Art Is Magic: a children's book for adults by

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It’s quite aprovocative thing to do, showing ablown-up car from [what was] effectively acivil war that Americans were involved in. It was really ajourney into the unknown, which is stressful, but exciting. It was aconstant sort of psychological state, weighing up situations with people and just trying to treat everyone the same. With conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Bear, the book offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of Deller’s life and works.

Art is Magic is artist Jeremy Deller's attempt to tie up the key works of his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired his work. In 1994, I made a poster about a reenactment of the battle. It was a semi-serious idea at that point – an attempt to see if there was a way to look at the strike and that confrontation as part of the canon of battles on British soil. I thought the form of a battle reenactment might just be an effective way to do this, as we in the UK are so used to this type of historical display. There was an absurdity built into the idea, not least because it taps into the national obsession with history and conflict to the point where, based on the way we talk about it, you’d think the second world war had finished only last week. When the former miners realised that the reenactors playing the police were unnerved by them, they played up to it Pulling together all Deller’s cultural touchstones – from acid house and brass bands to crop circles and folk traditions – and featuring conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Beard, Art is Magic offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of a unique mind. They handed out flyers explaining what had happened to the car, which Deller had been told had been blown up in the cultural heart of Baghdad. The explosion had killed over a hundred people. The reactions they received were perhaps surprising; the people who were crossest about it all were the anti-war factions, who felt it wasn’t sufficiently extreme. But most people were polite, though Deller says they couldn’t do the tour nowIt’s now in the Imperial War Museum, where he feels it at least fits with the IWM’s modern focus on the victims of war rather than the perpetrators. In 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike. The dispute lasted for over a year and was the most bitterly fought since the general strike of 1926, marking a turning point in the struggle between the government and the trade union movement. He wanted them to be in high-visibility locations, on roundabouts, near motorways, at railway stations. They didn’t approach people; if people came up to them they did not speak but instead handed them one of 19,000 cards with the name and details of a (regionally specific) soldier who had died on the first day of the battle. Deller spoke to every one of the participants, and gave talks about the project around the country With Deller’s idea, it was clear that the decoy of a film would be necessary. This would not only provide a source of finance (there was no getting away from the fact that this would be a lengthy and expensive undertaking) but it would also lend the project a certain degree of credibility. Throughout the last ten years at Artangel, we’ve always found that people (especially the owners of extraordinary locations) often become much more interested and much more co-operative if film or television is involved.

Deller finds fandom of any kind fascinating. He’s been one himself, and thinks fans make bands perform better – but it’s not only bands who have them; English Civil War re-enactors such as The Sealed Knot are fans of history, and Deller finds them just as interesting. At Beyoncé’s recent concert he enjoyed watching the audience as much as hearing the music A strange alliance of medieval, ancient Greek and even American civil war enthusiasts abandoned their favourite eras yesterday to relive one of the greatest symbolic moments of modern industrial struggle. Lined up on a Yorkshire hillside, long-haired members of a 17th century Cavalier regiment turned into striking miners for a day of noisy clashes with rival amateur actors who had swapped Confederate forage caps for the visors of 1980s riot police. – Martin Wainwright,TheGuardian, 18 June 2001 . Jeremy Deller’s new book, which he describes as “a sort of retrospective”, is called Art Is Magic. It reflects his belief in the alchemical power of art to transform the everyday – “if only for a moment, making the mundane profound”. He did, however, consider several other alternative titles for the book, including “That’s Not Art”, “Call That Art?” and “You Can’t Do That” , all of which are things people have said to him about his work. Over a thousand people were involved in the project, either through taking part, filming or helping with the research. I would personally like to thank everyone who has shown faith in the project or was at least willing to give it a go.Deller’s greatest work has taken place beyond gallery walls. Think of The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a 1000-person re-enactment of a clash between police and striking miners in 1984, for which Deller recruited a cast of ex-miners and battle re-enactors. Or We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016), his First World War memorial work, in which 1,400 young men in authentic military uniforms appeared, unheralded and unexplained, in public spaces around the UK on 1 July, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.