Mark Leckey: “technology essentially makes you believe in magic” (an interview)

A British artist who works in a variety of mediums, Mark Leckey’s first interests were music and technology and much of his art still reflects those concerns. Winner of the coveted Turner Prize in 2008, Leckey has exhibited his art in biennials and museum shows internationally for more than 20 years, but his current survey at New York’s MoMA PS1 is his largest exhibition of his work to date. Conceptual Fine Arts recently spoke to the witty artist about the dynamic show.

One of the earliest works in the show is the 1999 video “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”, which features VHS footage of club kids dancing and hanging out. Why is this video such a seminal piece in your vast body of work?

It was the first real work of art that I ever made. Prior to it I had been frustrated in my desire to make anything, so a lot of pent up energy went into the making of it. It took three years to make it, without any expectations. I’ve been trying to catch up with that work in some way ever since, because when I made it the kind of state that I was in was the freest. At the time I thought it was terrible. I needed people’s response to it, for them to tell me that it was working because I didn’t know. I think that part of the attraction to it now, particularly in the UK, is nostalgia for the 1990s—jungle, garage, that kind of period, and the VHS look of it.

You have a lot of works that reference animals, including a giant inflatable Felix the Cat. Why do animals play such an important role in your work?

They’re not real animals. They’re mostly cartoon animals or some kind of totems or symbols. Animals are good stand-ins for desires and needs. They’re surrogates that can go out in the world. The reason that I chose Felix the Cat is that I had discovered an image of him surrounded by strange machinery a long time ago. It was a photograph from 1920s or ‘30s and I found out that it was the first image ever broadcast on television. They scanned a figure of Felix the Cat that was rotating on a turntable and used it to test the transmission of images. That’s why I’m obsessed with Felix. He’s the very first electronic image ever broadcast and I basically grew up under the influence of the electronic image. It formed me; it colonised my imagination. Felix is like the avatar of the electronic image. He’s the God of TV, or any kind of electronic imagery that’s broadcast, networked or distributed. He’s the beginning of it; it all flows from him.

You seem to also have an affinity for copying other artists works, including several that are sexual in nature, like Rober Gober‘s “Man Coming Out of the Woman” and Herman Makkinik’s “Rocking Machine,” which depicts a giant cock and balls and was used as a prop in the Stanley Kubrick the film “A Clockwork Orange.” What are you telling us about contemporary culture by copying?

That’s not an easy one. For me it’s not copying, it’s more about acquisition. It’s like with Fiorucci—I have the means of production; I have the means to copy and reproduce those objects and I do that in order to have them. I want to get more intimate with them. For example, a lot of these objects can be remade by a process of photogrammetry, which is basically is photographing an object from all sides and then made a 3D print of it. It means that you can capture anything in the world and remake it. For me it means that I can put them alongside things that they could never be put aside. I can be more perverse with them.

Are you making a direct reference to radical nature of the Kubrick film or to sex?

I guess more to sex. Not even sex, maybe just biology and desire. I don’t know if it’s a sexy thing. I guess it’s erotic. I guess I want some erotic charge off of these things. But the nature of how they are made and what they are made of stops them from being quite so sexy.

You also have a 3D printed copy of The Plug and Stephanie Rollin‘s “Uterus Vase.” Are you using a number of digital processes in the making of your work?

Yeah, I’m using a whole range of digital processes and technologies to be able to replicate as many things as I can. I’m fascinated with those things and I want to be able to access them. All of these objects started out in a show that I curated. They were real objects by other people—the real Gober leg and the real “Uterus Vase.” They were always slightly distant because they were borrowed and they had to be handled properly. I couldn’t really touch them so they felt more distant. This was a way of making them less distant and more intimate. Essentially they are all things that I’ve fallen in love with. Now I want to possess them. I’ve asked everyone if it was okay to do and they’ve agreed to it. It’s not about stealing. It’s not about appropriation. It’s quite permissive. Nowadays, the idea that you could have one singular objects seems very hard to keep hold of, when things can be copied and replicated so easily.

In the show, that vase then gets combined with the body of a dog from Sander Mulder’s sculpture “Woofer.” Do you consider these kinds of pieces to be your original works?

The idea with them was to make some kind of hybrid by literally just putting things together. For example with that one I’m not sure if it works. I’m aiming at the surrealist idea of the exquisite corpse. It permissive but it makes something more perverse. The one with the Louise Bourgeois’ Nature Study, a cross between an animal and a monster, and Doctor Who’s helmet is a better fit. She was making something unnatural and uncanny, while combining it with a Cyberman Helmet from Doctor Who gives them both a different kind of logic.

Are these all parts of your “UniAddDumThs” installation? What’s the idea behind it?

Yes, they’re all part of it. About four years ago I was asked to curate a show for the Hayward Gallery in London. Every two to three years the Hayward asks an artist to curate a touring show based on any idea they come up with and I came up with the idea of “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things.” The title comes from an early phrase for the Internet of Things, which is the idea that everything can universally communicate, no matter how dumb they might be—whether it was a fridge or a TV. That’s what it was about. It was about the idea that the world we are inhabiting now—although it seems like we’re being propelled ever forward into the future by our devices at the same time it seems that mentally or cognitively we get thrown back to a more archaic, ancient way of thinking. The barebones of it is that technology essentially makes you believe in magic. It’s hard to argue against the idea that things aren’t magically produced.

What role do memory and autobiography play in your work?

A lot. Basically in the show there are two floors. There’s one floor that I would say is facing the future, or in the present trying to understand technology and the way that these things are speaking to us and what they want from us and how I respond to them and then upstairs it’s more about how technology continually reanimates your past and memories. Technology replays your memories—it stores and records and replays, which induces this continual sense of nostalgia. Part of the present is to be in the past. That’s your environment, I guess.

Are you using other people’s histories to tell your story?

Yeah, I would say so. There are a couple of artists in the show from New York—Becky Howland and Greg Allen. Becky has a pylon in the show that’s specific to a particular time. I wanted a resonance of her history in the show. And the fact that it’s been shown at PS1 30 years ago, I like those kind of echoes. I make pylons and was envious of hers, so I thought the best thing to do was to ask her to be part of the show. She has a better pylon than me.

Another of your works that has been described as seminal is “Made in ‘Eaven,” a looping short film that focuses on Jeff Koons’s sculpture “Rabbit.” How do you make his iconic piece your own in the film?

Again, like in Universal Addressability, I love that work. I wanted to be able to be with it, to look at it, to reflect on it and obviously that was impossible so I set out to make a video that would convince me that it was in my room. I used technology, used trickery to create the illusion that it was there. It had to have absolute verisimilitude. It had to be completely convincing, and I think it is. It convinces me and it convinces other people. Ultimately it was me that had to be satisfied. Every time I look at that piece I feel a thrill, which essentially why I made a lot of work—to have this sense of being transported. I’m looking for a kind of ecstasy—on a spectrum between a kind of joy and morbidity.

You’re also showing “Sound Systems,” which are functional speakers that fill the room with music and sounds that you have generated and compiled. What role do sound and music play in your work?

It’s huge. I spent a lot of time in the dance music scene in England and sound systems were part of that culture. I have a love of art but I also have a frustration, in that art is never as immediate as music. Neither is it as universal or as unfiltered. Art can be too hermetic, too academic and these things prevent it from being part of everyday consciousness. Music is the model that I ascribe to, actually. These Sound System pieces are quite loud and play sporadically, intermittingly and they play sounds that best suit their nature and they play other sounds that are bits of the show. They play bits of the Fridge piece, bits of Fiorucci, and they are used in performances. They’re quite contained and fettered during the show and come out to play during performances—they come out to play full force.

By the “fridge” piece, you mean your talking “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction” installation. What does it do and what does it tell us about the current state of technology?

I’m not sure what it tells us, but I can tell you why I made it. Like I said before I make all of my work out of quite selfish interests—to kind of amplify things that I’m already feeling. What I wanted to amplify with the fridge was my feeling of being beguiled by technology and confused by technology so I wanted to find a technical device that I could try to inhabit in some way. I wanted to become “fridge-like. It’s too difficult to become television-like or phone-like, but a fridge is kind of dumb enough, even when it’s an intelligent fridge, that you can try to feel what it’s like to be one. It’s like trying to feel what’s like to be a tree—like hugging a tree to feel the resonating power of nature. I wanted to kind of hug a refrigerator to feel that resonating power of technology. The fridge is just a giant puppet. It’s an act of ventriloquism. It’s really just me. What’s I trying to do with a lot of my work is to be outside of myself—to be something other than myself. It’s a sort of fantasy to be a fridge.

Your recent film “Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD” has been described as an autobiography—of sorts—that surveys your first 35 years on Earth, the period prior to your entry into the art realm with “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.” What the story you want to tell?

I wanted to do my memoirs. I had this idea that I could make my memoirs out of other things. The difference between making Fiorucci in 1999 and making English Kid now is the availability of endless hours of historical footage. So I thought would it be possible to remake my most lurid memories out of the footage that exists on YouTube and DVD and the rest of it. That was the origin of it and then I made a lot of things, a lot of models and miniatures to fill in the gaps. It’s not all totally recovered footage from YouTube, but a lot of that is holding it together.

And your 2012 video “Pearl Vision” has been called “A kind of self-portrait in a chrome snare.” How does that piece capture the real you?

Ha-ha. It’s a good question. Maybe it captures part of me. It captures the part of me that’s quite fetishistic, the part of me that’s narcissistic, that’s aspirational—the one that wants shiny things. It wants all of those parts of me but it also wants the good part of me, which is like rhythmic and sort of sensual. It’s both the sensual part of me and the consumerist part of me.

November 25, 2016