Visual arts: Mike Quille

How would you like to see images of tax haven St Helier burning or a giant William Morris upend Roman Abramovich’s yacht?

Or a slow-motion film of a hen harrier catching a toff’s Range Rover, which is then crushed into a box of metal and ends up as the bench you’re sitting on to watch the film?

Such highly enjoyable art installations are part of English Magic, the Jeremy Deller exhibition which runs at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate until the middle of next month.

Deller’s art is always rebellious, provocative and highly political but also oblique, humorous and very entertaining.

English Magic has eclectic, multimedia juxtapositions of popular cultural artefacts with murals, David Bowie soundtracks, film of the Lord Mayor’s show and drawings by prisoners who were former squaddies in Iraq.

Together they constitute an oblique but highly effective critique of capitalism and a reminder of the transformative power of the socialist vision. “I think it will make people angry,” says Deller about the exhibition. I think he’s right.

Deller’s focus on popular culture and his oppositional politics can be traced back to Andy Warhol and Transmitting Andy Warhol runs at Tate Liverpool until early in February.

The exhibition shows how he helped democratise and politicise visual art and on show are fine examples of Warhol’s work — there are stunning Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, the subversive soup-can paintings and chilling images of the underside of the US, like the electric chair and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters.

This year Teeside hosted outstanding art exhibitions by David Mulholland and David Watson, two local painters whose art really is for

everyone.

Their work depicts the decaying, declining but still authentically warm working-class communities being battered by deindustrialisation, unemployment, poverty and other sundry delights of neoliberal economics.

The solidarity of working people, their strength, vulnerability, suffering, joys and humour were also strikingly expressed in an exhibition of mining art at the Bowes Museum near Durham — itself a breathtaking monument to the rapacity of Durham mine owners.

Shafts of Light brought together some of the best examples of mining art from the last 200 years produced by the men and women who worked in pits or pit communities. This was vernacular art — experiential not decorative — from the heart of workers’ experience.

The biannual AV Festival in north-east England marked the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike with a well-curated set of events on the theme of extraction.

Sculptures, sound installations, films, music and exhibitions weaved a thematic and conceptual consistency which ran like a seam of coal throughout the festival.

It was inspiring to experience so much powerful and politically relevant art across so many media.

The festival highlight was a live performance in Easington Welfare Institute of the film Miners’ Hymns. Avoiding nostalgia and sentimentality, and showing clearly the brutal and destructive class war unleashed on mining communities 25 years ago, this film and its haunting music is a dignified homage to the miners and their families.

An elegy to a cultured, collective, and co-operative way of life that has been all but destroyed, there surely cannot be a more beautiful, moving and truthful evocation of working-class culture in this country.

Books: Len Phelan

My top reads this year, in no particular order, start with A People’s History of the French

Revolution by Eric Hazan (Verso) who, unusually, provides a more sympathetic view of Robespierre and the sans-culottes in the 1789 revolution than many other books on that period.

Hazan is a fine writer who really brings history to life — his Invention of Paris, on the radical 19th and 20th centuries in that city, is well worth checking out too — though some may find his “soixante-huitard” leftist interpolations wearingly tendentious.

Hazan’s work provides a radical point of historical reference, as does Victor Figueroa Clark’s Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat (Pluto), an excellent short biography which charts the Chilean president’s life and his political project of reform, democracy — and revolution.

It touches too on the lessons to be learnt by the left in Latin America and globally from the overthrow of Allende and the Popular Unity experience in Chile. Highly recommended, as is the reprint of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (Tangerine Press).

The brilliance of London’s reportage on the poverty-stricken East End of London at the turn of the last century remains an example of how it should be done and it ought to be on the reading list of any activist/journalist. The original photographs reproduced in the book are an eye-opener and there’s an excellent introduction by Ian Sinclair.

Another reissue I enjoyed and learned much from was Assata: An Autobiography (Zed Books). Written in 1988 by Assata Shakur — godmother of musician Tupac Shakur — it gives a gripping account of US race relations and the genesis of the Black Power movement from the 1960s onwards.

Given the current assaults on the black community by the police there, this is pretty essential reading for anyone seeking a more revolutionary context to the racist brutality we’re seeing almost daily on our screens and the culture of resistance growing in response to it.

If anyone deserves the sobriquet “national treasure” then it has to be legendary musician and man of the left Robert Wyatt, who’s the subject of Different Every Time (Serpent’s Tail), a fine biography by Marcus O’Dair.

“What marks him out as different from most popular musicians is his strong humanitarian and left-wing political views, on which he refuses to compromise,” the Morning Star’s reviewer said.

The book exemplifies this as it charts an extraordinary creative life with his wife Alfreda Benge which has had a lasting influence on, and given inspiration to, radical music in Britain and abroad.

The accompanying double-CD album, a compilation of Wyatt’s work from the ’60s to this day, sparkles with gems.

Last but not least I, like many, eagerly awaited the publication of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (Harper Collins) by another national treasure, Hilary Mantel. We weren’t disappointed.

The title says it all and, as you’d expect from la Mantel, this fictional account of an IRA sniper targeting the Tory milk-snatcher is a psychologically nuanced and skilfully crafted narrative which never fails to surprise.

It has, of course, been greeted with shrieks of outrage and opprobium by the Establishment in the year marking the 30th anniversary of her death and there can’t be a higher recommendation than that.

It’s soon to screened in a TV adaptation by the BBC which, for once, has shown backbone by resisting pressure from the living dead in the upper echelons to pull the plug on it.