Mark Leckey Explores The Transformative Power Of Hedonism

Mark Leckey, Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, (19 May – 26 June 2011) © 2011 Mark Blower

Mark Leckey is a British artist whose multimedia work spans the mediums of sculpture, film, sound, and performance and incorporates aspects of popular culture like Felix the Cat, Homer Simpson, and characters from bawdy British comic Viz. His work looks at transformation, escapism, and desire in the modern world, looking at the underground subcultures of British youth through the tawdry eyes of someone who grew up immersed in one, imbuing them with a certain mysticism.

He’s an artist who was working with found footage long before the internet made it more accessible and common, and in 2008 won the Turner Prize for his exhibition piece Industrial Lights and Magic. He’s also professor of film studies at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and has a electronic band called Jack Too Jack. Opening tomorrow at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park is his first British solo show SEE, WE ASSEMBLE which features the three works below:

BigBoxStatueAction 2003-2011

Mark Leckey
Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London
(19 May – 26 June 2011)
© 2011 Mark Blower

In this piece, two imposing forms stand in opposition, one is a combination of Mark Leckey’s speak stack sculptures Sound System (2003) and Dubplate (Sound System 1) (2001). The other is British sculptor Henry Moore‘s Upright Motive No.9 (1979). In contrast to Moore’s piece, the stacked sound system forms a different kind of sculpture, one associated with partying and the throngs of clubs or gigs. The two opposing structures encounter one another, eyeing each other up, preparing to do battle, one representing a revered master of the art establishment, the other, the after-hours thrills of loud music. While currently they stand mute, the piece will be a performance work where music is blasted out of the speaker at Moore’s sculpture, Leckey wanting to get the audience to look at the piece differently, out of its usual context and within the framework of modern hedonism, while exploring his continued theme of transformation through music.

GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction 2010-2011

Mark Leckey
Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London
(19 May – 26 June 2011)
© 2011 Mark Blower

When you enter the Serpentine Gallery you can hear a muted electronic voice coming from the west gallery. Upon entering this section, you see a black metal fridge in the center of a green room, with TV screens lining the walls. This fridge is a “smart” fridge that can advise you, four days in advance, that one of its contents is about to go out of date, along with emailing you recipes concocted from the ingredients you have in your fridge. The fridge also talks, but this is Leckey’s doing, giving it a voice—his own—which is distorted through a vocoder. Its doors (mouth?) sit slightly ajar, as existential mutterings fill the air about how it feels so cold and dark, the horrid smell, the worldly traumas of man and fridge. Under the voice-coded sounds of the fridge’s electronic warblings, you can just make out Leckey’s Liverpudlian accent. On the TV screens is footage Leckey filmed against the backdrop of the green room so he could superimpose images over it. Images of frost enclosing the fridge, of appliances and gadgets flashing next to its monolithic form, consumer goods and Egyptian statues and cultural artifacts, as the fridge laments modern ills and lap dancing clubs.

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 1999

In the third room is Leckey’s celebrated short film (above) on the subcultures of the British dance scenes from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Using found footage recorded by TV stations and amateurs, it chronicles the underground dance music scene, taking in

northern soul

, the

casuals

(a British youth subculture which Leckey was part of; Fiorucci is an Italian fashion label they wore), and the early 90s

rave

scene. The sounds are pumped out from another one of Leckey’s speaker stack sculptures,

Sound System

(top image), while scenes of youths dancing to the beat are cut up and spliced together, slowed down, and sped up, with music and voices overlaid to create the dizzying sensation felt when in the swarm of a club’s interior. The frozen faces, the tolling of a bell, the frantic dancing and sweating bodies, the haphazard but synchronous juxtaposition of image and sound, all helping to recreate the disorientating experience of losing yourself in the chaos of a darkened room, surrounded by smoke, strangers, and blaring sounds. It’s the transformative and transcendental power of dance, as played out through successive British nightlife scenes, amounting to a bunch of drugged up hedonists raving in dark, strobed rooms.