Some older posts...wasnt able to post for a while.
note: images taken from internet
At first glance Mark Leckeys for might seem like ‘difficult’
work to decipher. Obscure video footage; weird conceptual art strategies,
random bits and pieces, executed in completely different way. Does this guy
have anything like a ‘style’. My first introduction to his work was his Turner
prize winning; Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.
I really liked this video because the artist took the underground culture of music and dancing in a range of forms from Northern soul to illegal raves, and makes a montage out of the audio and footage. Partly hommage, partly nostalgic indulgence or wishful thinking (?)…what he does well is to manipulate the material evidence of the ‘past’ to make it more like the way a memory really is, teasing out the essence of recollection, which to me is desire. The nostalgic regard for the 60’s and 70’s which seems to typify not only contemporary art but culture more broadly is never far away in this work. Sound and picture slip and slide. Memory bounces, richochets and splinters, echoing through space and time. The video’s materiality is emphasised using edits, tempo changes, freeze frames and sound manipulations, all seemingly typical art video tropes. In Lecky’s editing he apparent certainty of the photographic record is reworked into something much more ambiguous, something less objective, less mechanical and exact.
Is it appropriated out of desire for and as a surrogate memory. These are cultural souveniers to me. He says on the information that he is trying to create the work out of specific life memories. Someone living in a squat on a mattress curled up in a red sleeping bag clearly is experiencing an LSD trip as we journey into his mind to see the imagined psychedelic images. Like Ryan Trecartin, Leckys reconstructions skew temporality and refuse linearity in favour of multiplicity and repetition. The complicated drive to participate in the process of image re-construction is undercut by this ambiguous refusal. Footage of Joy Division amplifies the audience, and their gaze rather than the actions of Ian Curtis. Lecky uses sculptural loudspeakers to employ just sounds, again signifiers of a culture at work in the margins.
An echoing chord with added reverb of Kraftwerks “Europe”from Trance Europe Express appears and hangs in the air of gallery space. The haunting motif is immediately recognisable and for a moment the sculpture looks like an ironic epitaph. Similarly the slick surface of the Sumsung refrigerator becomes totemic, impenetrable and monolithic. Then again, Lecky keeps me guessing and I think that’s why I like his work so much.
I really liked this video because the artist took the underground culture of music and dancing in a range of forms from Northern soul to illegal raves, and makes a montage out of the audio and footage. Partly hommage, partly nostalgic indulgence or wishful thinking (?)…what he does well is to manipulate the material evidence of the ‘past’ to make it more like the way a memory really is, teasing out the essence of recollection, which to me is desire. The nostalgic regard for the 60’s and 70’s which seems to typify not only contemporary art but culture more broadly is never far away in this work. Sound and picture slip and slide. Memory bounces, richochets and splinters, echoing through space and time. The video’s materiality is emphasised using edits, tempo changes, freeze frames and sound manipulations, all seemingly typical art video tropes. In Lecky’s editing he apparent certainty of the photographic record is reworked into something much more ambiguous, something less objective, less mechanical and exact.
Is it appropriated out of desire for and as a surrogate memory. These are cultural souveniers to me. He says on the information that he is trying to create the work out of specific life memories. Someone living in a squat on a mattress curled up in a red sleeping bag clearly is experiencing an LSD trip as we journey into his mind to see the imagined psychedelic images. Like Ryan Trecartin, Leckys reconstructions skew temporality and refuse linearity in favour of multiplicity and repetition. The complicated drive to participate in the process of image re-construction is undercut by this ambiguous refusal. Footage of Joy Division amplifies the audience, and their gaze rather than the actions of Ian Curtis. Lecky uses sculptural loudspeakers to employ just sounds, again signifiers of a culture at work in the margins.
An echoing chord with added reverb of Kraftwerks “Europe”from Trance Europe Express appears and hangs in the air of gallery space. The haunting motif is immediately recognisable and for a moment the sculpture looks like an ironic epitaph. Similarly the slick surface of the Sumsung refrigerator becomes totemic, impenetrable and monolithic. Then again, Lecky keeps me guessing and I think that’s why I like his work so much.
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