by Jeremy Deller, Nicholas Abrahams, United Kingdom 2012, 67'
| SOUNDTRACK: Rob St John | EDITING: Daniel Goddard | |
| LANGUAGE: Vo: English; Sub: Italian | ||
Presented at Lo schermo dell'arte 2019 In 2012, the same year he made the inflatable Sacrilege for the Glasgow International Festival of Art, Deller also directed (with his longtime collaborator Nicholas Abrahams) this documentary on one of the UK’s most eclectic and eccentric post-war characters. Considered the leading figure of British “New Realism”, Bruce Lacey might be the missing link in the history of alternative English culture. During his long career as a painter, sculptor, shaman, robot builder, satyr, musician, Lacey collaborated with Lenny Bruce, Spike Milligan, the Beatles and many others. He never stopped making art, assembling futuristic automata and machines, performing surreal and sometimes shocking performances. Although Lacey was 85 in 2012, the film shows a man still active, and curious. In his country house, he’s dedicated to his childish, delirious and multifaceted creative process, and seems to live in his own dimension, far from the modern world. Lacey is surrounded by a mystical, hallucinated, fairy-tale aura, a living bastion of the English counter-culture of the 1960s.
Jeremy Deller:
British artist Jeremy Deller, trained as an art historian, works with video, installation and performance on themes of popular and folk culture. He’s developed an ironic narrative suspended between reality and fiction. He’s interested in the mechanisms on which contemporary societies are structured and in the disparate experiences and relationships of individuals. He makes critical use of the stereotypes spread in society, especially those related to political, economic and religious powers. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004. Among his solo exhibitions: Sacrilege, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2018); English Magic, British Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Joy in People, Hayward Gallery, London (2012); It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, Creative Time and New Museum, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2009); Procession, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2009); D’une révolution à l’autre. Carte blanche à Jeremy Deller, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2008).