JEREMY DELLER’S ‘England – Spirit of Albion’ at the Venice Biennale…

‘Things obsess me,’ Jeremy Deller says, ‘but I don’t think of myself as obsessive.’

At 9.30 on the morning before his show opens in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale the artist is sitting in the sunshine in a cafe across the water from the domes and towers of San Marco, having a go at explaining himself.

Deller likes, in his own way, to look the part, so he has adopted something of the Englishman abroad. Khaki shorts, pale legs, socks with sandals, the kind of safari shirt favoured by David Attenborough, a broad-brimmed straw hat which could have done service for John Ruskin, and, around his shoulders, a hot pink sweater. Give him a butterfly net and he could pass for a louche Victorian botanist. He is a precise student of English manners – of dressing up in costumes and playing silly games – so none of these associations will have escaped him.

Like his work, which most famously ranges from his restaging in 2001 of the miners’ strike battle of Orgreave to his road trip across America with a car mangled by a bomb in Iraq in 2009 to his touring bouncy castle Stonehenge of last year, Deller is a quick and compelling presence. He is a great persuader, and is straightaway telling me in his generous, conspiratorial manner about how he felt when the British Council called a year ago to invite him to represent Britain in the closest the art world comes to the Olympics. “It’s like a lot of things, like when I was asked to do the Turner prize show in 2004,” he says. “The first thing is that your mind goes blank. Complete emptiness. You are on the phone and thinking: why on earth are you asking me? I’ve had all my good ideas already! I have none left. Then just as quickly it dawns on you that if you don’t do it someone else will. So you say yes, and then you have to have ideas. But it takes a bit of time.”

Read Laura Cummings’s review of the Venice Biennale here 

Jeremy Deller’s British Council commission is at Venice Biennale until 24 Nov. The exhibition will tour national venues in 2014; britishcouncil.org/visualarts