Jeremy Deller’s
The Battle of Orgreave (2001) has primarily been discussed in direct relation to the violent clashes between picketing miners and police during the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in the UK. As a performed re-enactment of violence which took place on 18 June 1984, the work has been positioned within a narrative of the Miners’ Strike that allows retrospective consideration of the political and social ramifications of the industrial action.
1 Whilst these interpretations are undoubtedly important, it is my contention that
The Battle of Orgreave needs to be considered from a variety of perspectives, and that identifying a broader range of subjects at work in Deller’s performance event leads to a richer and deeper understanding of this multifaceted work of art.
Fig. 1 Jeremy Deller, scene from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photo credit, Martin Jenkinson.
The Battle of Orgreave is best understood as a dialogical artwork, containing multiple strands created though conversations between the artist, veterans of the Miners’ Strike, re-enactment specialists, the audiences of the work and its art-historical context. While the 1984–85 Strike is undoubtedly the fulcrum of the work, Deller has allowed space for different themes to exist. Initially contextualising this re-enactment through a discussion of the Miners’ Strike and its presentation in the media, I will go on to suggest that
The Battle of Orgreave could be interpreted as an exploration of historical memory and a consideration of how the past is understood and transmitted in the present day. Deller’s fascination with ‘living history’, a term he uses to denote the stories of people living in the here and now who were involved in, or are representative of, events deemed culturally and historically significant,
2 can be viewed within a recent museological tendency of promoting the narratives of those on the margins of historical memory. Presenting the past in the present, Deller’s performance event encompasses the politics of re-enactment as historical methodology, whilst the realism of the re-enactment calls into question whether viewing such a performance can have historical authenticity. Thinking critically about the past, Deller sought to tell the truth of the violence at Orgreave, and in doing so undermined apparently authoritative versions of history.
The narrative of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike encompasses the steady decline of coal mining as a major employer within Britain’s heavy industries. Since the end of World War II, the contraction of the coal industry has been steady, and between 1960 and 1970 43 per cent of Britain’s collieries closed. The 1984 dispute can be directly linked to the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter leading to the fall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government.
3 By the time the Conservatives returned to power with Margaret Thatcher as leader in 1979, they had already drafted a policy proposal for the denationalisation of primary and secondary industries which many on the Left feared would have the additional outcome of quashing the power of the trade unions.
4 When, in 1984, the government and the National Coal Board announced plans for colliery closures, industrial action swiftly followed. The miners believed they could win; the government, ultimately, proved they could not. Although ostensibly about pit closures, the strike became the site of an ideological contest between left- and right-wing politics, a contest between the older, working-class socialism embodied by the NUM president Arthur Scargill and the new entrepreneurialism promoted by Margaret Thatcher.
Prior to the confrontation on 18 June 1984, it had become clear to both strikers and government that Orgreave would be of significant strategic importance in the trajectory of the dispute. Picketing the coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, which provided fuel for the Scunthorpe steelworks, Arthur Scargill had hoped to break the government’s will over pit closures. Throughout the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had aligned herself with the police force, being a vocal exponent of law and order. Having learnt the lessons of the 1981 urban uprisings, during the 1984–85 dispute police armed with riot equipment were deployed across mining districts. The eventual confrontation at Orgreave was the first time riot police had been used to contain an industrial strike in the UK. However, distancing government involvement in the causes of the strike, Thatcher claimed: ‘Mob violence can only be defeated if the police have the complete moral and practical support of the government.’
5In his book, published following the performance event, Deller explained:
On 18 June 1984, I was watching the evening news and saw footage of a mass picket at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in which thousands of were chased up a field by mounted police. The image of this pursuit 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 in the UK. Families were torn apart because of divided loyalties, the union movement was split on its willingness to support the National Union of Mineworkers, the print media especially contributed to the polarization of the arguments to the point where there appeared to be little space for the middle ground. So in all but name it became an ideological and industrial battle between two sections of British society.
6
In an extensive study, the Broadcasting Research Unit (BRU) found that between the months of June and August 1984 televised BBC coverage of violence on the picket lines was rising in comparison to ITV, where the reporting of violence was falling (see Cumberbatch
et al. 1986: 50). The bias towards covering the violent aspects of the strike by the BBC was to prove significant in its treatment of the confrontation between pickets and police on 18 June at Orgreave. In a detailed analysis of the BBC 9pm news and the ITV 10pm news of 18 June, the BRU found a marked contrast in the language of the reporting and the visual images broadcast. While the BBC juxtaposed images of pickets assaulting policemen with words such as ‘battle’, ‘violence’ and ‘battlefield’, ITV chose to broadcast a policeman truncheon-ing a picket, with the newscaster using words such as ‘fight’. However, both channels presented footage of the mounted police cantering into the pickets as occurring after an escalation of picket violence.
7 Eyewitness accounts of that day at Orgreave testify to the mounted charge as occurring
before any major escalation of violence, suggesting that police intervention was the cause rather than the consequence of picket violence.
Seeking to rectify this false impression, Deller made the mounted police charge a key feature in his performance, and as such
The Battle of Orgreave can be understood as building upon the work of leftist documentary photographers. During the course of the dispute images of the mounted police charge became synonymous with the Miners’ Strike, but they were not exclusive to Orgreave. Photographs by John Sturrock of mounted police charging towards a miners’ picket line at Brodsworth capture the pace and ferocity of the event from a miner’s perspective. Alongside images of the strike by Chris Killip, Sturrock’s photographs bear witness to the violent struggle taking place in 1984 and characterise the social documentary photography of the early to mid-1980s.
8 These documentary images of the 1984 strike, alongside the televised news footage, are echoed in Deller’s re-enactment.
On 18 June 2001, seventeen years after the original confrontation, Deller returned to Orgreave with a cast and crew to re-stage one of the most violent clashes of the strike. He had first conceived of re-enacting the conflict at Orgreave seven years earlier, and in 2000, having received financial backing from public-art commissioners Artangel, undertook eighteen months of research into the Miners’ Strike, looking at newspaper archives and television footage and, most importantly, meeting former miners and policemen and listening to their testimonies and eye-witness accounts. By choosing to re-enact the confrontation Deller distinguished Orgreave as not only particularly representative of the Miners’ Strike but also as individually worthy of commemoration. Describing in his statement a desire to tell the truth, of wanting to find out what really happened, he alluded to the biased news reporting of the British broadcast media and by mentioning families and the print media and making reference to the status of heavy industry and the conflict between political ideologies, Deller emphasised the breadth of the social and political issues in play during the strike, as well as its ongoing ramifications in contemporary society.
Approximately one thousand people took part in
The Battle of Orgreave in 2001, of whom about two hundred were ex-miners, together with a handful of ex-policemen (exact number unknown) who had been involved in the original conflict, and local Orgreave residents. For the reconstruction Deller enlisted the help of Howard Giles, director of Event-Plan, a re-enactment specialist company, who had previously been the director of English Heritage’s Special Events Unit. With Giles’ contacts, Deller recruited the other eight hundred participants from historical re-enactment societies,
9 all of whom were more used to re-staging historical events from outside their own living memory or personal experience. Rehearsals took place on 17 June, when participants performed mini-re-enactments, practiced period swear-words and told their stories of the strike to each other.
10On the day of the re-enactment, Orgreave village came to a standstill; a marquee was set up containing archival material and images, ensuring that onlookers were aware that
The Battle of Orgreave was a commemorative reconstruction. A commentary explaining what was happening and pop hits from 1984 was played over loudspeakers. Fashions of that year were revisited and participants were dressed in costumes appropriate to the time and place of the battle. Miners wore reprinted ‘Coal not Dole’ stickers, whilst police uniforms remained static in their familiarity. Although the weather was overcast in 2001, it had been a hot day in 1984 and Deller insisted on attention to detail: so miners played football and ate ice-lollies on the battlefield. Because the re-enactment was staged to be as ‘real’ as possible, the site specificity of Orgreave was central. Taking place in and around Orgreave itself, the production reactivated the everyday space of the village and the surrounding fields as a site of conflict, reoccupying it with scenes from living memory. Whilst it was not possible to adhere to the time-scale of the 1984 battle, care was taken to ensure that the re-enactment occurred in the correct sequence, and Howard Giles identified two phases of the battle which dictated the organisation of the reenactment.
11 The first comprised lines of miners and police in a stand-off in a nearby field and consisted of miners throwing foam-rocks, chanting and occasionally pushing the front line of police. In response, the police banged their truncheons on their shields and hit out at pushing miners. An actor playing Scargill inspected the police troops. This was followed by a recreation of the notorious mounted attack which scattered the miners, who were then pursued by police officers on foot. The charge led to mock-fighting between miners and police, both sides suffering pretend injuries; fake blood was distributed to achieve authenticity. During the original battle, panicked miners had retreated from the field by scrambling across a railway line, but for safety this event was omitted from the re-enactment.
Fig. 2 Jeremy Deller, scene from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photo credit, Martin Jenkinson.
Fig. 3 Jeremy Deller, scene from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photo credit, Martin Jenkinson.
The second phase was the battle in Orgreave village; again miners threw foam-rocks, whilst mounted police charged through the streets and eventually pushed the miners towards the outskirts of the village, where the re-enactment came to an end. Events that had originally occurred over approximately eight hours had been condensed and scaled down, but Deller recalled later that the re-enactment had at times veered towards real violence and contained an edginess not usually found in staged historical-battle re-enactments.
12 By insisting upon the presence and participation of ‘veterans’ of the 1984 conflict on the front lines of the restaged picket, Deller gained for his project a legitimacy and a level of authenticity that eludes other re-enactments and that made the work more compelling.
For many of the miners taking part in the performance,
The Battle of Orgreave offered an opportunity to reassert their truth of what happened on that day in 1984. In challenging governmental ‘truth’ of the violence at Orgreave and its presentation on both the BBC and ITV news, and by providing a forum in which the destructive stereotype of the miner could be reconsidered,
The Battle of Orgreave can be understood – following Bakhtin – as a means by which miners could ‘express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth’ (1984: 269). Functioning as personal catharsis and commemoration, Orgreave was also a comment on the legacy of social and political change in the subsequent years, and the performance touched on concerns that continue into the present. The closure of the mining industry ‘was not just a case of local economic decline but rather one of cultural crisis’.
13 In the wake of pit closures, many mining villages had to cope with the long-lasting effects of male unemployment, the dereliction of industrial buildings, a rise in petty crime, substance abuse and the collapse of community cohesion in areas whose raison d’être had been mining. By providing a platform to address the causes of these social problems, Deller can be considered as participating in the regeneration and rehabilitation of marginalised mining communities. Tom Morton’s proposition that
The Battle of Orgreave was not simply ‘about’ the Miners’ Strike but was, rather, ‘a part of its history, an epilogue to an experience’, seems particularly useful.
14
Fig. 4 Jeremy Deller, scene from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photo credit, Martin Jenkinson.
Similarly, using Deller’s conception of the term ‘living history’ discussed earlier, the participation of real miners and real policemen in the artwork places it within the purview of an individual picket’s or policeman’s experience, and as such, the work becomes part of their narrative of the strike. Deller was conscious that this should happen and his book
The English Civil War Part II: Personal Accounts of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike – whilst ostensibly a document of the artwork, containing photographs of the re-enactment and information about the day – is in fact, as its subtitle makes clear, a collection of personal accounts of the strike. Containing essays by a picket, a picket’s wife, a policeman and an ambulance driver amongst others, as well as reproducing newspaper reports and protest-song lyrics and containing a CD of oral testimonies, the book becomes a record of those normally excluded from official historical documents.
During his research for
The Battle of Orgreave Deller became an oral historian, interviewing witnesses of and participants in the event in order to record the experiences and opinions of those ‘people who might otherwise have been “hidden from history”’ (Perks and Thomson 1998: ix). The documentary film recording of
The Battle of Orgreave, directed by Mike Figgis,
15 is interspersed with archival television footage and interviews carried out by Deller; he also undertook the interviews for the audio CD. Deller’s foregrounding of oral history and the written testimony of the miners and their supporters enabled the ‘empowerment of individuals or social groups’, who were demonised for their actions in the mainstream press and by the government.
16 In his attraction to those on the margins of mainstream history, it is possible to see Deller as the artist-ethnographer aligning himself with the miners and their families, in order to tap into their subalterneity and produce an artwork with potentially trans-formative properties. However, whilst Deller’s book contains transcripts from a cross-section of people involved in the strike, David Gilbert notes that ‘other voices from the strike remain silent – those miners that returned to work in York-shire are shadowy figures to be demonised or pitied’.
17 Deller’s book and the CD subscribe to the predominant collective narrative of the strike given by pickets and their wives; miners who continued to work and anti-strike policemen are excluded. The casting of the striking miners as ‘right’ and the police as ‘wrong’ in Orgreave avoids some of the complexity of how to position non-striking miners. In this context, Anna Green has raised a note of caution when considering individual oral testimonies and histories that collaborate too closely with an already existent (although under-recognised) narrative.
18 She suggests that, while collective memory fulfils a need to remember and to cement identity within particular groups, the dominance of collective over individual memory has the potential to stifle differentiation and dissent. Green argues that ‘the need for an “affective community” ensures that individuals remember primarily those memories which are “in harmony” with those of others’.
19 In his desire to rectify wrongs done towards the miners, Deller prioritised those narratives that already had credence within the pro-strike mining community, with several of his narrators having already been recorded in print and oral history archives.
20 However, it is clear from his statement quoted earlier that this was always intended to be the case. In telling the truth of what happened at Orgreave and challenging the biased media narratives, the artwork and its accompanying publication would naturally lean towards the pickets’ position.
Enlisting the expertise of Howard Giles was critical for the fruition of Deller’s artwork and directed interpretations of
The Battle of Orgreave towards issues of history and re-enactment. As part of his research, Deller undertook an investigation into re-enactment societies and the role of historical re-enactment within British heritage industries. Embedded within Orgreave is a probing examination of the validity of re-enactment as historical experience and of the types of people who involve themselves with re-enacting historical battles as a creative pastime. Giles, in his role at English Heritage, had actively supported the use of re-enactment within the heritage sector as an educational tool in the form of ‘Living History’, which brought the past to life. In 1989, 49 per cent of English Heritage special events were military re-enactments.
21Literature on ‘Living History’ argues that re-enactment offers up alternative ways of accessing the past.
22 ‘Living History’ activates the senses of both participants and spectators, enabling a physical experience in a way that other forms of historical investigation do not. As a strategy for interpreting and negotiating the past, it is suggested, ‘Living History’ also allows for communication between the past and the present and facilitates greater understanding.
The Battle of Orgreave as a ‘Living History’ performance brought the past into the present and encouraged a reconsideration of the events of 1984. Historical re-enactment developed in the 1960s, stimulated by the centennial celebrations of the American Civil War, and re-enacting military battles remains at the forefront of this kind of activity. In Britain, The Sealed Knot and the English Civil War Society were the earliest and remain the largest re-enactment groups, with both societies specialising in battles from the English Civil War. With members of both of these groups participating,
The Battle of Orgreave might be equally ‘about’ the hobbyists who take part in historical battle reconstructions. In an extended interview, Deller explained:
Living history is a good term to use. That’s the phrase re-enactment groups use all the time to refer to what they do. But often their performances have no social or political context – you just see this battle and the details of war, cannons, horses, etc. It’s not about why those men are fighting each other, especially when they are from the same country. What I wanted was for re-enactors to be in a situation where they would be fighting with and against men that were part of an unfinished messy history. I wanted some of them to see that history didn’t end in 1945. That was initially almost as much of an interest as the event itself. A lot of the members of historical re-enactment societies were terrified of the miners. During the ‘80s they had obviously believed what they had read in the press and had the idea that the men that they would be working with on the re-enactment were going to be outright hooligans or revolutionaries. They thought it would turn into one huge real battle.
23
In his criticisms of un-contextualised re-enactments Deller appears to echo David Lowenthal, who argues that watching or participating in an exciting reconstruction is not the same as having historical knowledge or understanding; Lowenthal suggests that ‘factoids’, or details, replace the intricacies of historical contexualisation and interpretation.
24 Re-enactment societies appear to unconsciously uphold this position, presenting themselves as fervently a-political.
25 A bipartisan position has been the touchstone of historical re-enactment, with specialists arguing that in their adherence to battle records and attention to costume detail, performances (and therefore performers) do not allow space for personal subjectivity or historical revisionism.
26 Deller attempted to position the re-enactors beyond factoids, by bringing them face to face with the people they were pretending to be. In doing so, he demonstrated that the past and the present are intertwined and that, in order to fully understand the intricacies of the past, re-enactment performances must go beyond simulacra to include critical engagement.
But whilst it is possible to see details such as the ‘Coal not Dole’ stickers or the presence of vintage coal trucks as ‘structurally superfluous’ to the narrative of the strike given during Deller’s re-enactment, according to Roland Barthes’ essay
The Reality Effect these details can be seen as important descriptive notations which frame the action whilst not in themselves influencing the progression of the narrative.
27 Barthes argues that cumulatively, these details establish the reality of the scene so that, as Stephen Bann explains, it is the detail which ‘guarantees the authenticity of the historical message’.
28 From this perspective, verisimilitude is the frame which facilitates critical historical interpretation. Countering the anti-heritage discourse, Raphael Samuel maintains that ‘Living History’ can offer productive entryways into the past. For him historical re-enactment is ‘live interpretation’, where the past becomes plural and where hegemonic histories ascribed from above become fractured.
29 In this way,
The Battle of Orgreave gave new and experiential insight.
Nonetheless, Deller’s film
History in Action (2000–05) seems to support Lowenthal’s identification of living history as failing as a rigorous tool of historical research. In 1996, Howard Giles oversaw English Heritage’s first multi-period event, ‘History in Action’, at which re-enactment groups that specialised in different historical periods gathered at a single site. Since then, English Heritage has expanded its involvement with historical re-enactors and ‘History in Action’ has been held annually, ‘becoming the largest and most spectacular event of its kind in the world’.
30 Deller’s
History in Action is a record of this type of multi-era re-enactment event, depicting a procession of American World War I soldiers, followed by French nineteenth-century soldiers and their wives and children, marching through two rows of Roman legionaries. There is a strange intermingling of historical times and the work appears to be a record of Deller’s fascination with not only the people taking part but also their ability to conflate time, despite their commitment to historical accuracy. The work raises questions regarding what exactly these people are re-enacting and whether there can ever be anything truthful in the coming together of discrete historical periods in this way. While Deller’s stance towards these people is ambiguous, his film, in its existence as an artwork rather than a documentary, does imply a position, as proposed by Kevin Walsh, that re-enactment events ‘are nothing but mere titillation, meaningless amateur dramatics promoting the post-modern simulacrum, a hazy image of a manipulated and trivialized past’.
31 While
History in Action may stand alongside Folk Archive as a record of individual creativity and expression, it is distinct from
The Battle of Orgreave in that it lacks historical specificity and could therefore be regarded as a general comment on the non-contextualised activities of reenactment societies.
In light of this discussion of Britain’s heritage culture, if we return to Deller’s initial intention – to show the Miners’ Strike as a pivotal moment in British history, a second civil war in which socialism and the nationalised industries were defeated by Thatcherite free-market capitalism – then politicised interpretations of
The Battle of Orgreave as a nostalgic dialogue between past and present become increasingly complex. Robert Hewison and others have argued that the proliferation of heritage sites is a by-product of cultural nostalgia, but that this nostalgia is itself ‘felt most strongly at a time of discontent, anxiety or disappointment’ and that ‘the times for which we feel nostalgia more keenly were themselves periods of disturbance’.
32 Re-enacted in 2001,
The Battle of Orgreave could be viewed as evidence of personal nostalgia for community solidarity on the part of the ex-miners and, more specifically, as a symptom of a left-wing disenchantment with New Labour’s government.
Alongside the historical, cultural and political interpretations of
The Battle of Orgreave its art-historical contexts need also to be identified. As a time-based artwork, it exists within a discourse of performance in which reality and mimesis are united. Performance has been positioned as an alternative, anti-establishment art-form which can challenge the limitations of more traditional object-based art and institutional sites for viewing art.
33 Consequently, Deller’s idea of staging a re-enactment of the 1984 conflict can be conceived as performance art dealing with socio-political concerns which challenge the biased histories of the dominant power. The performed artwork can be understood, in Katherine Stiles’ terms, ‘as intrinsically activist and socially subversive of state policies, earning a privileged position on the margins of culture, where it serves in the liminal capacity as a tester of cultural values’.
34The performed re-enactment as subversive act of liberation from the prevailing order can also be regarded as a form of Bakhtin’s carnival, marking ‘the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalised and completed.’
35 The Battle of Orgreave might be seen therefore as a Bakhtinian suspension of the norms and prohibitions set in place to prevent civilian disorder and violence and giving its participants licence to enter into a fight or battle scenario outside the norms of everyday life. As in Bakhtin’s carnival: ‘The boundaries between play and life are intentionally erased’ so that ‘life itself is on stage’.
36 The artwork’s status as re-enactment extends Bakhtin’s proposition of carnival as a true depiction of life. The re-enactment as time machine transported the veterans and witnesses of the original conflict back to a time of remembered experience. The fine line between performed and real violent action in
The Battle of Orgreave is complicated by the re-enactment’s ability to telescope time, so that participants were both remembering real violence from the past and re-living it. When Alex Farquharson could record that ‘rumour had it that a small number of the real miners were applying too much gusto to their roles at rehearsals the previous day’, it is clear that a blurring between the real and the performed bodies taking part in the re-enactment occurred.
37Deller’s artwork provided a space in which a conflict over agency and ownership of personal identity could take place. For Adrian Heathfield, ‘the performing body is often presented as a site of contestation between opposing dynamics; as a passive recipient of inscription by social institutions, cultural discourses, ideologies and orders of power, and as an active agent through which identity and social relation may be tested, re-articulated and remade’.
38 The inclusion of real miners in the performance challenged the stereotype inscribed upon them in 1984 and enabled the participants to control their own presentation. It is significant that a proportion of the participating miners chose to play policemen during the reenactment, complicating the notion that identities are stable and that representation can be authoritative.
Bakhtin posits that when the lines between play and reality are erased the audience is also complicit in the performance. Directing
The Battle of Orgreave in front of spectators, Deller ensured that the re-enactment had an existence beyond its active participants; in this performance, as in carnival, ‘everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people’.
39 The ‘liveness’ of the event challenged a cultural system in which experience is frequently mediated. Just as ‘Living History’ has been seen to enable a physical historical experience, so live art performances heighten sensory knowledges and utilise the audience’s emotional responses. As part of a public art performance, the audience, as much as the reenactors or the artist, were complicit in the political positioning of
The Battle of Orgreave and Deller transformed his spectators from passive observers into active participants and witnesses. Tim Etchells has suggested that performance art has the power to transform disengaged onlookers into active contributors through their witnessing of events, whereby ‘to witness an event is to be present at it in an ethical way. To witness is to feel the weight of things and one’s own place in them.’
40 As Alex Farquharson observed, ‘For many – participants and spectators alike – this
Battle of Orgreave was more flashback than re-enactment’, and audience members joined in the chanting and jeering as policemen ran by.
41 The inclusion of Orgreave’s inhabitants within readings of Deller’s artwork is not only a recognition of the role spectators play in completing the performance, but also recalls their presence and participation at the 1984 conflict.
The Battle of Orgreave can then be interpreted as a public work of art, including not only the participants but also its observers.
Fig. 5 Jeremy Deller, scene from The Battle of Orgreave, 2001. Commissioned and produced by Artangel. Photo credit, Martin Jenkinson.
Reactivating memories of the Miner’s Strike through its re-enactment,
The Battle of Orgreave presented what happened at Orgreave in June 1984 as a conduit to wider concerns. Not only did Deller’s artwork take into consideration the personal memories of the artist and the original participants, it also highlights how collective and group memories are shaped. Challenging the truth of what was broadcast on television in 1984, Orgreave raised questions over the reliability of images, over who has control over the presentation of historic events and over how the past is remembered. Using the tools of the heritage industry,
The Battle of Orgreave opposed a heritage system in which the past is remembered through sanitised memories. Orgreave was not the past seen from a safe distance, but rather history presented as unfinished business. Identified as an artist-ethnographer and oral historian, Jeremy Deller can be located within the current debates surrounding the ethics of collaborative and socially engaged art. In
The Battle of Orgreave he initiated a multifaceted performance with a lightness of touch which has meant that, despite his having clear aims for the artwork, there remains enough dialogic space around it for it to exist beyond those parameters.
NOTES
The author and editors are grateful to Visual Culture in Britain journal for allowing this chapter to be re-printed.
