Mark Leckey. “Dream English Kid (LED)”, 2015, LED screen, 144.5 x 112.5 x 7.6 cm, installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2016. Image courtesy of Galerie Buccholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Mark Leckey accepted the 2008 Turner Prize for his work entitled “Industrial Light and Magic” simply by saying: “Umm… this is good”. His words quietly encapsulated his idiosyncrasies in approaching pop economy through a career built on pointing out and consuming cultural artefacts. Critics may have deemed his Turner Prize entry as the “worst on record,” but visitor numbers and influence on younger artists would suggest a more significant contribution to contemporary art discourse. The installation, featuring collaged videos of Felix the Cat and Homer Simpson, examined the role that repetitive images have in forming cultural identity and distinction between “us” and “other.”
Leckey’s latest autobiographical film, “Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD,” feels like a delectably well-executed pinnacle of years of research. Containing re-worked imagery and concepts from previous work, the progressive development in his intention and aesthetic is clear, and the high production value offers a balance between cultural theory and more basal enjoyment. On view at Galerie Buchholz until 19 March, it’s seeped in Brit nostalgia, memory issues and fringe communities.
Since his 1999 cult breakthrough piece “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” a nostalgic love letter to British dance subcultures of the Seventies and Eighties, Leckey has been considered a key artist of the “Youtube Generation” whose work is simultaneously symptomatic of and a tool for identity problems arising from the overly accessible cultural material available in the digital age. This is the only generation producing work in the transition from pre to post internet.
I was lucky to see him present a version of “The Long Tail,” part-lecture part-performance, at Edinburgh College of Art around 2009. To my delight, I was taught through an enthusiastic show and tell about various internet phenomenon using a (now retro) blackboard and chalk.
Mark Leckey. “Bridge #1”, 2014, print on cardboard, 46.5 x 200 x 200 cm, installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2016. Image courtesy of Galerie Buccholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Mark Leckey. “Bridge #1”, 2014, print on cardboard, 46.5 x 200 x 200 cm, installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2016. Image courtesy of Galerie Buccholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Although the artist is not physically present at this installation, we quickly recognise his distinctive ghostly digital imprint. The lights are all out in the entrance to the gallery save for a nauseating yellow glow emanating from within. Doors to the left and right are pulled closed and the buzzing LED pixels of screen work “Dream English Kid (LED)” beckon you tentatively forward into the digital nucleus of the space. The reason you feel a little sick, is due to the work “Untitled (Sodium Lights)” flooding from the right hand room and throwing your white balance out with oppressively strong street lighting bulbs. The orange glow, blamed for city light pollution, has been the standard lighting solution on British streets for generations. Walking through the otherwise empty orange room, the piece “Windmill Street Door” acts as entrance to the main work “Dream English Kid, 1964-1999 AD.”
The film is an instantly acerbic, visceral immersion of the senses into a pulsing conglomeration of memories, references, dreams and ghosts. I wonder how much time Leckey spent on K-Punk.org in its prime, or relates to the ideas in “Notes on Metamodernism.” The chronological narrative is distinguishable through dates in news headlines and radio broadcasts, at other times through record release dates and propaganda images, yet maintains a distinctly dream like, glitch-ridden tapestry. Leckey is our protagonist in the film, which follows from his birth in 1964 Liverpool to London in 1999 – the year we thought the digital world would end via Y2K.
Family videos are spliced together with scenes filmed by the artist and manipulated found footage from television shows, gigs, news reports and advertisement. The smorgasbord of markers will satisfy nostalgia for anyone over 30, or nerds of local British music scenes, and you will want to watch more than once just to make sure you haven’t missed one. Nods include Eric’s, Old Compton St porn shops and Black Market Records, as well as wider reaching reference to the moon landing, solar eclipse and shooting down of KAL 007.
The layered 5.1 soundscape moves the film seamlessly through distinct time periods, linking Marianne Faithful, the Beatles and Joy Division to Nineties dance tunes. The wash of sound over your body mimics the richness of the visuals, creating a sensuous and enjoyable physical experience, at times resembling “Enter The Void” or “Trainspotting”.
Mark Leckey. “Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD”, 2015, 4:3 film, 5.1 surround sound 23 min.
installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2016. Image courtesy of Galerie Buccholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Mark Leckey. “Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD”, 2015, 4:3 film, 5.1 surround sound 23 min.
installation view Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 2016. Image courtesy of Galerie Buccholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
Leckey’s sculpture “Bridge #1” recurs throughout the film as a reactive environment, sometimes clean and bright as the sun sets behind it, at other times sprayed with ashes and waste in the fallout of a nuclear explosion in imagined post apocalyptic world, demonstrative of the daily paranoia and fear of imminent nuclear war throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Even the orange lights on the other side of the door are an extension of the film and an extension of the artist.
He has the brain of an obsessive; a collector; someone who wants to recreate a feeling over and over again, each time better yet further removed from the original. Do you need the original any more? Where would that live? “It doesn’t matter; I just want you to feel this feeling I felt that night in 1987” – I imagine Leckey saying to his audience. The artist oscillates between desire for immediacy and “being in the moment” to longing for the past. This exercise in memory – of what components fit together to make you “you” – suggests a re-imagining might be more significant than the original, or further evinces that as we exist more and more on a digital plane, an “original” is no longer necessary.
Mark Leckey’s “Dream English Kid, 1964-1999AD” is at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, until 2 April 2016.