In 2013, Jeremy Deller represented the United Kingdom at the 55th Venice Biennale, the pinnacle of the art world calendar. His exhibition, English Magic, combined English folk with a fairly merciful (but of its time) anti-establishment sentiment, speaking in juxtaposition and conceptual ingenuity rather than outright iconoclasm. Deller’s patchwork of paintings, photographs, textile, sculpture, and video—all conceived by him, but often executed by guest artists—contained a multitude of historical and pop culture references, in what the Turner Prize winner called a ‘wistfully aggressive’ portrait of nation.

One mural portrayed an imagined torching of Jersey by an anti-tax evasion mob. Another showed a giant hen harrier clasping a Range Rover, a reference to the 2007 shooting of endangered birds over the Sandringham estate (allegedly by Prince Harry). Sketches of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell by incarcerated ex-servicemen lined the walls of an Iraq War-themed room, while 250,000-year-old palaeolithic hand axes lived next door. Two textile banners flanked the pavilion entrance, each bearing lyrics from David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. On the left, ‘I searched for form and land’, and on the right, ‘For years and years I roamed’.

I was reminded of Deller’s work visiting Nowt as Queer as Folk, a recent solo exhibition by Corbin Shaw at London’s Guts Gallery. The pair share a semantic language in which subversion and intertextuality reformulate the motifs and idioms of deep Englishness. Both use football, rave culture, and folk rituals to scrutinise national identity. (Shaw’s current exhibition at the football-themed OOF Gallery, London, runs alongside photographs by Martin Parr until 8 May).

Shaw’s banners evoke the complex nostalgia of growing up in working-class northern villages, where post-industrial alienation hangs over generations of men. Among his stitched all-caps slogans are: ‘Village Idiot Turned Village Celeb’; ‘Local Jobs For Local People’; and ‘Sad Lads In The Sticks’. He takes the same approach using England flags, capturing football fandom’s distinct melancholia while probing masculinity caught between repressed brotherhood and enlightened outcast.

There are historic connections too. The Battle of Orgreave is the subject of Deller’s most acclaimed 2001 re-enactment, which featured 200 miners from the original police clashes in 1984. Harthill, where Shaw was raised—and where memories of the Miners’ Strike loom large—is less than ten miles from the Orgreave coking plant where the violence occurred. Ed Hall, the textile-maker who creates Deller’s banners, has a long relationship with British labour movements, including crafting a piece for the South Yorkshire branch of Unite which references Orgreave, and to which Shaw’s badge-clad Pride of Sheff banner bears a tonal resemblance. Hall’s inclusion of the phrase ‘Still the Enemy Within,’ a play on Margaret Thatcher’s union-bashing speech a month after the Battle, feels like a precursor to Shaw’s playful appropriation of dissenting voices.

These overlaps speak to the influence of Deller’s ‘Social Surrealism’ on British conceptual art. The gap between the artists (at the time of Shaw’s birth in 1997, Deller was convincing brass bands to play acid house tunes for his Acid Brass project) makes a successor narrative compelling, while also reflecting the increased visibility of working-class, non-London-born artists. But while Deller uses mass spectacle to probe the country’s prejudices, affections, and eccentricities (his 2016 Battle of the Somme commemoration we’re here because we’re here being the best recent example), Shaw’s examination of identity relies on the slippages revealed by intergenerational closeness and community friction. Unlike Deller, he is an essential component of his own art—social commentary via social experience.

He is not the only one shaking up the aesthetics of Britishness. Peterborough-born Rene Matić creates work channelling ‘rude(ness)’, a concept adapted from Glitch Feminism which complicates the relationship between segregated notions of Britishness, mainly across racial and gender lines. As with Shaw, football, ‘casuals’ sportswear, slogan-clad flags, and dance feature prominently in Matić’s work, and text is used to disrupt entrenched codes of national expression.

Born British, Die British, the centrepiece of Matić’s 2020 solo exhibition at VITRINE gallery, London, is a video of the artist being tattooed with the eponymous slogan by Lal Hardy, who has been inking punks and skinheads since 1979. The film is accompanied by a photograph of the tattooed Matić by subculture chronicler Derek Ridgers. Elsewhere in the show, a Fred Perry polo shirt lies crumpled on the floor, an English casuals staple both treasured and discarded. (Matić’s father was a skinhead, and they often reference the movement’s anti-fascist history and connection with Jamaican Rude Boy aesthetics.)

The work’s subversion is clear: a Black British non-binary youth inscribed with a far-right-associated slogan, a queering of second wave continental feminism’s call to ‘write the body’ via textual difference. The piece also raises questions about a rarely codified aspect of national identity—the desire of minority groups to express their relationship to place without having to construct fresh and untarnished motifs (which are necessarily expected to parade their otherness from ‘typical’ white British culture). The very existence of Matic’s tattoo forces the phrase into semantic crisis, an acute appropriation which displaces its ethnonationalist undertones.

Shaw’s use of the England flag is similar, albeit more intentionally ambiguous. By satirising the sacrosanct, unblemished Saint George’s Cross using epigrams of disappointment and monarchical blasphemy—‘Long to Rain Over Us’; ‘Happy and Laborious’; ‘Almost Victorious’—he critiques masculine football culture while paying wry but sincere respect to its influence. After the suicide of a friend of Shaw’s father, the artist was struck that his father’s mourning peers draped the coffin in England flags bearing their own slogans. In his ‘Soften Up Hard Lad’ flag and ‘We Should Talk About Our Feelings’ Sheffield United scarf, Shaw marries palatable masculine imagery with progressive didacticism.

Without such intervention, England flags are broken signifiers, exhausted by co-option from both Football Lads Alliance-type nationalists on the one side, and what Joe Kennedy terms ‘authentocrat’ establishment figures on the other, seizing on their symbolism when politically expedient. (Think of Boris Johnson wearing an England football jersey over his shirt and tie during the team’s match against Denmark at Euro 2020, before his government was berated by defender Tyrone Mings for condemning the players’ taking of the knee in support of BLM.) An image of flag-waving Skegness on VE Day features in Matić’s recent photobook, flags for countries that don’t exist but bodies that do, a flash of tired alterity among intimate photos of friends and family.

More notable are those national icons which transcend these culture wars. Both Deller and Shaw have made works about Paul Gascoigne, whose talent, openness about addiction and mental health, working-class roots (and tears) have made him a tragic visionary in the English imagination. Shaw’s He Cried for our Sins banner shows Gascoigne, Stuart Pearce, and a bloodied Terry Venables being crucified. With police officers on horseback and green pastures below, it is his most Dellerian work, not just for its imagery, but its revisiting of a bygone era to which the artist did not have direct access.

What happens when these new perspectives come into direct contact with the country’s most celebrated state-of-the-nation artists? At OOF gallery, Shaw’s banners and flags are displayed in the room above a selection of Martin Parr’s football-themed photographs, from early-80s documentary shots of fans in Bradford, Halifax Town, and Hartlepool, to stills from his infamous Benidorm series and more recent images of jubilant supporters.

There are moments where the works speak in tandem, where theme surpasses form. Parr’s image of an ecstatic Wolves fan is the embodiment of Shaw’s ‘Pilgrimage to Paradise’ and ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ flags. One offers a discrete snapshot, the other a mantra ripe for iteration and interpretation. Parr’s Britain relies on a roving, distanced accumulation of visual information, and yet here his studies operate via specificity: of place, of team, of era. His subjects’ behaviours may be the country’s most understood sporting language, but it is Shaw’s texts which drift beyond his own experience into national empathy. Sheffield United are never mentioned; club crests are absent; his slogans unshackled by known narrators, but suddenly, his work becomes invitational to all.

The most important work in the two exhibitions is a Parr photograph from 2012. A topless man is shot from behind overlooking Clacton pier, with three tattoos on his back: ‘Made In England’ between a Tottenham Hotspur crest and a Union Jack. These images have long been the source of criticism of Parr: class tourism, archetype-hunting, exploitative anonymisation, and lack of proper engagement with the people photographed. But Shaw provides the missing contexts, his deep engagement with class lifting Parr’s work into dialogue with his own.

The image also gives new meaning to Matic’s Born British, Die British: not just an instance of the white British slogans they reinvent, but a clear example of how this iconography constitutes British cultural history, underlying the significance of Matic’s new chapter.

Shaw and Matic may well move away from work centring on their communities, as institutions entrust them with opportunities to deliver wide state-of-the-nation surveys, as was Deller’s task with English Magic, and Parr’s with his BBC documentary Think of England (1999). But as long as national identity is focalised through personal experience, their uplifting of regional and diaspora experience will remain inexhaustible. Stuart Hall wrote that Deller created political art by being an ‘animator’ of others: a boundless energiser of cultures. If Shaw and Matic are his successors, then it’s because they animate others by first animating themselves.