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    Rejecting the Art World With Mark Leckey

    The British artist explains the puzzling paradoxes of making art for MANIFESTO 2024.

    WRITER: Joe Bobowicz PHOTOGRAPHY: Sirui Ma PUBLISHED: June 17, 2024
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    In 2008, Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize for his seminal art film, "Industrial Light and Magic." Less than a decade earlier, he had debuted “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” an ode to misspent evenings and the long continuum of Britain’s rave subculture. It’s a haunting work that has, ironically, haunted him ever since. Now an art-world fixture, Leckey has gone on to earn critical acclaim for other video essay-style films, even curating shows, and for a brief period, teaching art at London’s Goldsmiths University.

    A 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 modeled rendition, Leckey screened multiple films, including 2019’s “Under Under In,” 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 characterizes much of his wider œuvre, grappling with status through melancholia, subcultural style and hyper-kitsch imagery.

    For MANIFESTO 2024, Leckey presents “DAZZLEDDARK,” a film that unpacks 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 town in Kent, England—the project toys with the brash, poetically dilapidated nature of Britain's seaside towns and cities in a proud and actively indulgent reappraisal of taste.

    An installation from the "Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers" exhibition, held at MoMA PS1 from October 23, 2016 to March 5, 2017.   Artwork by Mark Leckey / Photography by Pablo Enriquez
    Photographs of British artist Mark Leckey.   

    This process we're going through is a huge transformation and translation of ourselves from a culture of the written word into this other culture of digital image and text.

    Mark Leckey

    A still from Leckey’s video-based artwork ‘Pearl Vision’ (2012).   Artwork by Mark Leckey / Photography by Pablo Enriquez
    ABOVE: Performance still of Leckey's 'In the Long Tail' at the Henry Street Theatre, NYC, 2009. / BELOW: Mark Leckey, 'Beneath My Feet Begins to Crumble,' 2022.   ABOVE: Photography by Amy C. Elliott / BELOW: Photography by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, Installation view Pinacoteca Agnelli Torino

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