History of The World

Based on drawings from 1997, Jeremy Deller’s screenprint ‘History of the World’ (1998) is a captivating exercise in shared experience. Rendered in the ever‐familiar visual language of chalkboards, the artist produced a mind map to uncover the social, political and musical connections between house and brass music. Scribbled words like ‘808 State’, ‘Civic Pride’, ‘Free Parties’ and ‘Deindustrialisation’ are energetically connected to each other by arrows, together composing an intimate work which allows us to follow along in the development of Deller’s intricate thought process.

While acid and brass music may seem divergent, the artist proves otherwise through these scribbled words which highlight that both genres use music in dissent of the country’s political and social structures. This is perhaps most strongly noted in the relationships established between the terms ‘Civil Unrest’, ‘Orgreave’ and ‘The Miners Strike’, a subject to which Deller returned in his celebrated performance ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001).

Though an artwork in its own right, ‘History of the World’ also provided the visual justification for ‘Acid Brass’, first performed in 1997. An inventive work in which brass musicians performed acid music, Deller maintains that ‘without this diagram, “Acid Brass” would not have a conceptual backbone’.