D’une révolution à l’autre, exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo, 2008. Folk Archive, 1998–2005· Ed Hall, Banners, 1984–2008. Photo: Marc Domage.

The new curatorial project of Jeremy Deller, D’une révolution à l’autre, which was exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo from September 2008 to January 2009, explored the relationship between the industrial and cultural revolutions from the 18th century to the present and attempted to answer the question ‘What does revolution mean?’ with an emphasis on culture but also referencing the broader socio-political arena. Of course, the relationship between art and revolution immediately brings to mind either a politically mobilised art, which is associated with political and social struggles against authority and the attempt to break away from prevailing values, or pioneering efforts (by the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Constructivists) which, parallel to these struggles, were directed at the overthrow of the prevailing forms of art and perceptions, with the terms of a militant avant-garde. Jeremy Deller presented artefacts from artistic revolutions, and assumed the role of uncovering the traces left behind and that have been concealed but also to reveal their importance in present day struggles of the working class. With these historical references in mind, his anthropological approach brings us to a current concern, which is whether art today can be ‘revolutionary’.

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, the British artist is known for his eclectic, collective working method and his collaborations with social groups, artists or theoreticians of art, for his research and documentation practices and for his interest in the relationship between the collection, documentation, anthropological practice and the museum with art and social awakening. In the exhibition, he applied these methods to a curatorial process, which ‘explores fields that are on the periphery of contemporary art’ and ‘questions the strong relationships between industrial and cultural revolutions’ [i].

In the first two sections, Deller addressed the issue of ‘Britishness’, trying to reveal the hidden aspects of a collective sense of identity, through the display of multi-coloured protest banners by British artist Ed Hall that summoned British trade unions and other social groups [ii] to mobilise and, in the section Folk Archive, with displays from the archive of objects of folk art, examples of everyday creativity that Deller began to organise in 1999 together with Alan Kane [iii]. In both sections, Deller examined the British sense of identity in smaller-scaled tactics of social protest that do not comply with any norm and are not restricted in any way. He used museum devices (labels, display cases, frames, bases) to reinstate the products of ‘non-high art’, an art of everybody, into today’s strict yet arbitrary hierarchy of cultural production.

The next two sections were in the same spirit and juxtaposed the labor and rock revolutions. In one section he attempted a revival of the brief history of the Parisian rock scene in the early ’60s and more precisely, that of the Golf Drouot [iv]. In the other section, aspects of the British Industrial Revolution from 1760 to 2008 [v] were presented so as to show how ‘the dual trauma of the Industrial Revolution and chaotic urbanization opened the way for the development of an environment favorable to the appearance of British rock music’. Then, the spectator was initiated in the archaeology of electronic music through the display of documentation related to the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music in Moscow, an important research centre for 20th century sound and music technology [vi] so as to ‘restore the cultural history of the artistic utopia of the years 1910–1920, which was destroyed by the totalitarian government of the 1930s’. The final section dealt with the therapeutic dimension of art. It was dedicated to William Scott, an artist who works at the Creative Growth Art Center (art workshops devoted to adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities) and who examines the social topography of his home, San Francisco [vii], through drawings, models and sculpture.

One could argue that Deller’s attempt could be interpreted through the objectives of the genre of ‘participatory art’: the reinforcement of an active, ‘emancipated’ spectator, the democratic surrender of artistic identity and sharing of creativity, and finally, an examination of the political potentials of art. His methodology, which ‘revolves around the limits of history, anthropology and contemporary art’ and ‘blends private and collective stories in a unique way’ ”[viii] is also identified with the ‘ethnographic’ orientation of the last decade and is, by extension, exposed to all the dangers that are associated with ethnographic practice such as the ‘legitimization of ethnographic authority’ and objectification of the ‘other’ of the dominant culture (and often, as he points out, as a result of institutional intervention) [ix].

However, more than the relationship between the industrial and cultural revolutions and the experimental aspect of ethnographic methodology, the sharpness of which seems to be neutralised by the institutional frame in which they are presented, the project D’une révolution à l’autre, concerned a broader field of criticism, related to the institutions of contemporary art: their role in the aesthetic orientation of contemporary art, their social function. In this context, certain questions arise such as: Under what terms can a discussion take place today for the transition from the dominant model of the museum as entertainment industry to the art centre as a place for experimentation and research? How can institutions as mechanisms that construct the public sphere and collective representations be broadened and re-oriented? How can the visual arts remain critical to the current state of flux caused by the collapse of structures and social systems, the loss of identity and traditions, the retreat of collectivity and the political?

Considering the specific theme of ‘revolution’ under this prism, as the transcendence of hierarchies, categorisations and limits in the field of art in correlation to political revolutions, we considered the manner by which Deller used the institutional — even though experimental — space of the Palais de Tokyo to overturn the usual praises for the work of art, the artist and the museum. He reversed the sensational and heroic character of the work of art, put its elitist rules and the hierarchy between high and low culture into doubt, turned our attention to what was not retained by the formal history (of art) and reinstated its ‘artistic’ value as well as its political meaning, to elicit a new aesthetic proposal from this process.

Of course, the weakness of such new proposals has been frequently pointed out as far as the hegemonic model of the museum to resist the later normalisation and their conformity with the system they are trying to overthrow [x] are concerned. What was interesting in this exhibition was that, as if anticipating such an outcome, Deller adapted his method to the system that hosted his proposition, in order to attempt a critique that would result from this very system, that would conform to its structures while at the same time use them, intervene with them, foreseeing some change in the enactment of hegemonic relationships with history, memory, knowledge, tradition. He attempted a critique of the institutions that is not fulfilled through immediate protest or activism but stays indifferent to the established system of valorization and replaces it with the common, the everyday, with what has been forgotten [xi]. Referring to the archive, which by its very structure presupposes an awareness of the connection between knowledge and political authority, Deller displayed a variety of objects and documents as if they were museum exhibits, investing them with the aesthetic of contemporary art. He promoted sub-cultural forms of creativity without discarding their aesthetic autonomy as being outdated and retained, even throughout his collaborations, the role of ‘auteur’. He thus succeeded in combining a personal aesthetic quest [xii] with the participation of the spectator in an examination that is sociopolitical in nature and avoided the superficial, detached attitude that is frequently found in the anthropological approach.


[i] The quotations are from the press release.
[ii] This spectacular environment traces an alternative version of the political and social struggles in British history and at the same time, includes the spectator in a timeless as well as timely demonstration for social demands.
[iii] Seeking out original expressions of human creativity that do not reflect the general idea of ‘folk art’, Deller gathered folkloric snapshots from local competitions and festivals in his archives but also objects of handicrafts of the periphery. Like Ed Hall’s banner, Folk Archive uncovers the traces of a ‘parallel’ history of British, private and idiosyncratic, but one that is closely related to tradition as well. The Folk Archive was destined initially as an answer to globalised, corporate forms of representation, which comprised the content of the Millennium Dome in 2000. In 2006 it traveled to different British museums and was collected into a book of the same name.
[iv] Henri Leproux’s legendary ‘thé dansant’ that played an important role in the development of French pop music — with Eddy Mitchel, Johnny Halliday, and others — until 1980. The history of Golf Drouot was traced through posters, photographs and films of the period from the archives of Henri Leproux. It was organised by the sociologist Marc Touché.
[v] Titled All that is solid melts into air (from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels) and replicating a museum exhibition, objects from the industrial town of Blackburn and the Great Exhibition in London in 1951, as well as unpublished images from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour and two contemporary works by the curators are on display.
[vi] In the section titled 1917-1939 Sound Z (where ‘Z’ is a symbolic letter of the post war period, a symbol of energy, radio waves, electricity and lightning), curated by the current director of the Theremin Center, Andrei Smirnov, the art historian Lubov Pchelnika, the art critic and curator Matt Price and his collaborator, the curator Christina Steinbrecher, an attempt is made to record some of the more important and pioneering experiments that took place there. The staging of the space (low lighting, sound) intensifies the evidence of an avant-garde Russian music, most of which is presented here for the first time in the West.
[vii] William Scott proposed the gradual ‘removal’ and the reformation of his — socially disadvantaged — region so that discrimination would be abolished.
[viii] From the press release of the exhibition.
[ix] See Miwon Kwon, ‘The Un-sitings of Community’, Greek transl.: Nikos Iliades, in G. Stavrakakis, K. Stafylakis, The Political in Contemporary Art, Ekkremes, Athens, 2008, pp. 189–211.
[x] For a discussion of this issue, see Andrea Fraser, ‘What is Institutional Critique?’ and Isabelle Graw, ‘Beyond Institutional Critique’, in John C. Welchman (ed.) Institutional Critique and After, Soccas Symposium, vol. 2, jrp/ringier, Europe 2006, pp. 137–151 and pp. 305–309 respectively.
[xi] On this level, how Deller attempts to overturn the rules by working from the inside, is reminiscent of the analysis of Michel de Certeau regarding daily life which has the potential to overthrow, for the tactical practice of penetrating the world of the governing class with the objective of overthrowing its basic principles. Deller seems to agree with Michel de Certeau’s attempt to detect the daily procedures that play with the mechanisms of (whatever) discipline and do not comply with them but aim only to overthrow them, through the familiarization once again with a space that has been organised with the help of the practices of social and cultural production. M. De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1. arts de faire, Gallimard, Paris (1980), 1990, p. XL.
[xii] Claire Bishop has discussed the issue of the aesthetic in relationship to art that has a ‘social direction’ in her article, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, published in Artforum magazine in February 2006. Drawing from Jacques Rancière’s proposal that the aesthetic is the ‘ability to think contradiction’, she supports the idea that ‘the aesthetic doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the altar of social change, as it already inherently contains this ameliorative process.’ As she writes: ‘The best collaborative practices of the past ten years address this contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and reflect on this antinomy both in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception’.