Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
politically self- conscious about their activities emerged as an important
subtheme of the event.
The Battle of Orgreave therefore manages to dialogue simultaneously
with social history and art history, a point reinforced by the work’s reception
in the mainstream media, journals of oral history and art magazines. In
1984, the press presented the riot as having been started by unruly miners,
rather than by the decision to send mounted cavalry into the frontline of
strikers – an impression achieved by reverse editing the sequence of events
on the television news. Deller has described his counter- narrative as
‘history painting from below’, evoking a genre of historical writing referred
to as ‘people’s history’ or ‘history from below’. 68 The work also invites us
to make a comparison between two tendencies conventionally considered
to be at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: the eccentric leisure activity
of re- enactment (in which bloody battles are enthusiastically replicated as
group entertainment) and performance art (then at the outset of a trend for
re- enactment). However, Deller’s work forms part of a longer history of
popular theatre comprising gestures of political re- enactment, including
the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913 and the Storming of the Winter Palace
in 1920 (discussed in Chapter 2). Deller does not shy away from these
connections, and has referred to The Battle of Orgreave both as a contemporary
history painting through the medium of performance and as a work of
‘community theatre’. 69 In 2004 The Battle of Orgreave was given a further
Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One Is an Injury to All), 2004
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