Jeremy Deller has been chosen to represent Britain at this year's 55th Venice Biennale

"..a pied piper of popular culture"

Andrea Rose, British Council's Pavillion Commissioner

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane

Folk ArchiveBegun in 2000, the ‘Folk Archive’ is an ongoing project by artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane that is about what we might gain from vernacular art – amateur visual culture that’s unbounded by theory or by the teleological tug of future art history. Focused on Britain and Northern Ireland, the archive has none of the campy amour propre of, say, Jim Shaw’s collection of ‘Thrift Store Paintings’ (1970–2005). Rather, its contents are things that are truly valued, truly loved.
But what peculiar objects of affection. At the entrance of the archive’s recent Barbican outing stood a Michael Jackson Scarecrow (2005), a plush toy monkey perched on its shoulder and a vindicated grin on its lips. (I was reminded of a recent headline on the satirical news site The Onion: ‘Enchanted by Own Innocence, Michael Jackson Molests Self’.) This is one of a number of works in the show that were informed by Pop culture, and that saved it from being a compendium of archaic practices – barrel-rolling, gurning, mummers’ plays – that have survived into the present day. ‘Folk’, here, has gone electric, like Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Festival, and with similarly divisive results. Witness two near-identical Photoshop-ed images, in which the ‘South Park’ (1997–2005) kids are pictured as supporters of the Glasgow football clubs Rangers and Celtic, summing up years of Protestant versus Catholic sectarianism in a single Pop reference (imagine cries of ‘Cartman, you’re mom’s a crack whore’ being belted from the terraces of Ibrox Stadium).
Sometimes the works in the ‘Folk Archive’ look a lot like ‘proper’ contemporary art, something that may in part be accounted for by the visual habits of its selectors, but also by the fact that many contemporary artists draw on naive or vernacular aesthetics, and that all of us are participants in the same broad image economy. Accordingly, it’s hard not to think of Gillian Carnegie when confronted with a bleakly sensuous picture of a Lovely Bum (2005) made by a prison inmate, and even harder not to sniff a whiff of Paul McCarthy in a coffin-shaped display unit from a Blackpool joke shop, its shelves heaving with whoopee cushions, a strap-on pair of shitting buttocks and a wind-up wanking monkey. Sex, death and scatology – these, it seems, are our universal currency, our semiotic gold standard.
For all this, there are pieces in the ‘Folk Archive’ that remain stubbornly local. Laid out in a display case like exhibits in a tumbleweed-blown provincial museum, the costumes of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestlers are startling objects, if only for the beautifully stitched floral designs that curl across their wearers’ buttocks. This D.H. Lawrence-like reframing of masculinity as something intertwined with the fecund stuff of stamens and petals wouldn’t play on a national stage (no TV hard man would be seen dead in rose-patterned briefs), but in this small community of wrestling enthusiasts it seems to make sense. Even more private is another piece of prison art, Birdman (2004), a drawing that depicts a warty black man whose hair has been transformed into a worm-hungry crow, and whose brain appears to have been pierced by a pencil. Reading meaning off this image is close to impossible. Instead it hangs there on the wall like an accusation, or an act of defiance.
Where the ‘Folk Archive’ strays into the realm of political protest it is, surprisingly, at its least effective. Perhaps this is because the material it gathers (trade union banners, footage of marches, photographs of graffiti from the left and right) is already familiar from the news media, or perhaps because these objects and images are less concerned with art and its possibilities than the other pieces in the show. Half anthropological exercise, half act of love, the ‘Folk Archive’ is at its best when it charts an undiscovered country – an art world, and a Britain, that were hiding in full view.
Tom Morton

The Guardian, Wednesday 11 May 2005 11.32 BST Folk Archive is essentially a collection of images and items that would not normally be considered to be contemporary art, or even art at all. Rural crafts, such as scarecrow-making, are celebrated; fetes and fairs are recorded; even a graffito stating simply "avoid cider" makes it in.
"We are not looking for the most bizarre stuff ever produced," says Deller of their selection process. "It is what surprises us, what we are not expecting to see. When you see an item that is a variation on something, maybe taking it further forward or sideways, that is what we like."
Collated over six years, the Folk Archive exists mostly as a virtual collection, with Kane and Deller considering the exhibits so unique, priceless or charged by their owners and locations as to be impractical and undesirable to keep together when not on show. The pair have attempted to adopt the probable mindset of archivists looking back 100 years from now, uncovering what may be considered as 21st-century folk art. That said, they don't see themselves as setting a blueprint for future museums: they would rather just celebrate what's around us today.

"We were very conscious that stuff only exists in museums by accident," says Kane. "No one was looking around at the time that stuff was produced. I think there is a slight discrepancy between being interested in folk art and wanting to maintain or propose that anything we selected will be maintained. It is just about shifting your vision slightly."
Folk art is hard to define, and the show seems to lend itself to blurring boundaries. Some of the work is by untrained artists, some by the art-school educated and some created by unknown fingers in the grime on the back of white vans. Cakes have equal footing with trade union banners and decorative brickwork has parity with an artist's photographs.
What makes the Folk Archive more than a rag-tag of odd items is Kane and Deller's vision: the collection is defined as much by what they leave out as what they put in. But where does Kane and Deller's artistic input end and simple curation begin? Even the artists are unsure. "I think it differs for both of us," says Kane. "For me at the moment it is as valid to bring things into a gallery as it is to produce things to put into a gallery. It is no different to picking up a paintbrush and picking a colour. The decision-making thing - what you show, what you like - is connected back to being an artist."
Kane's point is borne out in the work of less-known artists who share Kane and Deller's compulsion to collect. Mark Pawson trawls car boot sales for the items the rest of us might ignore, then uses them to create printed ephemera, badges and books - a pocket-sized book of the plug wiring diagrams that come attached to electrical products, for instance, or a book about his Kinder egg collection.
Perhaps tellingly, Pawson has been a collector since childhood, starting out with the small Wade animals that were aimed at the pocket money market. Now, he says: "I collect things for my own amusement and decoration. Every so often a group of objects will push their way to the forefront and demand to be taken a bit more seriously."
Recently, he's been obsessed with "noggins": small, furry wooden Viking models that no one in charity shops or car boot sales could be persuaded to part with even pennies for. Pawson bought every one he could, ending up with hundreds on his heaving shelves at home. He then arranged them into families and tribes before creating an art book about them that was as much about the pieced-together archaeology of a forgotten mass-produced ornament as it was about his passion for collecting.