Power to the people: The artist relying on the public’s help

HAILSTONES are hammering horizontally along Sauchiehall Street the day Jeremy Deller arrives in Glasgow. Not a good day, perhaps, to be talking about the wisdom of open air art projects in the West of Scotland. “Changeable is understating it, really,” Deller says, drily, from the relative comfort of the CCA cafe. However, the Turner Prize-winning artist still hopes the sun will shine on his new venture, one of the headline events at this year’s Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

The details of the project are a closely guarded secret, so I’ll tell you what I know. It will be on Glasgow Green and it will be interactive. It is entitled Sacrilege. It will premiere in Glasgow before touring the UK, and will visit London in the summer during the Olympic Games.

“The public can go on it, as it were,” Deller says, carefully. “Maybe that’s the wrong term. The public can interact with it. It’s a big public thing in a public place.” Can I say anything else to entice our readers? “It’s free. Hopefully it will be an enjoyable experience. That’s what I’m hoping for, that people enjoy it, become part of it, as it were. It’s meant to be a celebratory thing.”

Deller, 45, is earnest, tending towards the laconic, slight of stature with a foppish pink scarf knotted at his neck. When he speaks, he leans forward as if addressing the table, his thick black fringe falling over his face. Sometimes he sounds bored, but at other times – talking about individuals he admires, or subjects which enthuse him – he becomes passionate in a pleasingly old fashioned, romantic way and uses words like “beautiful” and “amazing”.

He likes Glasgow. He is represented in the UK by the Modern Institute, based in the city. He has lots of friends here, people like David Shrigley, with whom he is currently sharing the space at the Hayward Gallery in London, both with major mid-career shows. “I’ve always liked coming up here. I always find it a very hospitable place. It’s cheaper than London, and the proximity to the landscape is fantastic. It’s got a street life, as well, which I like, as any big city should have. There’s always something to look at.”

Will the Glasgow Green work in some way reflect the character of the city, like the procession he organised to open the Manchester International Festival in 2009, where he brought together elements of vernacular culture, from a greasy spoon on wheels to a Carribbean steel band playing Joy Division songs? “No, no, nothing like that. But, hopefully, people’s interaction with it will bring out the character of the place. Hopefully people will respond to it in a Glaswegian manner,” he pauses. “Whatever that is!”

If there’s one common theme in almost all of Deller’s work, it’s people. He loves fans and hobbyists, people with genuine enthusiasms, he is fascinated by people’s interactions with one another, or with works of art. He’s the sort of person who goes to galleries to look at the audience. From his most famous work, The Battle of Orgreave, which involved about 1,000 people in a re-enactment of one of the most famous clashes of the miners’ strike, to his celebration of Folk Art at the Barbican, from knitting to decorative brick work, his works need people to make them happen. And it has a knock-on effect: people are drawn them because they are (surprise, surprise) interested in other people.

Occasionally, someone snipes that his work doesn’t look like art. There are few paintings, sculptures or even photographs. Deller doesn’t tend to make things; even with his films there is usually someone else behind the camera. “I don’t have very many technical skills, so I have to use the skills I do have which are communicating with people, working with people. I can’t draw or paint or sculpt so I have to look elsewhere, work with other people who have those talents.”

His formative years as an artist were at the time when the Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas et al – were the toast of the town. Yet however confrontational their work, they made objects for galleries, which ultimately sold for large sums of money. Deller was doing something much more radical: his was a kind of art without walls.

Winning the Turner Prize in 2004 was a major affirmation for his way of working. Some believe he has challenged the notion of what art is more than any other artist. Unlike many contemporary artists, he is deeply interested in his audience, “who they are, how they react to the work. Other people have different views, might see art as more elitist.”

Such was his lack of technical ability that the young Deller was tactfully shunted out of the O Level art class at school. He resolved to become an art historian, studying at the Courtauld Institute, but realised belatedly that he “didn’t have the temperament”. There followed years of living with his parents, making his own work. “It’s a gradual process. If you don’t go to art college, you have years of trying to work out what it is you’re doing.”

Did he ever wish he’d gone to art school? “No, never. I suspect if I had gone to art school I would have been a very different kind of artist. I would probably have been a lot more theoretical, and less interested in the public maybe. I suspect it would have put me off making art.”

Meeting Andy Warhol in London in 1986 was a key influence. He travelled to New York to visit the Factory in New York the following summer. “You’re drinking it in really, seeing how he works, being in that environment – it was fantastic. I was a huge fan at the time, and remain one to this day.” What inspired you about Warhol? “Everything really. The way he worked with musicians, publishing, films. He seemed to do what he wanted to do, and he made it work for himself, you can’t ask for more than that really as an artist. I think it’s a great model.”

In the years after leaving the Courtauld, he was exploring ways of making that model work in his own practice, finding his feet with his project Acid Brass in 1997. It began as a conversation in a pub – what would it sound like, to hear Acid House tunes played by a brass band? But instead of leaving it as idle speculation, Deller took the idea and ran with it, sought out the William Fairey Brass Band, and an arranger willing to score tracks like KLF’s What Time is Love. The result: a brass band playing acid tracks at the opening of Tate Modern, with Björk dancing in the aisles. Deller had arrived.

“It was a pivotal moment. I thought it was going to be a very difficult thing to persuade people to do, but the brass band were keen to do it, up for it, prepared to give it a go, and I thought, ‘Wow, maybe the public are less resistant to contemporary art than I thought.’ It gave me a lot of encouragement to work like that, and I really never looked back since.”

The project worked because it had integrity. He worked out the theoretical base in a giant flow chart – which is a work of art in itself – tracing the links between youth, music and politics. Deller’s projects may sometimes be humorous but they’re not gimmicks. They may invite people out of their comfort zones but they are not exploitative.

“I never want to do that. I wouldn’t see the point of doing that. That’s what TV does, the way it works with people, there’s a certain cruelty to it, and I’m not really interested in that. It’s about negotiation because often they have the skills I don’t have, so I have to make sure they’re willing to do what I hope is going to happen.”

He has the gift of being able to drive forward an artistic vision while being respectful of those he brings on board to realise it. He doesn’t home in on eccentrics for their oddness, he genuinely respects them. It could all too easily feel patronising, this public-school-educated artist paying homage to vernacular culture, but it doesn’t, it just feels sincere.

His best works touch on complex situations and bring a kind of clarity, without simplification. In 2009, he took a burned-out car, from a street in Iraq where a bomb had killed 38 people, to the USA and towed it through the Southern States inviting anyone he met into dialogue with him and his companions, a US veteran recently returned from Iraq and an exiled Iraqi.

“We weren’t sure what was going to happen. We were just worried that we were going to get attacked, get into situations where people would get very angry with us. But it didn’t happen. On the whole, people were really interested. It was a great experience, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I don’t mean best artworks, but one of the best experiences I’ve had in my whole life.”

The car is now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. It has been described as the war art of the 21st century. Not only does its charred frame immediately and vividly speak of civilian losses, it seems a fitting monument in a society obsessed by the car, prepared to go to war over oil.

At times like these, Deller is right on the money, as he was at the 2010 general election when he produced a poster for the Labour Party with “Vote Conservative for a New Britain” and a picture of Rupert Murdoch’s grinning face. “Having said that, I did another thing a few years previously which had ‘Vote Labour’ and a picture of George Bush, so it’s not as if I’m really a massive Labour supporter. It’s just that you’re voting for one person, but actually you’re voting for other people as well, you’re supporting their agendas and the people behind them, which in that case was Rupert Murdoch and his empire. But that all went wrong, thankfully.”

Is his work political? “It can be. Other times it’s not at all. It’s probably more about politics than political. I’m not a political artist. I hope I’m not. [If I were] people would think I’m trying to tell them something, and I’m not really. I’m trying to show them something rather than tell them something, that would be the big difference.”

• Jeremy Deller: Sacrilege is at Glasgow Green from 20 April until 7 May, part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. For more info, visit the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art website