Tales of the road with Jeremy Deller
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNubWgNTtK4]
Bathouseproject.org does appear to have been infiltrated. It apparently includes drawings and animations for a proposed bathouse in the UK. Bathouse: environment for bats.
Monday was day 17 of the Creative Time roadtrip. It found Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, with compadres Sgt. Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, hanging on the Santa Fe Plaza. Nato Thompson of Creative Time was there to record the days events for his blog. Jeremy talked to me and Conrad talked to Esam. We found out that the RV had a little fender bender in Tennessee, explaining in part Jeremys wish that they arrive safely in L.A. An angry citizen had approached the group in the morning, and generally reactions in Santa Fe had been mixed, Jeremy said. According to Natos blog, Jeremy and Jonathan had gotten into an argument with a “local art critic” at the house of Site Santa Fe director Laura Steward Heon the previous night. Ah, the art world. The rumpus was over whether work like this is art or not. Jonathan, the Platoon sergeant who worked in psyops in Iraq, called this old saw “tiresome.” I agree. And Esam Pasha, incidentally, reported to Conrad and me that when he was translating for the 21st Airborne at the start of the war, the military lacked sufficient body armor, water, even food. “If you dont have a plan for the soldiers how can you have a plan for the civilians?” Esam asked rhetorically. And he noted, when we were talking about our late mutual friend Steven Vincent, who died in 2005 in Basra, that times became hugely more dangerous in Iraq post-invasion. “Before the invasion there was one Saddam. After the invasion, 1000 Saddams.”
Ill be adding photos of the car, which reportedly was a car bomb detonated in Baghdad, soon.
Hmmnn, I wonder who that “local art critic” could have been? The “rumpus” was in Nato’s mind. The fact that Nato thinks we were arguing about whether or not the project is art demonstrates that he was too busy listening to himself and being generally defensive to have a discussion (or even an argument) with anyone.
My question–What do they feel they’re achieving and why is “art” the best cloak for the project to wear?–was still unanswered when Nato sulked away from the table.
Of course it’s obviously easier to insist that someone was being “tiresome” than to actually have to discuss what you’re doing, why and what it has come to mean to you.
Jeremy however, ended up speaking to me at length about the way he was approaching the project and why. Instead of pretending to be the absent victor in a fictional argument, he ended up divulging his process which gave me something to write about beyond press releases, observations or my own egotistical interpretation.
Imagine that.