Mark Leckey: O'Magic Power of Bleakness review – In memory of strange encounters under the M53

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Matthew Collings24 September 2019

I liked Mark Leckey’s new installation. I was in there for 55 minutes — that’s the total length of three of his films that form the basis of it. One is old, one more recent and one brand new. They are each collages of fragments with a mood of pleasurable jumpiness and things coming together in a neat clinch or left open and loose, unpredictably.

You don’t have to stand in front of a TV set to view them. You can move around, look here and there, sit down, get involved in one set of broken-up pictures and stories or drift off to another. The space he’s been given at Tate Britain is cavernous. The films are projected on multiple screens, some enormous. Seats are provided in the form of objects that look like modern-art sculpture. They turn out to be mock-ups of motorway architecture. In fact, you gradually become aware that there are features of the M53, its concrete towers and beams, replicated throughout the gallery, on the walls, floor and ceiling.

One minute you are looking at iconic images of the surface of the earth, and the depths of space, then spectacular aerial shots loom up of hundreds of young people dancing in flickering grey and white, as if the footage has been found on an abandoned spacecraft. These disco movements are repeated on a loop or slowed down. You are alienated from what you’re seeing: it’s familiar and strange at the same time. The abstract music clinks and beeps, then builds into reverberating swirls, dies out, and then comes squeaking and beeping back again.

The effect is always magical but it can be soft or hard and the hardest is the oldest. Soft is not so good. The oldest work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1990), is the piece in the installation that has the most power to mesmerise.

Superntural superhighway: Mark Leckey recalls the architecture of the M53 at Tate Britain
Mark Blower

It is also the most effective as a message of class struggle, even if it is entirely in the realm of culture. Young people who have very little find a way to give themselves power. It is a 15-minute film Leckey made nearly 30 years ago with the aim to imitate, but also challenge, contemporary music videos. He was interested in how people he knew tried to find intensity in iconic clothing and shared music: the pathetic illusion that you could get a powerful self from owning a pair of jeans.

If you have first-hand experience of raves and Northern Soul and whatnot, you’d find him great for this film alone. And if you do not have any such personal memories, like me, you’d be grateful to him anyway, as I am, for plunging the viewer into the mood, energy and strangeness of those youth rituals. Part joyous, part menacing.

He makes teenagers in daft outfits in Manchester or Liverpool seem significant, their bonkers actions the bearers of important meaning. He is visually witty about it, as if he doesn’t wholly know what he is doing, and he found all this significance — individuals dancing in their own little narcissistic spot, then 10 or 20 or 40 of them magically coordinating, then the group dissolving again — just by getting used to the technology of the edit suite. But with the entirely new work, which provides the focus for this installation, that mood of hot naivite producing genius effects changes.

Under Under In (2019) is lovely in its textures. But it simply puts into relatively spelled-out terms what was implicit in the older film, and in some of his subsequent installations, where the ordinary is made to appear divine. A work he put on in the Serpentine Gallery a few years ago, for example, caused sound speakers to be equivalent to a Henry Moore sculpture, and the Henry Moore equivalent to an ancient god.

All the motorway stuff in this installation refers to the site near Leckey’s childhood home on the Wirral, where he used to play with friends and once had a supernatural experience. He draws on this set of memories for the new film, a scripted story performed by child actors. The plot involves kids in hoodies seeming to be fairies, with one of them dying and going down to an underground tomb, and then being reborn. The theme of the supernatural seems preconceived and to a certain extent pre-digested. The old mode of sampled visual fragments flashing up on the screen accompanied by unpredictable sounds, is retained. But mystery is lost. The old film has baffling obscurity, yes. But he makes obscurity glamorous. The new work is too much as if the BBC was commissioned to make something accessible out of something art-world folk all appear to be talking about. It is a brave turn — but going middle class has not been entirely successful for Leckey.

Today until Jan 5 (tate.org.uk)

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