time it succeeded. The Battle of Orgreave was the climactic event of the strike, which only now (June 2014) is the subject of demands for a full scale judicial enquiry. During the strike the miners were demonised by the press, and the agents of social control cast them as violent law-breakers. In his study of Mods and Rockers in the 1960s, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the sociologist Stanley Cohen looked at the ways moral panics, campaigns against a ‘social evil’, are produced, and groups that were seen to threaten social stability are labelled as deviant, becoming stigmatised as folk devils. He argued that rather than deviance leading to social control, social control leads to deviance.5 Jeremy’s reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave and the film made of it for TV explicitly re-visited this violent event from the point of view of the miners, who had been depicted as the aggressors and law-breakers, folk devils. He inverts the ‘symbolic crusade’ against the miners in the original coverage of the strike by the press and media in order to uncover the role of the police, militarised in The Battle of Orgreave on a new scale, and show that it had effectively been a civil war. Deller wanted to make people angry, but at the same time, and this may be one of the reasons the film has lost none of its power, the event (the re-enactment was on a huge scale with eight hundred ‘re-enactment’ specialists and two hundred former miners) was open ended. Rather than delivering a thesis like a documentary film, he ‘left it to the experts to get on with it…I knew it had its own life. I had no ownership over it.’6 This is unusual both for an artist and for, say, a sociologist or political scientist. Behind Deller’s straightforwardly stated ambition: ‘I wanted to make a political film about the miners’ strike on the back of an artwork’ 7 was an idea strong enough to make any question about whether or not it was art irrelevant. To return to the photograph of Adrian Street and the miners, two other completely different projects (among others) can be related to this confrontation of worlds. One 5— Stanley Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers [1972], Martin Robertson Oxford, 1980.
followed the career of the wrestler, whom Deller found still active and still wrestling in Florida, obsessed with fitness, creating glamorous costumes for fellow wrestlers. This is one of his film studies of extraordinary individuals, which demand a quite different optic from the public event and general historical significance of The Battle of Orgreave. In 2010 Deller completed his film on ‘the life and times of Adrian Street’: So Many Ways to Hurt You, in which Street declaims his aggressive humorous self-portrait poem: ‘I’m just a sweet transvestite with a broken nose’. Street had, as Deller put it, ‘transcended a life of industrial toil in a spectacular fashion.’ He had been a body-builder, model and then championship wrestler in the great days of TV wrestling, with its exaggerated demons and angels, returning to Brynmawr Colliery to show off his belts and flash a vision of the future to the ‘coal serfs as to how the world would look in a post-industrial UK’, a kind of new Jerusalem. ‘The imagery’, Deller comments, ‘is pure William Blake’.8 The other project is an exhibition, an historical investigation of the Industrial Revolution, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2013-14). In one register this is a show based on extensive and imaginative research into the realities and myths of the Industrial Revolution, presenting material such as 19th century photographs of women workers, examples of Victorian anthropology documenting ‘a new tribe in the making: the industrial worker’9; shocking reports of child labour in the mines from the 1830s and 40s; banners, song-sheets and broadsides, and concrete evidence of the fundamental changes to working life brought about by factory and industrialised mining production, through the division of labour and the control of the working day: time, for example, was no longer based on nature, the seasons etc. but strictly by the clock. One of the exhibits is a twofaced clock (1810) which measured productivity as time. Working class, self-taught artists, some named, some anonymous, painted portraits of their fellow pitmen and workers or scenes in mines and foundries. John Martin painted grand, apocalyptic scenes often explicitly based in
6— Jeremy Deller in conversation with Claire Doherty, Contemporary Art From Studio to Situation, ed. Claire Doherty, Black Dog Publishing, 2004, p. 94.
8— Jeremy Deller All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Hayward Touring, 2013, p. 27.
7— Ibid., p. 95.
9— Ibid., p. 1.
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