachable, rather than the obscure, school. To me, my work is quite obvious in a way, more obvious than a lot of contemporary art, but it is definitely conceptual insofar as I start with an idea and see what happens. That still unsettles people who expect art to be on gallery walls.” What do most people not realise about William Morris? That he was a radical and sort of changed the world. That without him, you might not have an iPhone in your hand, designed like that.