The Bruce Lacey Experience

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.