Jeremy Deller - The Battle Of Orgreave 2001

I am looking at performances that might shock a viewer if they saw it on the street, and it might not be clear whether or not the event is real or fake. I have looked at other performances people have done to get an insight to how they have done them.  I have looked at re-enactments like Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, 2001 as he had re-enacted a real event that he had witnessed as a young boy on TV, of striking miners being chased up a hill and chased through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 miners strike which was a major industrial action affecting the British coal industry. The strike was led by the National Union of Mineworkers. The Thatcherian government announced on 6 March 1984 its intention to close 20 coal mines, also revealing the plan to close over 70 pits. Mass walkouts and strikes began following this revelation in March, including the widely reported Battle of Orgreave between 5,000 miners and 5,000 police officers. The photographs are almost those of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. The re-enactment happened in 2001, with about eight hundred historical re-enactors and two hundred former miners who had been part of the original conflict.  He asked the re-enactors to participate in the staging of a battle that occurred for memory, alongside veterans of the campaigns help.

I am looking at performances which might shock a viewer if they saw it in the street and it might not be clear whether these events are real or fake. By re-enacting a real life event it is almost like bringing the past to light and not letting major world issues be forgotten or dismissed. We are taking documentary and making it contemporary by creating work that combines reality and fiction not just purely reality and fact like documentary photography was intentionally invented for. We are bringing to light the documents of world issues through the use art and performance. This work would not be shown in a newspaper or on T.V as its purpose is not to be informative but to be photography art works therefore they are shown in exhibitions or photography books. This new category of work is still falling under the documentary genre but the work is now more contemporary and photographers are purposely blurring reality and fiction, instead of just editing their work and then passing it off as their own. I love documentary photography but I want people to start understanding the news, journalism and documentation of our generation. The concept behind my personal practice is that I want to take events that are popular in the news at the moment and recreate a performance of them publicly, to get a reaction from an audience that if they would have seen the same real event on the news, as they just see it on a screen they would have little to no reactions at all. I want to do a performance that is fictional but it’s a remake of something that happened in reality, I then want to go onto photograph the reality and see how then yet again another audience react to these images of a fictional event. This idea stemmed from my own perspective because personally I watch the news and I'm shocked but I don't feel any emotion because I have no personal attachment because it's not in my country or in front of me. I am part of the new contemporary ‘documentary’ movement creating work the blurs reality and fiction.