Art & Design
Mark Leckey, No Longer Art’s Wunderkind, Is Now Its Wizard
LONDON — Arrange to visit the British artist Mark Leckey at his home on gritty Caledonian Road here and he confirms in an email: “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Climb the steps to his modest flat and you find him surrounded by crayon drawings and plastic sippy cups.
Has Mark Leckey been domesticated?
Can this guy making tea in the kitchen be the art provocateur made famous by his 1999 short film “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,”
which traced British dance subcultures through sampled VHS footage? The
quirky guy whose massive inflatable “Felix the Cat” sculpture
captivated crowds at Frieze London last year?
True,
his long hair, piratelike beard and single pearl-drop earring still
evoke the bad-boy drifter he once was, growing up across the Mersey from
Liverpool, intrigued by the Northern soul scene of the 1960s, which was
made up of R&B and Motown, flare pants and dance marathons both
languid and manic.
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But
Mr. Leckey has recently married (Lizzie Carey-Thomas, the head of
programs at Serpentine Galleries); had a daughter, April (now 3½); and
entered middle age (he’s 52 and that beard shows flecks of gray). All
this makes him more conscious of paying the bills and no longer the
wunderkind who eight years ago won the Turner Prize, for British artists
under 50.
The Tate, which administers the award, said
that Mr. Leckey’s exploration of sound, performance and sculpture
“celebrates the imagination of the individual, and our potential to
inhabit, reclaim or animate an idea, a space, or an object.” (He had
already met Ms. Carey-Thomas, then the lead curator of the Turner Prize,
and she recused herself.)
Now
that he is, for better or worse, in the pantheon of prominent artists,
Mr. Leckey has had license to — as he put it — “swagger around a bit” at
the recent Frieze art fair. And the scope of that career is currently
on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, in a survey that opened on Sunday.
“Art
is changing — I don’t know if what I’m doing feels like it belongs to
an older era, one older white man having a show,” Mr. Leckey said,
standing by the sink throughout an interview. “The idea of celebrated
artists is being rightly questioned. So to do a show like this, though
it comes with all this excitement and energy, at the same time, it might
already be — not archaic — but belong to the past.”
The
show, “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,” does deal in memory,
most obviously in Mr. Leckey’s full-scale reproduction of a highway
overpass that figured prominently as a hangout in his youth. The
large-scale installation on the third floor, “Dream English Kid
1964-1999 AD,” also refers to his former home on Windmill Street in
London with videos, a model, wall paintings and an actual door from the
apartment.
“It’s
the projection of someone’s interior,” said Peter Eleey, associate
director of exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, who organized the show
with Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief media and performance art curator.
“They’re all things Mark has encountered. They’re not made up. In some
cases, they’re found objects.”
But
while the exhibition, which runs through March 5, examines his work
since the 1990s, Mr. Leckey is not only looking backward. Recent pieces
include the talking “GreenScreenRefrigerator” (2010-16), a suite of
Samsung products anchored by a sleek black refrigerator that is
accompanied by a performance and film which, according to the wall text,
“probes the inner life of the home appliance.”
Mr.
Eleey describes Mr. Leckey as sitting “on the cusp of the transition
from analog to digital, which allows us to look at the effect of
technology in a way that’s grounded in a deeper time.
“He’s
someone who feels very corrupted by advertising and television and
popular culture,” Mr. Eleey added, “who goes back to these things that
have held some outsized power for him.”
Mr.
Comer said that aspects of the show have a “dark humor,” while other
moments “feel quite sinister, foreboding.” He described the highway
overpass, for example, as “a ruin.”
“It’s not a symbol of an optimistic future,” Mr. Comer said. “It’s more like a dead end.”
Mr.
Leckey lit the overpass with motorway sodium street lamps to create a
sickly, yellow glow. “When I was younger, I would take magic mushrooms,”
he said. “Everything would go orange.
“I
want people, when they come into the space, to feel both polluted and
that they’ve moved into this altered state,” he continued, “a state
that’s akin to what music does, where you get lost.”
Mr.
Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port in North West England, an industrial
town of carmakers and oil refineries. “It’s what they call an overspill
area,” he said. “When I left school, the North started its slow
decline.”
Both
his parents worked in the department store Littlewoods — his father in
sales, his mother as a secretary. Mr. Leckey grew up getting into
trouble, leaving school at 15.
But
young Mark could draw. He favored huge battle scenes — “the epic ones,
very detailed,” he said, describing them as “autistic in that kind of
very repetitive, obsessive detailing.”
His
mother’s second husband encouraged him to go to art school, Mr. Leckey
recalled, “‘instead of heading where you’ve been heading.’”
But
art school emphasized critical theory, which Mr. Leckey found
frustrating. “I still think it was an experiment that went badly wrong,”
he said, “being asked to understand Derrida, just because you can draw.
And bad art arises from it.”
He
finished with a poor grade and wandered London before spending four
years in the United States with no green card — in San Francisco, where
he worked as a cook and did some web design; in Las Vegas, where he
worked on websites for big casinos; and in New York with the art dealer Gavin Brown.
“You
had this man who seemed to embody possibilities in art,” Mr. Brown
said. “He’s less of an artist than a curious member of our species.”
When Emma Dexter, then director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London, was planning a show about music videos, Mr. Brown suggested
she speak with Mr. Leckey, whose proposal became the “Fiorucci” film,
featuring images of British nightclubs from the 1970s to the ’90s.
“It
took me three years to make and I really didn’t realize it was anything
until the night of the opening,” Mr. Leckey recalled. “People liked
it.”
The
success came with expectations, raised even further by the Turner
Prize; this year he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, which went
to Anicka Yi. But Mr. Leckey said that he wasn’t complaining. “After
‘Fiorucci,’ I was in the art world proper,” he said. “I have to make
things and not disappoint people. It’s not a bad pressure.”
Those
who have followed Mr. Leckey over the years say his work has deepened.
“As he’s grown into middle age, perhaps he’s become more of a wizard
than a warrior,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s trying to understand some
profound things, which in another time could have been described as
magic — the internet and how it is a reflection of our imagination.”
While
Mr. Leckey is often referred to as a video artist, his work defies easy
categorization, as the MoMA PS1 show attests. Over here is a sculptural
Minotaur head; there, videos of his mock-pedagogical speeches;
elsewhere, a shiny chrome snare drum.
Even Mr. Leckey declined to say how he would describe himself. “I don’t like to,” he said. “I’ve tried my best to not be known.”
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