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Mark Leckey | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1964 (age 61–62) Birkenhead,Wirral, England |
| Education | Northumbria University (then Newcastle Polytechnic) |
| Known for | Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) Industrial Light and Magic (2008) |
| Style | Video |
| Spouse | Lizzie Carey-Thomas |
| Awards | Turner Prize 2008 |
Mark Leckey (born 1964) is a British contemporary artist. Hisfound object art andvideo pieces, which incorporate themes ofnostalgia andanxiety, and draw on elements ofpop culture, span several works and exhibitions. In particular, he is known forFiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) andIndustrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008Turner Prize.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions atKölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York City at theMuseum of Modern Art,Abrons Arts Center; at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008.[1] His works are held in the collections of theTate[2] and theCentre Pompidou.[3]
Leckey was born in Birkenhead,Wirral, nearLiverpool, England, in 1964. In a 2008 interview inThe Guardian, he described how he grew up in aworking-class family and became a"casual" in his youth.[4] His parents both worked forLittlewoods, the clothes store and betting company based in Liverpool. School, at a comprehensive inEllesmere Port in Cheshire, was not a happy experience for Leckey.[5] He left school at 15 with oneO Level, in art, and at 19 became obsessed with learning about ancient civilizations. He has described himself as anautodidact, "That's why I use bigger words than I should. It's a classic sign."[4] Following a conversation with his stepfather, he took hisA Levels and went to anart college inNewcastle from 1987 to 1990, but didn't enjoy it.[4][6]
Leckey moved to New York in late 1995 and first returned to London in 1997, where he worked for web design agency Online Magic.[5] When he made the videoFiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999, he was living in a tiny flat in Windmill Street, in Fitzrovia.[4] He formed the band donAteller with Ed Laliq, and had the first gig at the 414 Club in Brixton.[5] Later band members includeEnrico David andBonnie Camplin.[7] He served as professor of film studies at theStädelschule,Frankfurt-am-Main,Germany from 2005 to 2009.[8][9]
He lives inNorth London with his wife, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, a curator of contemporary art at theSerpentine Gallery, and their daughter.[5]
Leckey's video work has as its subject the "tawdry but somehow romantic elegance of certain aspects of British culture,"[10] He likes the idea of letting "culture use you as an instrument." but adds that the pretentiousness that artists sometimes fall into is destructive to the artistic process: "What gets in the way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function, or where it's going to be. When you start thinking of something as art, you're fucked: you're never going to advance."[4]Matthew Higgs has described his work as “possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet."[11] Leckey citedErik Davis, the Californian cultural critic as a big influence. He classified himself as a pop artist.[7]
He exhibited alongsideDamien Hirst in the 1990New Contemporaries exhibition at theICA but afterwards dropped from view, before making a "comeback" withFiorucci Made Me Hardcore in 1999.[11] In 2004, he participated inManifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art.[12] In 2006 he participated in theTate Triennial.[13] In 2013, Leckey toured the UK for his curatorial project,The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, commissioned by theHayward Gallery.[7] In the autumn of 2014, theWiels contemporary art centre in Brussels staged a mid-career retrospective devoted to Leckey.[5] The exhibition, namedLending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials, is Leckey’s largest exhibition to date. The title comes from a letter byGuillaume Apollinaire, in which he claims that what he and filmmakerGeorges Méliès do is "lend enchantment to vulgar materials".[6][9]
In 2019 Leckey exhibitedO' Magic Power of Bleakness atTate Britain, London.[14][15][16]
One evening in 1999,Gavin Brown, Martin McGeown and Leckey were at a gallery private view in London. Emma Dexter, then a curator at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), talked to Leckey, who argued that the most exciting art form of the time was music video. Intrigued, Dexter invited him to make a work. Leckey produced a 15-minute film that he calledFiorucci Made Me Hardcore.[5] The work was first screened at the ICA.[17]
The work is a compilation offound footage from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s underground music and dance scene in the UK. It starts with the disco scene of the 1970s, touches upon theNorthern soul of the late 1970s and early 1980s and climaxes with therave scene of the 1990s. Mash-ups of a single soundtrack play during the whole video, giving a sense of unity and narrative to the video. However, there are moments of spoken text. At one point an animated element - a bird tattoo image - appears as if released from the hand of a dancer, then carried into the next shot finds its place on the arm of another of the film's nightclubbing subjects. Some dance moves are played on loop for a few seconds, some are played in slow motion.
A significant portion of the footage is taken from the 1977Tony Palmer filmThe Wigan Casino made forGranada TV. It follows on the path of several previous appropriative art video artists and critics have remarked on its similarities withWilliam S. Burroughs' technique ofcut-ups,[18] a literary technique whereupon a text's sentences or words are cut up and later randomly rehashed into a new text.
Writing about Leckey’s first few video pieces, which in addition toFiorucci… includeWe Are (Untitled) (2000) andParade (2003), the art critic Catherine Wood said that they "represent the human subject striving to spread itself out into a reduced dimensionality. His subjects dance, take drugs and dress up in their attempts to transcend the obstinate physicality of the body and disappear in abstract identification with the ecstasy of music, or the seamlessness of the image."[19]
The title, Leckey said, was about the notion that "something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be taken by a group of people and made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming." Leckey admitted that he cried during the making of the video.[5]
Leckey has made ‘immersion’ pieces that offer aural and visual stimuli to the audience, such asSound System (2002).
This video takes place in Leckey’s empty London studio. The camera rotates aroundJeff Koons’Rabbit (1986), which is placed in the center of the empty room, Leckey's London flat.[7] The video was transferred to16 mm film and "is presented on a pedestal, like a sculpture."[20] The shiny surface of the sculpture reflects the room clearly, but there is no reflection of the camera, after a while the viewer realizes that there was never a bunny in the studio; it was a computer-generated image of Koons' work.
Leckey is an admirer of Koons and has talked about what it is that attracts him to his work: "I like the idea of something that's almost inhuman in its perfection, like Bunny. It's as if it just appeared in the world, as if Koons just imagined it and it appeared. I always get too involved in the work."[4]
In this video Leckey appropriates theDrunken Bakers comic strip fromViz, written by Barney Farmer and illustrated by Lee Healey.[21][22] Leckey filmed the comic strip, added close-ups and jump-cuts reworked into a stop-motion-like video. Leckey has removed all the speech bubbles and replaced them with a dialogue read verbatim from the comic by himself and Steven Claydon, a member of his band JackTooJack. He also added aural effects with burping, vomiting, slurping, among others and fades to black between episodes.
The piece is projected on a white wall in a completely white room, a clock projected in the outside of the room moves from three to four, before returning to three and repeating the cycle. The comic and video itself lack colour, so the only two colours in the room are black and white. As with some of his previous work, it deals "with hedonistic time-wasting as a means of (temporary) escape from the strictures of capitalism and adult responsibility."[23]Roberta Smith noted "Mr. Leckey conveys an oppressive sense of the drinker's irresistible drive for oblivion, excavating the painful realities that often spur comedy." In this act of appropriation, Leckey did not get official permission to use the material fromViz, "which, in a rare instance of corporate enlightenment, granted him permission retroactively."[23]
InFelix Gets Broadcast (2007), Leckey features one of the earlier figures ofFelix The Cat.
He won the 2008Turner Prize for his exhibitionIndustrial Light and Magic. It included the pieceCinema-in-the-Round a video lecture where "the artist offers a compilation of his talks on film, television and video about the relationship between object and image."[24]
This performance work began with his inhaling the gases used as coolant for aSamsung fridge. Leckey voices, through digital modulation, the inner monologue of a black Samsung fridge-freezer, as it tries to explain itself to itself and the world around it. The work, Leckey said, is a kind of fantasy: that he could bring himself into "a state outside of myself, fridge-like, less-human, feeling like an image".[4]
ForBigBoxStatueAction, Leckey places one of his sound systems "in conversation" with icons of British modernist sculptures, such asJacob Epstein'sJacob and the Angel andHenry Moore's sculpture. In order to elicit a response from the sculpture, he serenades it with a sound piece created from sampled music and archive material.
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things was a curated exhibition held at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, then atNottingham Contemporary. It took its title from a supposed concept in computing that refers to "the possibility of a network of objects communicating with each other like sentient agents", and featured three galleries presenting different collections of artifacts and art pieces from a wide range of history. Leckey imagined it as a work of fiction, in his own words a "non-realist, anti-realist,magic-realist,speculative,slipstream fiction, a sort of sci-fi show". He also sought to evoketechno-animism.
In 2015, Leckey exhibitedUniAddDumThs, a "replication" of The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, atKunsthalle Basel. It featured entirely reproduced versions of the objects in the original exhibition via3D printing and cardboard cutouts.
Leckey createdDream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD, a collage film with acoming-of-age theme created as an attempt to capture "found memories" of his life from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, which gradually builds up inanxiety and suspension. Harry Thorne, writing for Frieze, commented that elements of the film, such as recurring references tosolar andlunar eclipses (which Leckey has attributed to himself astrologically being a Cancerian or a "moonchild"),[25] andcountdowns,[25] "communicate a desire to comprehend the greater universe that is specific to both a particular era and to the artist himself".[25]
Leckey's work is held in the following permanent collections:
