- Venue
- Liverpool Hope University
- Location
- North West England
I didn’t expect to like Mark Leckey’s work, although to be honest I wasn’t especially familiar with any of it before his talk last week. I haven’t been taking as much notice of Turner Prize winners in recent years. At first, when the event was such a breakthrough in terms of making contemporary art part of popular culture, I enjoyed the controversy and spectacle of it all. These days, however, I tend to see it as one of many television money-spinners that take advantage of people competing for celebrity status. I had read some reviews that seemed to suggest, on the whole, that there were more worthy contenders than Mark Leckey who should have received the 2008 trophy.
It was difficult to find the building, due to so much construction work going on around it, but I managed to arrive at Hope University’s Great Hall just in time. The lecture hall was more than half full with a combination of mainly students and a good proportion of staff from both the Tate and the university – a roughly equal mix of men and women, I’d say. I found a seat on a fairly empty row, directly behind some students and wondered what opinions they might have and how they would respond to the celebrity artist addressing them.
Mark took the audience on a candid and insightful journey. Setting off from his early days of ‘yearning to belong’, growing up on the Wirral and aspiring to be part of the action amongst the bright lights of Liverpool (“over there”), we travelled with him through some of the ideas and aspirations that have shaped his life and his work.
Mark’s lecture reminded me of the third year lectures that we used to attend (and eventually each have to deliver) during my fine art degree course. Every Friday afternoon in the Art Faculty lecture theatre, a third year student would be sacrificed, having to stand in ‘the dock’ to explain their efforts to the rest of us with the aid of the slide projector. During the interrogation process that ensued, we questioned anything and everything about the work presented: its execution, its relevance and validity….…little ground was left uncovered. Whilst some students viewed this rite of passage as ritual humiliation, I think it was a worthwhile process. Engaging works of art will inevitably provoke questions. Mark Leckey, however, did not offer us the opportunity to ask any questions and I was disappointed.
“Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” was the first piece of work we saw. Mark had spent a long time collecting grainy old video footage showing the music and trends of times that some of us in the audience remembered. He had intended to create a documentary but, he explained, became so absorbed and immersed in the process of ‘collaging’ these clips that it took on a new direction altogether.
This was interesting. Allowing the nature of the material to impose itself on the artist and becoming lost into the process is something I can identify with.
From here, we moved on to see some of his second work in film, ‘We Are (Untitled)’. This was filmed in his London flat using a mix of actors and mates and attempted to capture his disillusionment with the youth/clubbing scene and its artifice. It was deliberately quite staged and self-conscious, as a reflection of the culture it represented and Mark’s changing attitude towards it. Moving on, Mark was beginning to make comparisons between Casuals and fin de siecle Dandys- narcissistic young men obsessed with their own image and style. He explored this further with his third film, ‘Parade’. The silhouette figure of an eighties’ new romantic, complete with trademark bouffant hair and cigarette passively observes a parade of passing images: desirable goods, billboards and magazine beauties – the fantasy life. Through this work, Mark told us, he was recognising and trying to come to terms with the trappings and associations of his batchelor life style.
The work I liked the most was ‘Big Box Statue Action’. These were Mark’s ‘Donatella’ years, exploring the sculptural qualities of sound systems, unlikely equivalents, opposite pairs and imagined narratives between them. We saw pieces exhibited at the ICA and an installation addressing a carved marble Jacob Epstein sculpture in the foyer of Tate Britain. Later there was the Jeff Koons Rabbit animation film and his piece based on Viz characters the Drunken Bakers. The rabbit piece was the (virtual) realisation of his desire to house this iconic work of art in his own home so that it would reflect the four walls of his studio flat. I preferred the Drunken Bakers soundtrack that he had created and set against the sequence of stills directly from the Viz comic strip drawings. The lecture ended with Mark’s most recent work: talks. During these talks he has been expressing his ideas and theories more directly to audiences and we heard a brief summary of his “Long Tail Theory”.
I liked Mark Leckey’s work. His ideas were interesting and they were expressed and explored in novel and imaginative ways. At the beginning of the talk, Mark explained that he had started a fine art degree course at Newcastle but left early because he thought that fine art was “up its own arse”. I found this comment quite intriguing in the light of the relationship he has since enjoyed with institutions like the ICA, the Tate and the Turner Prize and the work that he has produced. Of all the questions that I would like to have asked, it was this comment generated the most!
Tracey Cartledge
Artist, Manchester.
