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Battle of Orgreave
Contemporary re-enactment, art event or memorial? David Butler gives an insider account of Jeremy Deller’s ambitious Artangel Times commission.
It's an overcast Saturday morning. I'm standing outdoors in a queue – which will prove to be the first of many – and I know it's going to rain. I ask the guys beside me why they're here. They're all from re-enactment groups; every weekend they dress up as soldiers and replay history. Further down the line are groups of ex-miners and sandwiched between us are local lads from South Yorkshire hired in by a film agency. We're here to make art, or re-enact a battle, or take part in a film, or have a celebration, or lay some ghosts to rest, or re-right history, or tell our own stories, or have a reunion, or show that we're not beaten. We're in Orgreave, South Yorkshire where seventeen years ago 4,000 miners from across the UK tried to stop coal moving into the coke works, and the government massed 3,000 police as part of a strategy that destroyed a major part of the British economy and the way of life of thousands of people. Jeremy Deller's re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave was a proposal for the Artangel Times Open (it's politically questionable that support for this event should come from a violently anti-NUM, Murdoch paper – but there's also a sense of poetic...
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