![]() He felt he couldn’t do what Deller was proposing “until I finished the job on me, and that wasn’t done yet.” But then he explained why: He was in a very different place in his life at that time, working on fixing past relationships and the relationship he had with himself. It was, however, a process that took a decade.ĭuring the discussion, Pop said that Deller had initially approached him about the project 10 years ago and he’d said no. It not only revealed all of Deller’s motivations, feelings, and connections that went into getting the drawings made in the first place, but it gave his subject a way to participate in his own portrait - itself a gesture of respect, a reversal of the male gaze and the one-way power dynamic. Most importantly, the show’s culmination was a discussion between Deller and Pop, which occurred onstage after the opening reception. So rather than making a gold statue of the musician, Deller orchestrated a series of role-reversal experiences, turning the artist into a curator, the rock star into a tableau vivant, and the art students into collaborators. Pop is one of the most difficult, drug- and sex-addicted, out-of-control, angry, irrational, self-destructive musicians ever - and he’s lived to tell about it. ![]() Indeed, among musicians, Iggy Pop has long been considered an “artist’s artist” and is credited as being the “godfather of punk rock,” throwing himself into crowds, breaking bones, and baring his lithe body before audiences - all before the Sex Pistols crystalized the style into what became known as punk rock. His body has witnessed much and should be documented.” In a press release, he explained his rationale: “ body is central to an understanding of rock music and its place within American culture. One could say Deller has a sentimental approach, one that values intangible things like history and mimetic engagement with the past, which he’s demonstrated in older projects like Battle of Orgreave (2001), in which he staged a massive reenactment of a famous confrontation between striking miners and police in South Yorkshire, and Sacrilege (2014), a life-size inflatable Stonehenge modeled after the kind found in popular amusement parks, pointing to the cheapening of our collective memories and cultural histories by reducing such monuments to objects of amusement.ĭeller’s approach to depicting the figure is the polar opposite of that of many of his contemporaries, who have famously embraced the free-market economics of the art-fair system by making such works as Damian Hirst’s hyper-commodified diamond-encrusted skull (For the Love of God, 2007) and Mark Quinn’s life-sized 18k-gold statue of supermodel Kate Moss (Sphinx, 2006).ĭeller chose to use Pop’s body and his presence as the subject of the work. But many of the powerful anticapitalist critiques in this project are implicit and, as such, are easy to overlook. Jeremy Deller explains an ancient statue to Iggy Popīut the exhibition is just a point of departure for a larger dialog about the objectification and commodification of the body, as well as a kind of “where are we now?” discussion of the male form (and, by extension, the female form) in art.
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