Mark Wallinger / Jeremy Deller

After my initial response to both Wallinger’s ‘State Britain’ and Deller's restaging of the Battle of Orgeave, I have realised my interpretations and considerations of the works changed considerably from when I first interacted with them, so I wanted to write another reflection on it aside from my notes.

To start with, I believe with Wallinger’s work it is always there and interesting how he reflects the aspect of art in an institutional context. The idea of taking something that is already there in history and interpreting it as a political act, a protest and placing that in an institution where the whole definition of the act’s limits, how we perceive and react to it undeniably changes. I believe not only he changes these factors but also states something to say, rather an opinion on a political aspect from the wider picture. To me, it is a work that pushes you to question things and look for different perspectives which might not be there at first glance while stating a perspective at the same time, so it becomes one of the most interesting parts of my research. Now coming to how they relate to each other for Deller’s work for me, when I first saw the restaging in class, as I was also working on particular political events in Turkey, the first idea that popped into my head was how appropriate or right was it to recreate something in a physical form which also affected real people as well. Don’t get me wrong, I believe especially within politics and social matters when it comes to preserving history or reflecting an opinion if we had to be careful about everything that happened and affected people not to hurt or offend someone, after a while the power of doing or stating anything about these things would reduce to zero and it would eventually come to the invalidation of these matters. However, as the particular events I was working on were quite harsh which led to many losses, the idea of being able to recreate something like that seemed very intense at first.

I believe after interpreting Wallinger’s work as I wrote above, my ideas about what Deller did with this work also changed as well. If we take the aspect of putting something in an institutional context and therefore changing or examining how the definition of that changes within the limits of art, at some matter what Jeremy Deller did becomes virtually the same with only one change and that is doing it under the context of a name, and art, without actually putting that real, physical limit. Of course, these are all my personal reflections and interpretations of things, but I believe it is still very interesting how it even just pushes me to think about these things.

FMP Research / Sketchbook

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