La société n'existe pas

“There is no such thing as society”: the phrase coined by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has remained famous. Less well known are its ramifications in images, from the English Civil War of the 17th century to contemporary art and popular culture in Britain. From photographs to posters, from manuscripts to frontispieces, this book crosses history to identify the visual echoes of Thatcherism. Its starting point is a piece by the artist Jeremy Deller: the reconstruction of a workers’ battle between striking miners and police officers that took place in 1984. Maxime Boidy extracts from it a series of scenes that are as many inflections of the idea of “political body”. In doing so, he draws the discreet and burning actuality of these symbolic forms, at the time of the civil war imposed by globalized Thatcherism.