You’ll see something and you go, ‘That’s it, that’s now, that’s this moment, you’ve found that.’ I like that.”.
His work is hard to categorise (he gets bored doing the same type of art over and over), but he often remembers his previous life and uses technology to bring those recollections into now – not shiny and new, but dragging emotional detritus and strangers’ videos and “did this actually happen?” with them. And after describing him a bit, saying he used to wear a tracksuit and he had a beard, she said, ‘That’s Bullet Baxter from Grange Hill’. “We need to talk!” “We do!” says Leckey. He moved away from this life when his mum’s new husband, a self-educated docker, took him aside.
writing, photographs, fact and fiction by damon fairclough. Dream English Kid was triggered by his memories of seeing Joy Division at a matinee performance in Liverpool, when he was in his early teens.
As the building that housed the last remaining portion of Cream’s legendary Nation venue – the rest of the superclub’s home has been demolished for redevelopment – it would have been a bricks-and-mortar connection with some of the currents that make Leckey’s video feel so powerfully charged.
“If people got lost too, that would be magic.”. “I’m at that age, plus I’m from the north west – I think there’s something quite nostalgic about that, a bit maudlin and quite sentimental. “Technology has put us in this strange place where we’re never fully present.” Experience Turner Prize-winning Mark Leckey in the midst of his absorbing installation, which is a replication of the ramps underneath his childhood bridge.The installation evolved out of Leckey’s earlier artwork ‘Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD’ (2015) and became a way for him to create a sort of memoir. One of the galleries will be taken over by the grey struts and slab underside of the motorway, revealing the space beneath, so that walking into the room will make you feel a bit like young Leckey did, hanging out, waiting for something to happen.
He lives and works in London.Mark Leckey was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in May 2017 at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in connection with his installation ‘He Thrusts his Fists against the Posts but Still Insists he Sees the Ghosts’, which can be experienced in the X-room venue from May 4 – September 3, 2017. Mark Leckey in the Long Tail, a new talk that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London earlier this year, takes the same approach and extends his argument into the twenty-first century, using examples and props to visualize how an internet-based economy has changed distribution, demand, and creativity. He won the Turner prize in 2008, with work that included a lecture about film and video, as well as a piece that used photo slides and made them into a 3D representation of his old flat. The camera froze on faces, wound back, showed them again. In Dream English Kid, a motorway bridge kept reappearing.
When Birkenhead-born artist Mark Leckey talks about Liverpool, you can still hear the yearning in his voice. Though one day of course, things will be different, and middle-aged veterans of today’s nascent Baltic Triangle will project onto it the phantoms of their youth. I started trying to piece together some episodes in my life that were significant to me, essentially through found footage and found sound, and I tried to remake these memories.”. When Leckey was 20, he went back to college to take his O-levels (he’d dropped out of school at 15). “I am inherently nostalgic,” he says. So I had this fantasy that if I could somehow boost the signal, I might be able to hear myself when I was 15.
From bad wool to Wirral kid made good, it’s been quite a journey – and I can only hope that Mark Leckey continues dreaming on. So he comes down to us. In particular, the importance of Eric’s as a post-Beatles cultural node comes through very loud and clear. Who’s engaged with it, who’s buying it… When I went to art school, I was trained in the idea of becoming this, like… sovereign being, right? In 2016, another of Leckey’s videos, Dream English Kid 1964-1999AD, won the Tiger short film award at the Rotterdam film festival.