Procession

by Ruth Barker, 6 Jul 2009

Hello,
Jeremy Deller’s most recent public work Procession was staged (if staged is the word) yesterday in Manchester, as part of the International Festival there. I wish I’d seen it (I didn’t), but I’ll present it to you as I’ve been able to reconstruct it from the media reports.

Deller has been working with the multiplicity of Manchester’s publics to orchestrate a parade through the centre of the city, marking space while also marking something far more intangible through the series of self-identifications that are suddenly made explicit and public. For the procession was predominantly made up of groups of allegiance – some organised, like the Scouts; others social, like the Goths; some cultural, like the Shree Swaminarayan Gadi Piping Band; and others still were what we might call ‘single issue’, like the Unrepentant Smokers. Added to these were notes of cultural and social remembrance, the imagination of the city made flesh as decorated floats, as a steel band played the memory of Joy Division, or a factory with chimneys and mill works drifted through the streets on the back of a lorry.

This idea of the heterogeneous public – of many separate related or unrelated groups of people who may or may not be aware of each other – is one that long ago replaced the idea of the public as a mass with a single homogenous identity. And yet I have never before seen it so lovingly or generously made visible, with banners and floats and slogans and carnival.

As expertly nurtured by Deller, Procession is so much more than an essay into the make-up of the British populace. It is a song to the chaotic, personal, contradictory natures of people, both as they are as individuals and as they behave as groups. More than a gesture, Procession comes close to being some kind of celebration of the human condition as well as a tribute to the humanity of our civic spaces.

And, significantly, Procession moved. Trawling down the main thoroughfares of Manchester, it passed assembled crowds who waved and cheered and passed judgement and joined in. And who understood that they too were part it.

More later.
R

Some of the media coverage.

Manchester International Festival

BBC Footage

Jeremy Deller Talk about Manchester Procession

The Guardian

Continuity in Architecture