MARK LECKEY
From Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore to recent works like DAZZLEDDARK, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey turns British pop-cultural history into video art evocations of youth, class and nostalgia.
At the turn of the millennium, Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize for his seminal art film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). An ode to misspent evenings and the long continuum of British rave subculture, it’s a haunting work that has, ironically, haunted him ever since. Quickly becoming an art world fixture, Leckey went on to earn critical acclaim for other video-essay-style films, even curating shows, and for a brief period, teaching art at Goldsmiths University.
His 2019 Tate Britain retrospective cemented his place as one of the most important voices in the British art world. In the Tate’s exhibition halls he installed a to-scale recreation of a gritty motorway bridge at Eastham Rake – a liminal space where he and his friends loitered as youths. Inside his modelled rendition, Leckey screened multiple films, including Under Under In (2019), a creepy short following a group of tracksuit-clad “scallies” as they witness a supernatural experience. Referencing Leckey’s feelings of alienation as a working-class man joining an otherwise elitist art world, the film characterises much of his wider oeuvre, grappling with class through melancholia, subcultural style and hyper-kitsch imagery.
For Manifesto, Leckey presents DAZZLEDDARK (2023), a film that unpicks similar themes. Originally commissioned for an exhibition he “edited” (he eschewed the term “curated”) last year at the Turner Contemporary in Margate – a rapidly gentrifying seaside town – it toys with brash seaside aesthetics in a proud and actively indulgent re-appraisal of taste.
JOE BOBOWICZ
What does DAZZLEDDARK mean to you as a film?
MARK LECKEY
It came out of doing that show at Margate and trying to find a different approach to making work. My faith in art was severely tested during the pandemic and I wanted to find some way out. I'm trying to find a space where I can make work without anxiety, without thinking too much about what it means and what it contributes to the discourse or where it sits. I found the best release was thinking of making work through music, rather than through art. So, I started making these videos – the first one I made, I think, was To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) in 2022 – and then DAZZLEDDARK was made using the same kind of approach, thinking of it as sound and video in concert. I think of it not as a work about Margate, but just a work that was produced through being at the seaside, and all the memories, and ideas and politics of being at that place. Like a poetic association – not making work that becomes a position on the subject.
JB
Like an affect? Embodying a feeling, but not necessarily being explicit with it?
ML
Yes, but that term, affect, really gets under my skin. You know, the problem I've always had with a lot of discourse around art is the suspicion about emotion or feelings. The point is that you approach something and you're trying to get as close as possible to that thing – whatever the fascination or the fixation – and then when you use the word affect, and it distances it again.
JB
Yes, I guess that makes me think a lot about your career, really. From the more obvious stuff like Fiorucci, all the way through to Under Under In, it’s about getting invested in something, almost indulgently.
ML
I like that. The idea of indulging in something in a purposeless way where there's no particular value to that indulgence. I can never remember this phrase, but it's like, the more useless the thing is, or the more trashy that thing is, the greater the investment. I love that equation.
JB
It reminds me of one of the projects you work on in the background. On your computer, there’s a hard drive you call the ‘abundance dump’, right? And it's about embracing everything that interests you, without editing yourself.
ML
Yeah. With DAZZLEDDARK, I was trying to transmit a sense of when you're on the beach and the tide has retreated, and the sea is just this black void. Behind you are the lights and the fairground, and that excess is a means to keep the void at bay. I always find it powerful that you can go somewhere as crass as a seaside town, but there’s this primitive feeling of nothingness, and then the gaudy excess is a means of refusing the nothingness. I find that really affective! There’s a Philip K. Dick quote where he says, “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” It’s the same with the hard drive folder, it's like I'm sifting through detritus, looking for something within that.
JB
With your films, a lot of the references to fashion and branding tap into that sense of tackiness or excess. In Under Under In, there’s a chanting of brand names by the boys, namely Adidas, North Face and Stone Island. And in Fiorucci, you had the repetition of the brand names there: Ellesse, Kappa, Sergio Taccini, Burberry, Aquascutum. You've recently reshared your film, We Are (Untitled) (2001), on YouTube. It’s a snapshot of the UK garage scene, where the styles seem to be quite important. The actors in it are wearing the garish ‘off-key’ Moschino, Iceberg and Versace – it's always the diffusion brands. Does your interest in fashion tie into this thinking as well?
ML
Very much. My interest in art stems from getting into style as a young teenager. You know, the casual movement in Liverpool in the Northwest, learning how to read what those brands or signs meant, but also seeing them adapted. Some of it was flashy and expensive, but some of it was cheap. I remember a particular craze for cycling tops, which you could pick up for five pounds from the market. There was something about taking things that seem brash and tasteless. The more I think about this stuff now, they're taking these ideas from gay culture but mobilising into this mass movement, which is very straight and laddish. Like John Waters embodies it, that tastelessness. Wearing everything that is considered naff and crass, like polyester and leopard print.
JB
Within this vein of indulgence or abundance, do you find yourself drawn to online things, too. You seem to get a lot from the internet.
ML
Definitely. I think there's something in all of what I've said to be found in the internet. At the moment, I'm obsessed with this kind of SoundCloud rap, although I hate that term. Anyway, it's very degraded, everything's pushed into this crunchy, harsh mix. There's a kid called Axxturel and IslurwhenItalk, Xaviersobased, some of them just pop up and do a couple of songs, and then they're gone. It's very impermanent, like they're trying to impersonate the internet, to mimic it – the way your feed throws up lots of disparate things. The moment we are in, this process we're going through is a huge transformation, and a huge translation of ourselves from a culture of the written word into this other culture of digital image and text. So, I'm just listening for and looking out for signs of what that is, you know? I don't think I'm going to find it in painting. I don't know if I'm going to find it in art, to be honest. This new reality reveals itself online.
JB
You’re very keen to look outside the art world, elsewhere. With that in mind, do you still consider yourself a fine artist?
ML
Weirdly, I think for the first time, I feel entirely comfortable saying I want to be an artist. The question for me is whether the art world is the best place to be an artist. I find the space that I want to occupy is more aligned with music. Not just not just because I like music but I like music’s position within culture. It’s what I would hope art could aspire to – more democratic and less anxiety-inducing. My family won't go and look at art, because ‘it's not for them’. But they listen to music. And they love music. Even though a member of their family is an artist, they wouldn't consider going to a gallery. Even when I take them to my shows, they're like, ‘I don't really understand this.’ And I'm saying to them, ‘No, it is what it is. There's nothing occluded there.’ It’s so ingrained in them. It's a class division. Music, it's accessible, and at the same time, it can be incredibly difficult and experimental and esoteric. And that amazes me. But art is becoming much more popular. I keep hoping at some point it gets so big that it starts to split into difficult, less difficult, avant garde, populist, do you know what I mean? I'm waffling again, I think I've said enough.
