Is it Art? The Battle of Orgreave

Is it Art? The Battle of Orgreave 

Part three of  Kitchen Table Writers' look at contemporary art

Seventeen years after the 1984 minor’s strike, conceptual artist Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, reconstructed its most violent confrontation in documentary film and showed on the UK’s Channel Four. 

What was the battle? During the miners'strike, picketing took place all over the county of Yorkshire. One such picket was at a coking plant near Rotherham called Orgreave. The miners picketed and the police came to break this up so that the coke could continue to be shipped out. 

Jeremy Deller was asking…was it that simple?

The police had swelled ranks bussed from all over the UK – some were not police at all, but subscripted from the army. The miners also had many strike sympathisers bussed in to increase the picket numbers. The clash turned into a running battle, resulting in over 120 people injured and 93 arrests. Jeremy Deller wanted to reproduce the battle to get to the heart and the truth of it, which he believed did not emerge at the time.

I first encountered Jeremy Deller in 2012, when I heard, through my Druid friends, that he had conceptualised the idea of a life-sized bouncy castle replica of Stonehenge. I can recall him saying online, that this was ‘a bit of fun’. He reinforced this with the title ‘Sacrilege’. I’m a druid, and was horrified to hear that a group of druids wanted to hire the castle in an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records…how many fully-robed druids can you get on a bouncy castle shaped like Stonehenge…

Image courtesy of Jeremy Deller

Druids have a varied press, from satanic to dippy, and bouncing on Stonehenge wasn’t going to improve our image, in my opinion. I was somewhat pacified when the idea was abandoned due to lack of funds, but to this day, I shudder at the thought. 

Deller won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket, (a video study of Texas) in 2004, but I was still not convinced. An artist who used the words bouncing and Stonehenge in one breath would surely do nothing more than fatuous hommage to the miner's strike with a single video reconstruction.

Before I watched it, I imagined that The Battle of Orgreave would hardly be art at all – despite becoming part of an exhibition at the Tate…The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All).

The Channel Four documentary, directed by Mike Figgis, also wove together interviews, live filming of the battle’s rehearsals and footage of the original event. Such programmes are usually for entertainment and information, not art’s sake. What does one remember about a BBC 4 documentary on the Romans? Not Mary Beard talking about history. It’s the re-enactment that’s impactful. Done well, battle scenes can be good telly, but surely they are not a piece of art.

But watching it on Youtube, I had to admit to myself that The Battle of Orgreave was informative, dramatic and engaging. The re-enactment itself hit home emotionally, even knowing the truncheons were plastic and the bricks were foam. I was moved and newly informed. 

Artangle Media described the making of the documentary as a ‘decoy’ – it would raise sufficient money to pay for the reconstruction in the first place. This led me to rethink my position. Why would this reconstruction be a contribution to conceptualised art? I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s argument…a work of art has a presence or aura that was the consequence of its authenticity.

The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All).The Courtesy of The Tate 

Deller says of the original event, the clash in 1984;  I had witnessed as a young person on TV, images of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 strike – having the quality of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. Immediately after the original confrontation, questions were raised. There was a suspicion the operation was under government control, and that police instructions were to switch strategies from the defensive protection of collieries to actively breaking up crowds and making arrests. It was revealed that the police charged on horseback prior to any major violence by the pickets. The subsequent case made against the arrested miners was thrown out of court. 

Prior to the reconstruction, Deller made posters he displayed at other art events he created (for example ‘Acid House’ at Tate Liverpool), printed on fake parchment and announcing a re-enactment of ‘The Bloody Battle of Orgreave’ under the title The English Civil War (part 2) . All this sounded very esoteric. You’d have to be in on the joke. On the other hand, it would raise anyone’s curiosity, so it was an excellent advertising move.

In the documentary, re-enactment expert Howard Giles pointed out how ‘Roman’ the original confrontation was, and how rudimentary the weapons were. The police were licensed to use only truncheons, but they did have protection; helmets and perspex shields had recently been issued as part of riot gear. The miners had stones, no protective gear, but a strong belief in what they were doing. They were lined up in traditional battle format, the miners in front of the coking plant. The police moved towards them with a basic strategy of hold the line and attack from the middle of the ranks, with a cavalry charge pursuing the strikers through the village. Roman, medieval, or reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars – certainly not the UK policing in the 1980s.

The re-enactment was held on a field very close to the original site. Over 800 people took part, mostly veteran re-enactors, but also former miners and policemen. The footage of interviews with them demonstrates how vividly they relived the events they’d taken part in. I had difficulty believing they considered what they were doing an artistic endeavour, it felt more urgent than that, and far more like a social protest. It came across strongly that they wanted people to be aware of what really happened. It’s also fair to say that many participants did not know the full extent of their involvement in an artistic project. Individually, some of them weren’t there to make art at all.

Photo of Deller Courtesy of The Tate 

Deller wrote…The image of this pursuit up the hill stuck in my mind and for years I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, like a civil war, had a traumatically divisive effect at all levels of life. 

Deller then, did not plan to re-enact what was reported to have happened on that day (which most historic re-enactments strive to do), he wanted to document the truth as he perceived it…or, as it turned out to be when reconstructed. At first, this reminded me of factual media programming, investigative journalism and reconstructions of crimes ontelevision. But I recalled Pablo Picasso’s words, Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand’ . There is something in this which suggests an artistic concept, without leaving the social comment behind at all. 

Until that point I had been keen to spot ‘artistic filming’ or things like the use of music or heightened language (as in Pinter’s plays) in the television programme, and had been disappointed to realise that the reconstruction was almost as chaotic and unconstructed as the original battle. Once I began to think of art as 'realising the truth', I began to see how the work was propelled essentially by an aesthetic interpretation of passionate socio-political ideals, which Deller presented within an imaginative and original piece.

So, after viewing the documentary, and doing my research around it, I’ve had to extend my view about what art can be, and ask myself, can art be an idea in the mind an artist that will need many other people, often with skills artists don't have, to bring an artistic project to fruition? There are two aspects to this piece of art; the actual re-enactment itself, with or without the video that recorded it, and, afterwards, the TV documentary programme, that actually only showed snatches of the re-enactment alongside the other aspects. Both seem quite valid, and the entire project made me look at how art raises emotions and forces the viewer to re-evaluate their perceptions, often, as in this case, by creating a work appreciated for its integral truth.

Watch the documentary here

Jeremy Deller (born 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process. He won the Turner Prize in 2004, and in 2010 was awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA). Deller is known for his Battle of Orgreave (2001), a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave which occurred during the UK miners' strike in 1984  http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jeremy-deller-3034