The Crowd Teaser

He's recreated the Battle of Orgreave and invented the world's most expensive cocktail. Will Jeremy Deller win the Turner Prize?

The Observer, October 2004

At the end of September 2004, Jeremy Deller walked for 10 minutes from his small workroom in Highbury, north London, to an editing suite in Islington, there to meet with the woman who had the most difficult job in show business. A film director called Linda Zuck had the task of making a five-minute movie that would encapsulate a decade of Deller's work, a challenge one might compare with squeezing a zoo into a horse box.
At 38, Deller is the youngest person on this year's Turner Prize shortlist, and the favourite at William Hill. He is slightly elfin in appearance, with a chiseled face and a black slick of hair, and his favoured look - white jeans, bold-stripe T-shirt, silk patterned scarf - is raffish Seventies Chelsea bohemian.

The film he was about to see, which will be shown on Channel 4 and on a continuous loop at Tate Britain, describes an artist who does 'social interventions' - sometimes playful, occasionally challenging, mostly unexpected. It opens with his most famous work, a reconstruction three years ago of the Battle of Orgreave, and then hurtles back to his idea of asking a brass band to play acid-house tunes. From there it's but a sprint through his cocktail project with Peter Stringfellow and his street parade in Spain and his interview with a coffee-shop manager who serves George Bush in Texas.

Deller settled down to watch the film in a slightly damp room in a converted mews house, and he soon saw himself explaining that he had spent $2,000 on five acres of desert near Death Valley. He said he could have spent this money framing eight photographs, but at least now he owned a little piece of America.

When the film ended, he paused for a moment and said: 'Fine. It's fine. But the thing about that Stringfellow's stuff is that it's done with someone else, so I wonder whether we could credit him.'

He worried a little about some of the captions describing his work, and argued that 'it's good not explaining everything. I'd rather have some mystery.' He then watched the film again, trying to identify an acid-brass song for copyright clearance, changing the commentary accompanying the Spanish street parade ('It wasn't really a commission,' he said. 'I forgot to ask for any money. I don't suppose I could ask for it retrospectively?') and then he wondered how best to avoid sounding like a prat when he talked about his American land grab. 'It just makes me sound like any old conceptual artist who bought some land and did nothing with it. But it's part of a whole guidebook I made about California, and it was really the end of a treasure hunt, and I made an album of this man playing banjo music on it.'

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