Jeremy Deller: English Magic, William Morris Gallery

Roll up, roll up! Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller’s 2013 Venice Biennale show English Magic has arrived in Walthamstow’s 19th century William Morris Gallery - for its first UK showing. 

An exhibition which has been called ‘the dark side of Danny Boyle’s uplifting opening ceremony for London 2012 ’, Deller’s show looks at the best and worst of what it is to be English – as well as the role of Big Money in powering the international art world.

It’s a series of installations, photographs, murals and films which was selected to represent England at the 55th Biennale last year by eight British Council-appointed judges, and in its six month residency attracted a record 374,000 visitors to the Gran Bretagne pavilion. 

Its subject matter is hugely eclectic, with a panoply of visual references to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, birds of prey, 19th century social reformers, Tony Blair, plus a room devoted to William Morris himself – a 19th century art and design pioneer whose ideas about the democratisation of art have fascinated Deller for years.

This is a distinctly angry show. At its centre is a mural depicting a giant, Poseidon-like William Morris hurling a yacht (belonging to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich) deep into the Venice laguna: a piece inspired by the famously obnoxious mooring of said 377ft yacht at the 2011 Biennale, when it blocked the view of the Giardini quay. This, together with a collection of framed 1990s share certificates from the selling-off of Soviet public assets, bears the provocative title We Sit Starving Amindst Our Gold (a line from William Morris’s 1891 tract The Socialist Ideal: Art). It’s a straight-talking criticism of the contemporary art world as a playground for the obscenely rich.

St Helier on Fire – a dystopic mural of the Channel Island tax haven engulfed in flames – and the photographic/installation piece Bevan Tried To Save the Nation offer equally pointed critiques of social injustice. But most affecting is a series of drawings curated by Deller and executed by British prisoners – many of them ex-soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The unrefined honesty of drawings such as Basra in my Sights, by Andy at HMP Everthorpe, and portraits of Dr David Kelly and Alastair Campbell, are brutally evocative. 

‘I thought it was a good idea to have [the likes of Blair, Campbell and the former head of MI6 John Scarlett] drawn by people who'd been on the receiving end of their decisions. It was about inverting the power process,’ says Deller. The show as a whole manages that with aplomb.