jeremy deller, welcome to this cultural life. thank you. you were brought up in dulwich in south london. what are your earliest cultural memories of home? home. well, church, actually. there s culture in church. yeah. there s a human culture, there s people, and then there s music and there s visuals and smells and so on. so, the church, maybe early on as a child, is something i remember. i remember seeing help, the beatles film, very early on. i remember telling my mother i d just discovered these four men who live in the same house as each other, which was very much like the house we lived in. and i was amazed. then she told me, oh, actually, i know those people. that s the beatles and they re not around any more. that was your introduction to the beatles? yeah, and i was very sad. i remember being very sad about it, thinking that they didn t live together properly and it was actually. they weren t around. so help was a big influence on me, and television in general, i t
prize do for you as an artist at the time? well, it s the classic. you know, you win the turner prize and then you start getting invited to things that you weren t invited to before. and that s the exact moment that you don t want to go to those things because you know they re only inviting you because of the turner prize. that sort of thing. but i think it gives you. you definitely get an upgrade. you went to the courtauld to study art history, so was the idea to become an art historian or a curator? yeah, the idea was to, to be around art, because i liked it and i liked doing art history, so i wanted to be around paintings and sculpture and that world. i liked the world. so you could have been a curator? yes, i could have been. i could, but it would have been terrible. after i graduated, i did try working in a museum as a volunteer. and it was a disaster because itjust, nothing happens. you know, you re sitting in an office, you re not spending time with art or looking at it. you re.
and so ijust knew, i can t do this. i have to be more actively involved somehow. so what changed, then? what made you an artist? well, at the end of the first year at the courtauld, i d gone to an andy warhol opening and i d met him. he signed something for me, and then i d met him two nights later and spent time in his company. and then gone to the factory and been there for a couple of weeks on and off, and just being in his orbit and seeing his world and the world he d created for himself was very. it kind of ruined me, really. you should just explain the factory, his, his headquarters in new york, which was his office, his studio, his film studio. everything. he painted in the basement. so the factory was basically his world, his world vision ina building. so it was very exciting to be there, but we were just hanging out, really, and just like breathing it in. as an experience, at that age, to be with someone who s sort of mythic he was mythic then was amazing. what did that