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STRONG AND STABLE MY ARSE (2017)
The artist Jeremy Deller has been dubbed a ‘curator of the improbable.’ There’s plenty of evidence to support this: arranging for a pit brass band to play acid house music, making a life-size bouncy castle version of Stonehenge, towing a bomb blasted car wreck across the U.S. to promote debate about the invasion of Iraq, his wall mural at the 2014 Venice Biennale of a hen harrier grasping a Range Rover in its talons… For the flyingleaps project Deller has hi-jacked a stock phrase that’s been repeated ad nauseum by Theresa May since she called her flip flop snap election. The unfussy black lettering on a white ground is a design knowingly spartan: ‘showing or characterized by austerity or a lack of comfort or luxury.’ Sounds familiar. Together with its somewhat melancholy ‘black bordered tell of grief’, as Dickens had it, the work refutes Tory claims to be reliable on anything except perhaps swingeing public sector cuts. Mary Wollstonecraft said ‘It’s justice not charity that is wanting in this world.’ And Deller’s pièce de résistance may be somewhat base but at the same time it’s pure gold. That terse, defiant and disapproving ‘my arse’ appended to May’s glib verbal con. ‘Grapefruit my arse’ ‘Bono my arse’ ‘Feng Shui my arse’… ‘Strong and stable my arse.’ Where’s Ricky Tomlinson as Jim Royle? It wouldn’t be bad thing to hear him voicing Deller’s phrase twenty-four seven, to counter what’s proved often to be the mainstream media’s rank and invidious reporting of #GE2017. www.jeremydeller.org
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