Meet the Gods

By Neil Cooper, 03.06.2025

Stone and Cupid Peekaboo, film still, courtesy of the artists

Saturday lunchtime in Dundee’s City Square, and the Gods walk amongst us. The red carpet is out on the steps of the Caird Hall leading inside to the Marryat Hall, and the Square is alive with noise. As Dundee Community Youth Orchestra rehearse a horn-led number that sounds like an off-cut from the soundtrack to cult 1970s film The Wicker Man, a stall run by KennardPhillipps, the artist duo of Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, is being set up for people to screen-print their own t-shirts. 

 

Another stall invites passers-by to toss celestial looking laurels on to hooks to win a mystery teapot. A group of students are dressed in homemade outfits that look like a miniature Stonehenge. Co-curator of the day’s events Laura McSorley walks across the Square wielding what appears to be a gold lamébullhorn.

 

At the far end of the Square, the drums and chants of pro and counter refugee-based demos may not be part of the official spectacle at the Caird Hall end, but the sound bleed between the two all seems to fit. Especially when the protestors are fanfared out at the end of their demo in what looks like a mini ceilidh round the square.

 

 

Before long, inside the Marryat, Bacchus’ tea party is in full swing, with Venus’ aerial life drawing class at one end of the room, while others prefer checking themselves out in the mini hall of mirrors of Narcissus’ Bothy. Later, a game of Medusa Musical Statues will similarly turn classical mythology into parlour game fun, before the day finishes with a joyously ramshackle performance by Tattie and the Tubers.

 

Welcome to ‘Meet the Gods’, the Dundee leg of The Triumph of Art, Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller’s UK wide celebration of the National Gallery’s 200^thanniversary. Rather than mark the occasion with a behind-closed doors event homaging artists past, Deller and assorted cross-country collaborators have drawn from the National Gallery’s collection and taken to the streets in a riot of living pageantry. 

 

Deller and McSorley have worked over several months with students from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and University of Dundee. The end result is a glorious mash-up of community festival, fun palace, village fete, civic intervention and hippy happening.  

 

“I love all those things,” Deller says a couple of days after serving tea and Dundee Cake from behind decorated trestle tables at Bacchus’ tea party. Later he will pose with a plastic severed Medusa’s head filming the Strip the Willow that eventually takes over the hall. 

 

“It was quite messy and chaotic at times, and we weren’t expecting the volume of people to turn up who did, but it was a mixture of all these things we know and love from our childhood onwards. These events are great levellers as well. Everyone's on the same level, literally and metaphorically, wandering about looking at stuff and then going inside, looking at things, talking to people, talking to strangers. You're sharing an unusual experience, so you just chat to someone because you feel you can. You're both in the same boat in a sort of social way, so it’s all alright.”

 

For McSorley, a DJCAD graduate who came on board with the National Gallery through the Art Fund, with a background working with Generator Projects in Dundee, Edinburgh Art Festival and other initiatives, the importance of art school involvement was crucial to the success of Meet the Gods.

 

“I think the event did exactly what it was meant to do,” she says. “Working with DJCAD, it demonstrated how art schools have this capacity to produce collective joy through collaborative practices, as well as helping young artists form new friendships, and make new connections. With arts education under threat or not being prioritised so it's becoming increasingly inaccessible, especially for people who are working class or from marginalised backgrounds, I think the day was a real moment to show the power of arts education and what the students are capable of.”

Having launched at Derry-Londonderry Playhouse in Ireland with an event called ‘The Triumph of Music’, ‘The Triumph of Art’s’ next leg will take place in Llandudno, Wales later in June, with Deller and co working with Mostyn Gallery on ‘Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream?’ In July, The Box, Plymouth will host the nautically flavoured ‘Hello Sailor,’ before all four projects from each country in the UK convene in London for one almighty shindig in Trafalgar Square. 

 

‘Meet the Gods’ and other ‘Triumph of Art’ events continue Deller’s fascination with civic spectacle that has developed through works such as ‘Sacrilege’ (2012), a bouncy replica of Stonehenge that opened at Glasgow International. Like ‘Sacrilege’, ‘Meet the Gods’ taps into a secular communal need to gather for some kind of shared experience rooted in ritual while reclaiming contemporary civic space.

 

“I do believe in civic space,” says Deller, “and I believe in events like ‘Meet the Gods’. I think it's really important now more than ever that people who might not have much in common can gather, be in the same space, and enjoy something together, maybe talk to each other, and justhave a different kind of experience in public.”

 

Meet the Gods took place at Dundee City Square and the Marryat Hall, Dundee on 24^thMay 2025. Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? takes place in Llandudno on 21^stJune; Hello Sailor, Plymouth, 5^thJuly. The Triumph of Art, Trafalgar Square, London, 26^thJuly.