Jeremy Deller is in love. This isn't hot news - he's always been happy to talk about his work in terms of his own and other people's love, for the things that matter and make life worthwhile. Sometimes it's undoubtedly a carried-away-with-passion, tell-the-world kind of love but, translated into the world of Deller's art, it feels more like a system of allegiances - a pantheistic mini-universe, peopled with personal heroes, where the familiar cultural boundaries have shifted.

A place where the Cornerhouse arts centre in Manchester presents 'You're Rendering That Scaffolding Dangerous' - the poetry of Shaun William Ryder; the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford is reassessing the life and work of Spike Milligan ('What are we going to do now?'); and the lyrics of Stephen Patrick Morrissey are in the British Museum, alongside Oscar Wilde. Deller, in a spirit of optimism, has produced press releases for all these and more, along with posters proclaiming, among other things, that 'Keith Moon Matters' and that 'Brian Epstein Died For You and maybe it says something about the difference between his approach and that of many of his contemporaries that the work he's campaigning to get into the museums isn't his own.

The words 'popular' and 'culture' turn up plenty in connection with Deller's work, and for obvious reasons. There's something of a mythology even, growing up around the mass media moments some of his activity has generated - taking in for example the semi-legendary Acid Brass collaboration and its spirited but slightly dodgy adoption by the KLF, and rehab-era Robbie Williams' appearance on MTV in one of Deller's My Booze Hell t-shirts. But to figure his project as simply a cultural elevation of pop ephemera is to miss the point. One thing Deller understands is that 'popular culture' isn't different from 'serious culture' just because it's stuff that a lot of people like. It's another kind of category altogether, defined more or less by a closeness to people's lives, to your own life - the part of culture that you come from, that you live in, which shapes you and through which you express ... whatever it is you need to express. It's not a single, mass entity made up of a mush of pop music, TV, tabloid newspapers and advertising. In Britain, it's 60 or however many million individuals whose interests, passions and lives sometimes coincide, and it is precisely these moments, when new communities define themselves spontaneously, ahead of the media reaction, that Deller gets interested. He's interested in what interests other people, and specifically he's interested in the things that move people, motivate them, and structure their lives.

It sounds like sociology but it's almost the opposite; a celebration of subjectivity that would get any academic handed their cards. Deller makes the point again and again that if there is such a thing as a neutral observer, he isn't it. What he does, he does from a position of involvement, but with an honesty about where he's coming from that's central to his attitude and allows him to get away with a lot. He wrote a poem when Di died. Not, very obviously when you read it, because he aspires to be a poet (though you have to admire '...the paparazzi/who acted like Nazis'), but as a way of participating in one of the strangest and potentially most unsettling events in recent times. When millions were pouring out their feelings around the country, Deller poured his in too, adding to the mountain of tributes along The Mall, but he didn't fake his reaction. So it was a straightforward kind of poem, not much more than a rhyming, grief-free Di bio, but once it got dropped into the surrounding torrent of histrionic emotion it was caught up, changed and absorbed. Without ridiculing the very genuine distress of the assembled Dianaphiles, he made the point that there's no outside view of an event like this, when even the simplest facts have turned to myth and melodrama.

Deller says that, for him, the two most important social phenomena of the last fifteen years were the miners' strike and the start of the acid-house scene. He's made work about both these events, or perhaps more accurately he's made work about how these events have passed into history while at the same time their consequences surround us. 'English Civil War' one poster reads. 'The Sealed Knot ... re-enacting the Bloody Battle of Orgreave. The King's Mounted Troops versus The Northern Rebellious Barebacks'. At the bottom, quite small, are the words 'supported by English Heritage'. For all the parody, the point is clearly made. In Deller's alternative reality a surreal analogue of English Heritage would actually support the restaging of the encounter at Orgreave between striking miners and police, and we'd see with hindsight how the full, violent power of the state was used, indefensibly, in defence of its own political and economic interests. In parallel, another poster shows the familiar acid-house smiley, a symbol in its vacant, hedonistic way as antagonistic to straight society as the anarchy sign and an emblem of another consequence, more or less, of the Thatcher years. 'Did he change your life?' the slogan reads, heading straight back to a time when not having a job to get up for on Monday morning suddenly didn't seem so bad after all, when life for a huge cross-section of young UK-ers from doleys through students to aspiring chartered accountants acquired a new, collective focus - E-for-escapism. As a kind of tribute to that whole situation, one of Deller's early shows documented an unsuccessful search for Bez, the Happy Mondays' hapless 'dancer' and embodiment of everything that came out of Madchester - the good, the bad and the bug-eyed-on-drugs. At the time Bez had vanished from view - he's got an autobiography out now, believe it or not - but he'd been a defining figure, a non-musician at the centre of a music scene, a living advert for a lifestyle. 'If you wanted to know what taking ecstasy was like,' observes Deller, 'you just had to look at him.' But even that got politicised eventually, first in a vague fight-for-your-right-to-get-off-your-head-on-the-weekend sort of way and then more clearly, in opposition to the infamous Criminal Justice Bill, the CJB, and its blanket measures against 'unlawful assembly' that could be used to criminalise both ravers and striking miners on picket lines.

Which brings us to Acid Brass, on which Deller collaborated with the Williams Fairey Band and arranger/conductor Rodney Newton to stage, initially, just two performances; at the Liverpool School of Performing Arts and then at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Although Herb Alpert probably deserves the credit for the original idea of having a brass band cover popular hits, Deller's project makes a kind of conceptual sense that gives an extra depth, not just to the idea but to the music itself. Played by the brass band, with its unlosable baggage of town squares, winding gear, and old-fashioned working-class pride, the selection of club classics from the dole age like the KLF's 'What Time Is Love' or A Guy Called Gerald's 'Voodoo Ray' become anthems of a new sort, going down a storm with the audience and throwing up a resonant network of connections. Deller's accompanying drawing The History of the World is a tangly diagram of some of these, with ideas and events connected flowchart style to map the cultural territory where Acid Brass can take place and make sense. It jumps from tongue-in-cheek subjective links like 'brass-bands-melancholy-the-north-SoS State-techno', to socio-economic analysis e.g. 'pit bands-the miners' strike-deindustrialisation-warehouse parties', to the declaration of political common ground that links the miners' strike via civil unrest to the CJB and the Castlemorton festival. Seeing Acid Brass in action reminded me of the excitement I felt when, as a fourteen-year-old percussionist with my local brass band, we got to play anything at all with a vaguely rocking beat and I could temporarily go into my rock star daydream; weiredly it also recalls that scene in the film of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner where the borstal boys all have to sing Jerusalem. It's something to do with the unexpected poignancy that comes from one part of society getting superimposed onto another and coming through with its dignity not just intact, but enhanced. Like a lot of what Deller does, Acid Brass walks a fine line, stepping up almost to the brink of mockery. But it's that element of the absurd, the bizarre sincerity of it all that draws you in, requires that you believe a little and not just consume, and gives the work its edge.

Acid Brass pretty quickly took on a life of its own. Partly because it was a neat idea that appealed to record companies, promoters, curators and journalists but just as much because, as isn't the case with many similar art productions, it actually appealed to Deller's collaborators, the band and the conductor. Once it was rolling Deller was happy to slip into the back seat and see where it went. (By the time the NME got around to reviewing the Acid Brass CD, Deller's involvement and the art-world origins of the project didn't even get a mention.) This low-key approach to collaboration enables him to set up situations that would otherwise be at best difficult, at worst severely compromised. For instance, Deller spent some time working with a group of elderly folk at the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill on Sea, a Modernist building that's usually considered to be Britain's finest, designed by Basil Spence and now functioning as a tea-room in the town with the country's most-aged population. Working with a recording engineer and state-of-the-art digital equipment that has pretty much defined the sound of 1990s music, the old-timers recorded a selection of their favourite songs (Bing Crosby to the fore). In passing, they realised a small part of the Modernist dream - that technology would be egalitarian, enabling and good. As an artwork it's understated, and thoughtful in the sense of considerate, but it also develops the idea of looking at one part of culture through another that's become a Deller trademark. He's made a series of photographs of Middle Class Hand Signals, mimicking US gang gestures, whose secret meanings are things like 'cup of tea with one sugar', 'Church of England' or - my favorite, thumb rubbed across forefingers as though counting money - 'Antiques Roadshow'. He's printed posters to replace the ones you see outside churches, with the lyrics of some of his favorite bands (eg. The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, New Order, etc.) instead of chapter and verse. An ongoing project involves presenting 12" dance singles to all the mayors he meets, and somehow he seems to meet a few. One of the very first things he did in the name of art was to send cards to selected aristos during the debs' party season - the time when the girl children of the upper classes, having grown up into ladies, must be formally presented to what their families euphemistically refer to as society. They all send each other lovely invitations and some of them received an extra one, inviting them to meet 'The Chelsea Smilers, At Home, Anytime'. It shows that, right from the start, Deller's work was venturing into places that art rarely bothers to go. Typically, it was an invitation for one part of society to meet another, and for the rest of us to figure out the meaning of the consequences - The Chelsea Smilers are a football firm.

This ambivalent relationship to the conventional gallery scenario has consistently been one of the most interesting things about what he does. He doesn't keep a studio but he's working most of the time, making photographs, videos, posters, setting up situations. When he's involved in a show it often feels like he'd rather his own work happen anywhere but inside the designated exhibition space. Invited to exhibit at the ARC in Paris during 'Life/Live', the British art survey, he chose to use the museum cafe, filling it with altered versions of the official poster for the show - strapline 'the British art scene in the nineties' - featuring various alternative, perhaps more appropriate images, including an anonymous coke-snorter and a photo of the desperate scramble to board the last chopper out of Saigon during the Vietnam War. He's forever putting up posters, getting flyers handed out to bemused clubbers. At a recent show in Liverpool he illuminated a seedy shaggers' alley behind the nightclub Cream with an outdoor glitterball. There's a card on a student notice board somewhere that reads 'video cameras and car radios stolen to order'. For the Museum In Progress he's contributed images to billboards all over Europe. He's been writing on money and then spending it, using the ready-made random distribution system to pass on a variety of information - in England, gossip and unsubstantiated accusations about the nightclub bouncers implicated in the death of Leah Belts; in Sweden, quotations from that country's greatest humanist philosopher, Swedenborg. With another London artist, Alan Kane, he held a show at Peter Stringfellow's infamous West End nightspot and with Glasgow-based artist and DJ Jennie Wilkes he's made a single called Corporate Rock Must Die that samples AC/DC. For Up & Co. in New York, and a few other places including agnès b. and siksi magazine, he's made a whole load of t-shirts that would sit happily next to Carnaby Street's finest, with slogans from 'Middle Class Hero' through 'I love melancholy' to the almost-perfect 'bored teenager' (as he said, 'there's nothing more dangerous than a bored teenager'). He once managed to get a bumper sticker reading 'I love joyriding' onto the back of a police car.

The world of Deller exists already, mingled with the rest, all the things you love, all the things you loathe, but he exaggerates it all, magnifies it until you can't miss it. He isn't interested in the contemporary art audience or scene so much as in what he calls, maybe for want of a better term, folk art. Of course, the art world provides the premise and the opportunity for most of his projects to take place; he studied the history of art at the celebratedly conservative Courtauld Institute, specialising in the Baroque, and he unashamedly draws parallels between the martyred saints and miracles of that period with the secular events and cult figures of the late twentieth century. But perhaps it is because of this background that he works the way he does, with an awareness of a context that's not just the art world but much wider, socially and historically, and has little in common with the art-student-conditioning to fill an empty white room with objects. When he does work in a gallery situation he tends to look for a way to open it up. For the show 'Jeremy Deller At Home' at Cabinet Gallery he moved in and installed a symbolic version of his bedroom. Most successfully, at the Norwich Gallery, he presented work by fans of The Manic Street Preachers (other fans - he's one too) under the title The Uses of Literacy. Through the band's fanzine. Spectators of Suicide, Deller asked for contributions of band-related artwork and that's what he got: mostly drawings (some not that different looking to the fake-naïve rock-star drawings that spring up anyway in the art scene now and then), with an impressive intensity level and also, brilliantly, a shelf-full of books: Sartre, Salinger, Plath and many more; a mini-library of soul-searching, self-improvement and rites of passage that tied it all together. The Manic Street Preachers were the perfect choice, a band who are serious, in their own special way, about the power of knowledge, unashamedly self-educated intellectuals with Situationist leanings who always wanted to conquer Top of the Pops. It all means that the show ends up with an idea of 'folk art' that signifies more than just not being able to draw that well.

Deller talks about the fans as being the 'moral shareholders' of a band, the keepers, or creators, of their soul in the face of inevitable commercial compromises. He also notes the way the fans, through their obsessive love, give it all meaning and make their subjective world live. This is, of course, a projection of his own position. Deller's art is kind of pop that fixes mostly on the points where the apparently superficial has been invested with deep, personal reality - love, morality, all the big themes - and because of this it manages to articulate something pop art never could: that who you are, where you're from, what you do and why might matter after all.

- Will Bradley