English conceptual artist. His eclectic work engages on a broad
level with popular and traditional culture; his forays into folk
art are deliberately low-brow, anti-urban and characterised by an
entertaining lightness of touch.
He often works collaboratively; for the 1996 work Acid Brass,
presented live and on CD, he instigated the incongruous
transcription of a number of acid house anthems for a traditional
brass band. The strange juxtaposition of traditional brass band and
contemporary dance music forced a revealing relationship between
the old and the new and suggested the possibility not just of a
collision but of an interaction between the cultures represented by
these distinct musical forms. This approach was continued in the
exhibition The Uses of Literacy (Norwich, Gal., 1997) for which
Deller solicited and displayed material from fans of the rock group
Manic Street Preachers; this was later published in book form again
using a title borrowed from a classic analysis of popular culture
by Richard Hoggart (London, 1957). Deller continued this
accumulative, laissez-faire strategy in the Folk Archive project,
begun in 1999 with Alan Kane (b. 1961). The artists described this
work as a 'celebration of subjectivity', and underlined the
authenticity of the archived objects and documents. An Introduction
to the Folk Archive (2000), a selective display of their findings
from diverse sources such as morris dancing, gurning competitions
and political demonstrations, was included at the exhibition
Intelligence: New British Art (London, Tate, 2000).