From one revolution to another : five rooms

1995-2000 Folk archive
The first room “The folk archive” is a documentary fund, collected by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. This is rather an ethnological collection of creative practices and tradition, some of which are really ancient. It witnesses in its own way the British popular cultural identity.

1998 - 2008 Ed Hall’s Banners
The second room presents a collection of banners painted and embroidered for different associations by Ed Hall, an architect involved in social movements. These banners tell in a particular manner the 30 last years of British history viewed by minorities and social concerns they defend. Ed Hall has selected by himself the banners which he has lent for this exhibition.

William Scott. Good Person
This section presents the William Scott’s urban planning project that would see San Francisco rebuilt as a new city named “Praise Frisco” and a series of portrait works which depict himself, his family and members of his local church. William Scott works at Creative Growth Art Centre (USA) that is an art workshop that serves a community of adult artists with mental, physical and developmental disabilities.

1962-2001 The beginning of the rock in France (in collaboration with Marc Touché)
Two collections are presented in this room. The first is an archive of Golf Drouot, an emblematic place for the birth of rock in France. The second collection is the archive of a rehearsal studio of an amateurish rock group Against You. Both archives are a kind of contemporary archaeology that allows determine social appurtenance of members of the group.

1917-1939 Sound in Z (Matt Price and Andrey Smirnov)
This section presents documents, photographs and visuals which are linked with archives of Theremin Centre in Moscow, a centre of researches that linked the physical aspect of acoustic and the musical sciences. The aim of this archive is to restore the history and the culture of this “artistic utopia” of 1910-1920 which was destroyed in confrontation with the soviet authorities.

1760-2008 All that is solid melts into air (with Scott King)
The title of the exposition is a citation from the Communist Manifest. This section put together a lot of objects and witnesses of the period between 1760 and 2008. Some of them are representative of the state of industrial development in Victorian Great Britain and enthusiastic artist’s attitude toward it. Another part of the documents demonstrate relations of transition and consequence that could be established between the industrial revolution and the cultural one, which is the appearance of the rock music.

Album

Folk Archive, anthropology or art ?

Folk Archive is the personal work of Jeremy Deller in this exhibition. The collection presents some traditional practices, artistic or individual that you may be extravagant. As the funny face competition, the fight embroidery, the celebration of the French Revolution in England ... they are mass behavior, individual affirmations face against social rules too strict, customizations or protests, demands.

Jeremy Deller refuses a hierarchy between the arts and everyday objects, the commercial and the common. His objective is to capture performance, perishable, the life moment where popular class escapes of its dark life. Deller is interested in British life in its small details; details that define a culture, an identity: multicolored cakes, ritual battles between villages, parades disguised, sculptures of vegetables, etc. It is an unofficial Britain version. It is the creative life! Folk Archive, recently purchased by the British Council, shows the continuity of folklore in Britain today.

Inevitably, there are a lot of humors. Photos and videos are still exposed kitsch and show wacky traditions. This exhibition shows the taste of English for the costumes, fancy dress. For us it is explained in two ways: there is a tradition inherited from Shakespeare, where women were not allowed to play on stage. The men were on stage to travesty. However, there is also the importance of social classes. In England, the social hierarchy is so rigid that costumes had the only way to be what you could not be.

In front of this collector fever of Jeremy Deller, the exhibition is a work to reading as a novel, watching as a movie, looking through as a portfolio. And Jeremy Deller is an artist, a theater director. After this visit, you will want just one desire: take a Eurostar ticket!

Folk Archive Album

The banners by Ed Hall, a height exhibition

In the hall, a large banner welcomes the visitor. Then forty banners in the first room, celebrating clubs, committees, associations, political organizations and trade unions with their demands.

The banner art is highly developed and very traditional in England. This second exhibition is made up by Ed Hall, a senior architect in London who now devotes his life to British demands. His guests are associations engaged in social causes and political unions, families plunged into mourning, parents outraged by q school closure, or the Union rail, the International Union for sex workers.

With these creations, we discover British social history: demonstrations against the police blunders, against privatization with Thatcher, against the war in Iraq, etc. So during the visit, put up your eyes!

Banners Album

All that is solid melts into air

This title is a quotation from the Communist Manifest which evokes the capacity of capitalism to adaptation. It is not necessary to explain what do this Manifest have to do with the concept of the revolution and how it is associated with the industrial development…

The collection embraces the period since the beginning of the industrial revolution in England in 1760. One part of the documents witnesses the enthusiasms linked to the development. Another part presents (like Adam Curtis’s documentaries) the process of decline which was rather extended. Social mutations and crises it has produced still apparent until nowadays. This section evokes possible links between the industrial revolution and the musical production. In Great Britain the rock music appears at the moment of decline of the industrial development, so it can be interpreted as its natural consequence.





The part consecrated to the city of Manchester embodies this relation of transition. Once being a symbol of the industrial revolution in England, Manchester became a center of rock and punk music. Other significant examples are the genealogy of the rock singer and photographs of Adrian Street who was a miner’s son who chose to become a professional catcher. In JD’s opinion, the photo of this man, clothed as a travesty, and his father in a mine is a real provocation!